Announcing the Call for Proposals for the 2016 AESA Conference

Greetings AESA members and other listserv subscribers...

We would like to announce the call for proposals for the 2016 American
Educational Studies Association Conference.

Please note: AESA membership is deliberating conference dates and
location. Updates to this call will be made as soon as a decision is
reached.

Conference Theme: Love, Labor, and Learning Under the Gun: A Call for
Education Writ Large with Visionary Pragmatism

Under the gun names literally and figuratively the situation of love,
labor, and learning in the face of Second Amendment militancy and
murderous white supremacy across the U.S.; xenophobic walls, border
patrols, occupations, and deportations; fundamentalist terrorism,
mercenary militarism, and climate wars; worldwide violence of every
kind against diverse LGBTQ people and other women and children; toxic
water, air, and land; and speciesism—as well as union-busting, tenure
abolition, program cuts and shutdowns, high-stakes testing,
surveillance, micro-aggressions, school-to-prison pipelines, and
forceful privatization of public education at every level. For young
people and their educators, the challenges of loving, laboring, and
learning to live under the gun are at once personal and political. No
matter whom the U.S. elects as its next President [after or while] we
meet, ironically amid ongoing international centennial celebration of
John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, the interdisciplinary
educational studies community will continue to engage under-the-gun
challenges as labors of love and as labors for learning—disarming
labors both practical and intellectual. They demand critical
historical consciousness as well as nuanced intersectional
understanding of education’s practical complexities and conceptual
problems in changing cultural contexts. They call upon educators’
imaginative capacities for ethical leadership, civil action,
curricular and pedagogical artistry in behalf of peace and justice.

We call for submissions that reflect “the creative tension between
vision and pragmatism” that Patricia Hill Collins in Another Kind of
Public Education has called “visionary pragmatism,” as well as what
Jane Roland Martin has called “education writ large,” which exceeds
school or campus boundaries to include encounters between individuals
and cultures that change one another for worse or for better. Note a
new category of submission this year—action meetings—for organizing
leadership strategies to resist, disarm, and transform under-the-gun
domination. We invite submissions that investigate past educational
and cultural creativity living under the gun, that describe and
analyze both under-the-gun contexts and loving educational
environments. We welcome also conceptual inquiry that analyzes and
reframes ethical connections among love, labor, and learning.

MAY DAY SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  May 1, 2016.
All proposals must be submitted electronically to the Online
Conference System (OCS) via the AESA website.  It will open April 1,
2016 (5:00 pm CST) and close on International Labor Day, May 1, 2016
(11:59 CST).  MAY DAY is the final deadline, not a faux deadline!
Participants must plan ahead to make this May 1st deadline.
Notifications of proposals’ acceptance or rejections will be sent on
or before August 15, 2016.

Questions? Contact AESA President Elect/Program Chair Susan Laird at
laird@ou.edu