Announcements

On behalf of special issue editors, Janice Kroeger and Iris Berger, we are announcing a Call for a New Special Issue with details about submission below:

The International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal

Special Issue Title: Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education: Turning to Hope,Making Sanctuary Janice Kroeger & Iris Berger, Co-Editors 

To figure out how, with each other, we can open up possibilities for what can still be...we can’t do that in a negative mood. We can’t do that if we do nothing but critique. We need critique; we absolutely need it. But it’s not going to open up the sense of what might yet be. It’s not going to open up the sense of that which is not yet possible but profoundly needed.  

~Donna J. Haraway

“Where there is hope, there is difficulty” ~ Sara Ahmed

Janice Kroeger, acknowledges the lake Erie watershed, the stolen lands upon which she currently lives and works as the ancestral home of the Lenape,Cayuga, and the Tuscarawas people, as well as many others across time, including the Mingo, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Erie, and on...

Iris Berger, acknowledges the land on which her study and work take place as the unceded (not surrendered) territory of the Musqueampeople who have lived in the Fraser River estuary, including much of Vancouver, for thousands of years.

Special Issue Description: In this special issue we seek to ‘open up possibilities for what can still be’ while recognizing the enormity of worldly issues facing early childhood educators, children, and families. The geo-politics of late capitalism, including wars, migration, pollution, extreme weather events, and the persistent effects of colonialism have created a precarious future for childhoods and the ‘earthly communities of life’ (Abram, 2020). As we learn ‘to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth’ (Haraway, 2016),we, in this volume/collection, acknowledge grief and despondency, while turning tohope(and reconciliation(s)) as a speculative gesture to the possibility that things can be otherwise. We ask how might we do early childhood education in the messiness (and tragedies) of this moment? We highlight movements,doings and undoings,which reconcile justicewith childhood in its entanglement with the world by collectively (re)thinking, (re)configuring and (re)conceptualizing early childhood education now, a time of heavy childhoods, without dragging children through the muck.

Even within rampant consumerism and divisive politics which ultimately shape and contour the practices of educators and opportunities for young children, we are curious about (enlivened by) how others are seeing-and-doing-hope filled-encounters with children in and outside classrooms. In this collection, we grapple with presence, staying present with “the trouble” and not-yet-known futures for justice (or making spaces for justice-yet-to-come). What would acting from where we are be when hope wrestles with despair? Hope in this sense is not naive but anactivestance,a doing… a hope “that enacts the stand” of the assemblage which “actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides” (West, 1997; 2011). Hope is alsohowconceptual and pedagogic come together addressing a seeing-beyond the “consequences of neoliberalism” in ethical and inclusive spaces (Iorio, Parnell, Quintero & Hamm,p. 300, in Bloch, Swadener & Cannella, 2018). Post-human thinking concedes to the discursive and material violences impacting the lives of diverse people, often seeing those at the most marginal positions receiving the brunt of nation state failures (as terrified and terrorized immigrants, indigenous peoples, refugees, language minority groups, gender-diverse/queer and other undervalued groups). Yet, we witnessed educators “making sanctuary” (Akomloafe, 2019) even within the injustices of structural and contributory constraints or the totalizing ways that we encounter post-human concerns. We strive for capacity in our thinking to engage hope(full), care(full), and mind(full) practice in early education, recognizing post-human capacities for answerability even while understanding and appreciating the multiple and often competing demands imposed within the standardized time-space of educators and researchers lives and work (Kroeger & Widrig, 2023).

In this volume we take a decree of hope, selecting authors and contributors who think/value:

  • Thinking beyond nationalism(s) and how this kind of thinking (with place) is related to hope in terms of healing, reconciling purposes (within/out) ofcolonized statuses (Kroeger & Widrig, 2023) Indigenous education, with actors who rekindle, revitalize, and relearn/invent wise pre-modernand post-modernways of doing and being to educate in a post-anthropocentric childhood(Simpson, 2014; Todd, 2016).

  • Nature, land based, andoutdoor early educationalapproaches which are vitalizing habitats in-and-out-of-classroom spaceswith inquiry opportunities thatreject/accept/reconcile post-consumerism, griefs, or the manufactured crisisof early school readiness.

