Call for Contributors: Education for the Commons: Pedagogy, Politics, and Potentiality, Manuscripts should be between 6,000-8,000 words.

CFP: Education for the Commons: Pedagogy, Politics, and Potentiality

Alexander Means, State University of New York, Buffalo State
Derek R. Ford, Syracuse University
Graham B. Slater, University of Utah

While the common has a long history in Western and non-Western
thought, it has recently re-emerged as a prominent theme within social
science, law, economics, business, technology, policy, ecology, and
activist theories and movements. The reinvigoration of the common
across these varied fields can be attributed largely to growing
recognition of the need for creative responses to a wide array of
global crises that threaten our collective lives and futures. In this
sense, the common is often invoked as a challenge to neoliberal
hegemony and the destructive expansionary drive of capitalism to
enclose what remains of the world’s common resources, labor, and
culture for private gain. At the same time, the common is also being
taken up as a pragmatic and utopian referent to rethink modern
political categories and imagine alternatives to both capitalism
(private property) and socialism (public property). This framing of
the common as both an analytical concept and normative political ideal
has generated fascinating new discussions around the nature of
contemporary subjectivity and collectivity as well as new forms of
life, labor and value relations, identity, imperialism and
neocolonialism, and--what we wish to focus on in this edited
collection--education.

The common, we argue in this volume, must be understood as an
educational concept. This is another way of suggesting that the common
is inherently pedagogical. As an actual and virtual field of material,
social, and cultural production, the common is constantly being made,
remade, and undone. The fault lines and generative tensions of
commoning and enclosing, by enabling or constraining ways of being,
knowing, working, and relating, literally teach us. To say that
commoning and enclosing are pedagogical relations is to also recognize
that they are political relations--that is, the common is always a
divided and contested site rich in social and cultural difference and
rife with differentials of power. Ultimately, the pedagogical and
political dimensions of commoning and enclosing always harbor latent
forms of potentiality. As with education itself, the common can never
be fully captured or enclosed. Rather the common is an open question:
a necessarily hopeful and conflicted condition of our global
commonality and interrelation.

This volume is interested in exploring education as a crucial domain
of the common. How is it that conflicts over the common raise and
answer pedagogical questions concerning geography, class, power, race,
gender, institutions, sexuality, value, labor, technology,
colonialism, subjectivity, communication, politics, affect,
emancipation, and ecology? What can educational theories offer
movements for the common, and how can struggles for commons,
particularly common educational institutions and practices, inform the
development of educational theory and critical social theory more
broadly? We are interested in abstracts of no more than 300 words that
explore these questions concerning contemporary articulations of
education and the common through a variety of themes and topics. This
includes, but is not limited to:

Privatization and New Enclosures
Public, Private, and Common
Values, Value Theory, Value Conflicts
Precarity, Labor, and Social Reproduction
Technology, Technoscience, Technopolitics
New Materialisms
Aesthetics and Affect Theory
Queer Theory
Indigenous Perspectives and Indigeneity
Decolonial Projects
Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, Disability
Feminism and Feminist Pedagogies
Critical Race Theory
Neoliberal Culture and Subjectivity
Humanism, Transhumanism, and Posthumanism
Critical Pedagogy and Radical Educational Philosophy
Cognitive Capitalism, New Media, and Immaterial Labor
Finance Capitalism, Anti-capitalism, and Post-Capitalism
Biopolitics, Governmentality, Power, Subjectivity
Social Movements, Occupations, Radical Imaginations
Ecoliteracy, Ecopolitics, and Ecopedagogy
Spatial Theory, Place-Based Education, Border and Mobility Studies
Critical Disability Studies

If you are interested in contributing to this edited collection for
Palgrave Macmillan please submit an abstract by March 31, 2015 of no
more than 300 words to: educationforthecommons@gmail.com. We
anticipate final manuscripts being due January 4, 2016 with a late
2016 publication. Manuscripts should be between 6,000-8,000 words.