Call for papers for a special issue on "Educative Practices and the Making of (Non) Citizens"

Guest Editors
Brenda N. Sanya, Karishma Desai, Durell M. Callier, Cameron McCarthy

The Editors of Curriculum Inquiry in collaboration with the Guest Editors are seeking manuscripts for a special issue that is scheduled for publication in the Fall of 2017.  “Educative Practices and the Making of (Non) Citizens,” aims to feature the work of established and emerging scholars from a variety of academic fields and disciplines that explore critical approaches to understanding citizenship using a diverse range of methodological and theoretical frameworks. This interdisciplinary special issue aims to theorize relationships between citizenship and the interstices of educational spaces. Accordingly, we envision a special issue focused on the multiplicity of roles that education takes up with regards to citizenship. Particularly, we are interested in bringing together critical scholarship on citizenship and education that expands the discourse of citizenship beyond civic participation to examine the interrelationships of categories of difference, questions of the human, educative practices, law and legal definitions, and the performativity of citizenship.

There is a long, tightly interwoven relationship between citizenship, education, and the nation-state. Historically, educational institutions have often been designed to fashion particular kinds of docile, disciplined subjects for the state. Additionally, there is a contentious relationship between citizenship, rights, and responsibilities. This relationship mediates the guarantees of rights and responsibilities based on one’s subjective positions, compliance with national documentation regulations, and performance of citizenship and other emerging factors. Moreover, cultural practices and beliefs generated from contested negotiations with the state and its hegemonic forms inform the boundaries of cultural citizenship. Therefore, citizenship is not only restricted and policed during border crossings, or within borders; it is also performed, negotiated, and bound to notions of belonging. If citizenship is the location where laws and social contracts meet and ostensibly secure rights of individuals in relation to the state, then education is often complicit in securing state ideologies. Therefore, the relationship between citizenship and education has distinct manifestations in relation to multiple and overlapping categories of difference. As such, the making of (non)citizens through educative practices is linked to the impulsive and coercive forces of neoliberalism and settler colonialism, legacies of colonialism, and the afterlife of slavery. Citizenship is profoundly co-articulated by race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. It is through these variables that citizenship is differentially afforded, experienced, and understood.

For this special issue, we invite articles that investigate how educational and curricular practices employ and secure regulatory technologies where marginalized citizens are othered and erased through the production and juxtaposition of the normal and ideal. We seek articles that attend to these categories of difference in the physical and imagined spaces of policy documents, legal cases, media campaigns, school curricula, collective memories, citizenship education programs, archival aporia, speculative histories, and auto-ethnographies. These articles will illustrate how discourses of exceptionalism and normalcy are produced, how they mask racialized violence and geopolitical dynamics, or how centering erased narratives might unsettle inscribed logics of citizenship. Rather than starting from pre-given categories of difference, this special issue solicits articles that trace the making of such categories and their consequences, as well as modes by which they are contested, transgressed, and transformed.

We do not assume that schools are insulated from public discourse, political movements, and systems of governance. Instead, we seek articles investigating the dynamic relations between educative practices instituted through schools and non-formal learning spaces that construct subject-citizens, and mainstream societal discourses that naturalize an ideal and good citizen, and pathologizes and others. Above all, this special issue call is extended to as wide a range of new critical scholarship as is possible that seeks to engage and transcend disciplinary isolationism and genre confinement in the examination of the status of the (non)citizen in contemporary educational research.

In light of this, we invite papers pertaining to citizenship that theorize and analyze:

• Colonial legacies of Western liberal citizenship manifest in curriculums, policies, and pedagogical techniques;
• How the ideal citizen is anchored in Western liberalism’s configuration of the human
• Neoliberal technologies of governing are instituted through educational sites, and how these technologies inform citizen-making;
• Transnational migrations in pursuit of education which unsettle or reaffirm the logic of national citizenship and belonging;
• How citizenship is performed, gained, regulated, surveilled, and embodied across self-selected and presumed identities and identity politics, border crossings, legal documentation, and within immigration law
• How educational spaces are theorized, enacted, or resisted in ways that unsettle neoliberal, regulatory, or colonial discourses and practices
• Theorizations of educational spaces that reconfigure normative categories of citizenship, and invite alternative possibilities and futures

Instructions for Submissions

Submission Deadline: December 15, 2016

Manuscripts for this special issue are expected to be between 6000 and 8000 words, including references and endnotes. Guidelines for manuscript submission along with other relevant information is available here. All manuscripts submitted to Curriculum Inquiry are subjected to a preliminary internal review by the editorial team, and those deemed appropriate for publication in the journal will be sent anonymously to external reviewers. Questions about the focus of the special issue can be addressed to guest editors Brenda N. Sanya (sanya2@illinois.edu). Other questions regarding submission can be addressed directly to the Curriculum Inquiry Editorial Office at curriculum.inquiry.oise@utoronto.ca.