    Demonstrating hope in the fact(s) of rightwing conservatism that attempts to rearrange the world in ways that omit (villainize) rather than honor the perspectives of children in/as undervalued categories (emergent translinguists, non-verbal and differently-(dis)abled children, gender-diverse children)

  • Hope that is above, below, and with/in either the individual or the notions of afterlife (indigenous ideas suggest that the afterlife is to be striven for and understood in relation to the present/presence)....Existing with a slowness, even stillness-awareness of post-activism (Akomloafe, 2020) while “making sanctuary”-thinking beyond the walls and wars, finding the cracks-“disrupting the exclusivity of human agency”-to witness an opening to a world that is livable for our children, ourselves, and our multi-species kin (Haraway, 2008).

Please be in touch withjkroege1@kent.eduoriris.berger@ubc.ca(guest editors) if you would like to contribute to or be considered for this collection in the International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal

Key Dates:

February 21th, 2025 (extension from Feb. 15); Please submit an abstract and summary or outline totaling 500 words (note please contact editors if needed or questions)

March 1, 2025;Abstract feedback(Note:acceptance of abstract does not guarantee submission acceptance)

May 1, 2025; Full article submission ,up to 6000 words (send to Janice Kroeger & Iris for 1st round comments, suggestions/revisions)

June 5, 2025; Authors receive feedback for the first draft

July15,2025;FullPaperSubmissionstoICCPSJforAnonymousReviews

September15,2025;Finalrevisions,notifications

October 15, 2025; Paper resubmissions(ifnecessary)

November 15, 2025; NotificationofAcceptance

Late Fall 2025;Publication of special issue

References

Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. DukeUniversity Press. ISBN-100822363194

Akomloafe, B. (2019, March 15).Making Sanctuary: Hope, Companionship, Race and

Emergence in the Anthropocene.Keynote Speech, 'Seeking Connections Across

Generations' for Spiritual Directors International at the Seattle Marriott Bellevue.

https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/making-sanctuary-hope-companionship-race-and-emergence-in-the-anthropocene

Akomloafe, B. (2020, November 13).What I Mean By Postactivism. Blog post.

https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/what-i-mean-by-postactivism

Abram, D. (2020). In the ground of our unknowing.Emergence Magazine,7.

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/in-the-ground-of-our-unknowing/

Haraway, J. Donna (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, J. Donna (2016).Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780

Iorio, J. M., Parnell, W. Quintero,E. P. & Hamm, C. (2018). Early Childhood Teacher

Educator as Public Intellectual. in REconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and Care–A Reader: Critical Questions, New Imaginaries & Social Activism. In Bloch,

Marianne, N. Swadener, Beth Blue, & Gaile Cannella (Editors). pp. 299-312.

Kroeger, J. & Widrig, C. (2023). Not as strange as dying: Reimagining North American practices in early childhood social studies as place-based and decolonialized. In Be(com)ing Stange(r): Towards a Posthumanist Social Studies(Editors, Bretton A.Varga, Timothy Montreal, & Rebecca C. Christ). Teachers College Press.

Latour, Bruno. (2018).Down to Earth: Politics in New Climatic Regime.Polity Press.

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.Decolonization: indigeneity, education & society,3(3).

Todd, Z. (2016). An indigenous feminist's take on the ontological turn:‘Ontology’is just another word for colonialism.Journal of historical sociology,29(1), 4-22.

Weigel, M.(2019, June 20).Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: ‘The disorder of our era isn’t necessary.’ The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/20/donna-haraway-interview-cyborg-manifesto-post-truth

West, Cornell (n.d.). Hope and Optimism: Love and Loss. Master Class.https://www.masterclass.com/classes/cornel-west-teaches-philosophy/chapters/hope-and-optimism-love-and-loss

West, C., & Ehrenberg, J. (2011). Left Matters: An Interview with Cornel West.New Political Science,33(3),

 

 

The announcement page is also used to bring up new information regarding childhood policy studies that are immediate and may require action.  Readers are asked to send critical policy announcements to Dr. Marianne Bloch or to associate editors: Dr. I-Fang Lee or Dr. Lucy Heimer email: heimerl@uww.edu or lgheimer@gmail.com). Please describe the issue in a 2-3 sentence format and give website addresses so that readers can obtain further information.