Call for Papers: Critical Questions in Education (Special Theme Issue) Uncovering Youth Spaces: Activists Voices, Productive, Materialist Methodologies, and Social Inquiry; proposals due 10/15/16

Call for Papers: Critical Questions in Education (Special Theme
Issue) Uncovering Youth Spaces: Activists Voices, Productive,
Materialist Methodologies, and Social Inquiry; proposals due 10/15/16

Guest Editor: Sophia Rodriguez, PhD, Assistant Professor, Educational
Foundations, College of Charleston, SC

CALL FOR PAPERS
This special issue of CQIE is dedicated to new understandings of
critical, participatory, or materialist methodologies in educational
research on youth studies with particular attention to youth from
minoritized communities, or with youth that occupy marginalized
identities (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; McCarty, 2002). This call
defines “minoritized communities and identities” by drawing from
Gutiérrez and Rogoff’s (2003) work that posits that the practice of
labeling students’ cultural differences with individual traits such as
being “low-income,” “at risk,” or any “othering” language are part of
the institutional, ascription process of identity that allows for
hierarchies in schools and society (Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003). This
ascription process also sets the conditions for positive and negative
academic trajectories for minoritized youth and contributes to the
reproduction of inequality in society. Given the resurgence of youth
activism and larger youth social movements against educational
injustices, this special issue hopes to expand on notions of agency,
empowerment, and resistance within the context(s) of neoliberal
ideologies that govern much of the current education policy and reform
climate (Giroux, 2014, 2015; Fabricant & Fine, 2012; Rodriguez, 2016)
and globalization. As it stands, neoliberal ideologies provide the
context for youth activism (Kirshner, Gaertner, & Pozzoboni, 2010),
where neoliberalism is defined as a set of political ideologies and
practices (Harvey, 2005). Neoliberal ideologies have been applied to
educational research (Lipman, 2011) to underscore the ways in which
public goods such as education are subject to privatization, changing
the shape of social structures and relationships (Ball, 1999, 2003;
Rodriguez, 2016) and negatively impacting communities of color.
Further, youth activists have been responding to such privatization
movements such as charter school proliferation and turnaround
practices in urban schools across the U.S. (Kirshner, et. al, 2010).
The special issue hopes to provide insight into the interworkings of
youth culture(s) and space(s) with/in social movements toward
educational justice, particularly in our current racialized contexts
of education policy and practice. This special issue is interested in
submissions that are centered on youth voices and experiences.

Importantly, the special issue situates its inquiry within two larger
theoretical and methodological concerns. First, the special issue will
contribute to theoretical and conceptual discussions of youth activism
or organizing, agency, subjectivity, empowerment, resistance, and
space. Authors will be expected to engage with and theorize such
concepts in order to ponder the critical questions: How do young
people—often marginalized and excluded from educational
policy-making—use or claim space(s) in their efforts for social
change? What constitutes youth organizing and how is it (or is it not)
an articulation of youth culture(s)? In what ways are youth identities
or subjectivities conceived of in local contexts, and how can
re-conceptualizing youth subjectivities offer breakthroughs in our
current understandings of young people's role in protesting, if not
overcoming, racial oppression and xenophobia both at the structural
and individual, material levels in society? Or, how do forms of youth
activism offer responses to gender-based and class-based inequalities
in society?

Second, the special issue will engage with methodologies that offer
windows into youth culture. This issue welcomes more recent
materialist methodologies as well as critical or participatory
frameworks that help to reveal youth experiences. To build upon the
previous scholarship on youth activism, however, the special issue
will ask authors to deeply engage with methodological dilemmas, risks,
and productive entanglements as they attempt to disrupt knowledge
production in their respective communities by focusing on critical
issues related to racialization, mass incarceration, or other pressing
societal oppression against the bodies, voices, and desires of young
people.

Given this Special Issue’s hope to contribute to theoretical and
methodological dimensions of youth studies in education research, it
welcomes multiple, and potentially contradictory experiences of youth
as they challenge injustices in society and education. The issue
welcomes research on youth emotion, desire, pain, joy, resistance, and
on winning and losing collective battles against current education
reform (or a lack of) efforts related to charter proliferation, school
closures and turnarounds, neighborhood poverty, and the
criminalization of black and brown bodies in multiple sites in and
beyond school, and in the media. In other words, while this issue
welcomes in-classroom or in-school experiences of youth, the issue
will ultimately tend to spaces where youth are moving, traversing, and
negotiating boundaries thereby making visible spaces of possibility,
i.e. community-based and after-school, other informal or formal spaces
or not-so-likely educational spaces, i.e. migrant farms, prisons,
alleys, parks, or cyberspaces.

As an important note, the issue welcomes multiple ways that young
people engage in implicit, informal, or less formalized organizing or
activism, depending on the context and definitions that researchers
utilize. Thus, authors will be expected to define or re-define what it
means to identify as “activists” or “organizers,” or to not, from
youth perspectives. That said, this issue aims to include multiple
experiences of issues that are important for young people today in
society, pushing boundaries of possible action for young people and
for researchers alike. Finally, the issue hopes to privilege
productive analyses of youth identity and space in hopes of excavating
narratives that challenge our understanding of progress, and human
agency in constrained educational and societal contexts.

Importance to CQIE
This special issue aligns with the aims of CQIE, namely, issues of
educational policy and practice considered from a foundational,
theoretical and methodology perspective. By documenting social
processes related to youth activism and/or organizing, this special
issue invites provocative manuscripts that disrupt normative knowledge
production, drawing from philosophical, theoretical, historical,
sociological, and anthropological perspectives. Further, this special
issue asks contributors to engage in risky, politicized/political
topics in our contemporary moment.

Qualifications to guest edit
Dr. Sophia Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Educational
Foundations at the College of Charleston. She recently guest edited a
double issue of the top-tier journal, Global Studies of Childhood. She
also has significant experience reviewing proposals and manuscripts as
the Chair of the Foucault and Contemporary Theory and Education SIG,
American Education Research Association, and as an Editorial Board
Member for Policy Futures in Education along with reviewing for
several other journals.

General Timeline
Call for Papers: August 31, 2016
Proposals Due: October 15, 2016
Accept/Reject: November 1, 2016
Draft Articles Due: January 25, 2017
Feedback to authors: March 30, 2017
Final Drafts Due: June 1, 2017
Published: Fall 2017

Guidelines for Authors:

TYPES OF ARTICLES
Research Articles
Manuscripts reporting original, empirical research using qualitative
and/or mixed method findings related to education should include a
literature review and/or theoretical/conceptual framework, methods,
and analysis sections. The literature should be relevant to the
research topic and findings. The methods need to be clearly outlined
and should match the research question or stated purpose of the
manuscript. Please include a brief description of any methodologies
that are less familiar to educators and the educational research
community. The analysis should be clear, and the arguments set forth
should emerge from the findings presented in the manuscript. APA is an
acceptable format for research articles.

Scholarly Essays
An academic essay should have a well-developed argument that answers a
particular question or several related questions. It should begin with
a review of previous work on the chosen topic and, subsequently,
provide reasoning, evidence, and examples that support the author’s
thesis on the question(s) addressed. Scholarly essays are nonfiction
but often take on a subjective point of view; they are often
expository, but they can also be narrative in style. Chicago Style is
the acceptable format for scholarly essays.

CRITERIA
Significance and Impact
Manuscripts and critical reviews should focus on questions relevant to
the field of education. These questions should be pointed and should
also have implications for broader educational problems, nationally
and/or globally. Manuscripts/critical reviews should contribute to the
work of stakeholders seeking to address educational challenges and
should explicitly state their contributions, whether theoretical or
practical, in order to identify the populations that would most
benefit from its publication, such as teachers, professors,
policymakers, or students.

Advancement of the Field
The manuscript should push existing theory in a new direction, and/or
extend, fill a gap in, or bring a new perspective to current
literature. Books/films/media being reviewed should be substantial in
their contributions to the study of educational problems.

Clarity and Style
Manuscripts must be well written in clear, concise language. As a
foundationally oriented critical journal, CQIE publishes articles
reflective of those themes found in social foundations of education.
To that end, we ask potential authors to be mindful of the following
understanding of social foundations work as stated by the Leaned
Societies in Education (CLSE):
Foundations of Education refers to a broadly-conceived field of
educational study that derives its character and methods from a number
of academic disciplines, combinations of disciplines, and area
studies, including: history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology,
religion, political science, economics, psychology, cultural studies,
gender studies, comparative and international education, educational
studies, and educational policy studies. As distinct from
Psychological Foundations of Education, which rely on the behavioral
sciences, these Standards address the Social Foundations of Education,
which rely heavily on the disciplines and methodologies of the
humanities, particularly history and philosophy, and the social
sciences, such as sociology and political science. The purpose of
foundations study is to bring these disciplinary resources to bear in
developing interpretive, normative, and critical perspectives on
education, both inside and outside of schools.
The interpretive perspectives use concepts and theories developed
within the humanities and the social sciences to assist students in
examining, understanding, and explaining education within different
contexts. Foundational studies promote analysis of the intent,
meaning, and effects of educational institutions, including schools.
Such studies attend particularly to the diverse contexts within which
educational phenomena occur, and how interpretation can vary with
different historical, philosophical, and cultural perspectives.
The normative perspectives assist students in examining and explaining
education in light of value orientations. Foundational studies promote
understanding of normative and ethical behavior in educational
development and recognition of the inevitable presence of normative
influences in educational thought and practice. Foundational studies
probe the nature of assumptions about education and schooling. They
examine the relation of policy analysis to values and the extent to
which educational policymaking reflects values. Finally, they
encourage students to develop their own value positions regarding
education on the basis of critical study and their own reflections.
The critical perspectives employ normative interpretations to assist
students to develop inquiry skills, to question educational
assumptions and arrangements, and to identify contradictions and
inconsistencies among social and educational values, policies, and
practices. In particular, the critical perspectives engage students in
employing democratic values to assess educational beliefs, policies,
and practices in light of their origins, influences, and consequences.
Particular disciplinary studies in, e.g., the history, philosophy, or
sociology of education shall be considered as study in the Foundations
of Education provided the above perspectives are addressed and
promoted. The objective of such study is to sharpen students’
abilities to examine, understand, and explain educational proposals,
arrangements, and practices and to develop a disciplined sense of
policy-oriented educational responsibility. Such study develops an
awareness of education and schooling in light of their complex
relations to the environing culture.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Proposal Format
Please send a 750-1000 word proposal, excluding references, for review
in a word document to Dr. Sophia Rodriguez (contact information below)
by October 15, 2016. This proposal should indicate the aim of the
research study or if it is a conceptual/theoretical paper, specific
methodological approaches, key findings, and an overview of the
argument. Please also include how the manuscript directly addresses
the call. Authors should also submit a reference list that includes
key references that will be utilized in the manuscript. Please also
submit all relevant contact information (author name(s), institutional
affiliation, and email).

To have your manuscript considered for publication, please submit a
proposal by October 15, 2016 (11:59pm EST) to rodriguezs1@cofc.edu
with the subject line, “CQIE Rodriguez Special Issue”.

Final Manuscript Formatting
• CQIE accepts manuscripts of up to 10,000 words, including abstract,
list of keywords, appendices, footnotes and references, and reserves
the right to return any manuscript that exceeds that length.
• All text must be double-spaced; type size must be 12 point with
1-inch margins on all sides.
• Attach a short biography, keywords, and a short abstract to your submission.
• Authors should refer to The Chicago Manual of Style for general
questions of style, grammar, punctuation, and form, and for footnotes
of theoretical, descriptive, or essay-like material.
• The journal defers to author preference in decisions about the
naming and capitalization of racial, ethnic, and cultural groups.
Manuscripts should be internally consistent in this regard.
• Authors of empirical research articles may use APA format. Please
refer to Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
for reference and citation styles.

Contact Info:
Dr. Sophia Rodriguez
66 George Street
Dept. of Teacher Education
College of Charleston
Charleston, SC 29424
Rodriguezs1@cofc.edu