CALL FOR PROPOSALS
21ST CENTURY SOCIALISM AND EDUCATION: GLOBAL ALTERNATIVES TO PATRIARCHY, RACIAL CAPITALISM, MILITARISM, AND CLIMATE CHANGE CIES 2023 CALL FOR PROPOSALS THEMATIC TRACK
At CIES in February 2023, we will once again be organizing a thematic track of panels focused on 21st Century Socialism and Education: Global Alternatives to Patriarchy, Racial Capitalism, Militarism, and Climate Change. This series of panels, workshops, and papers will continue the discussion begun during roughly 20 panels each in CIES 2001 and 2022 on alternative education and development for the new millennium.
The 2023 CIES theme is “Improving Education for a More Equitable World”. The description references the “dream” of education for all and the abundant educational reforms around the world that fall short of realizing equity. It highlights some of the structural problems that constrain progress - power imbalance, income disparity, and neocolonialism, for example. The theme also emphasizes social factors like gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language, ability, culture, religion, geopolitics, and the current crisis context of pandemic and climate change that our education improvement agendas must address. Our “21st Century Socialism and Education” panel series for 2023 offers a unique opportunity to illuminate deeper critical analyses of the drivers of inequity and highlight the outlines of a number of promising alternatives that do in fact demonstrate a transformative pathway forward. We refer to socialism to evoke contributions that recognize the fundamental problems with capitalism and its connections to structures of patriarchy, racism, militarism, and ecological crisis. “Socialism" is not well-defined, and "21st-century socialism" even less so; however, we use it as an attempt to deepen participatory praxis in all spheres of social life, including the state, the economy, the workplace, social and cultural spheres, media, technology, and, of utmost importance for CIES, the education system. As a society, CIES needs to reflect on how our scholarship, academic priorities, and approaches can better contribute to continuing and new struggles for eco-balance, social/economic justice, and more representative democracy. In 2022, we approached the site of CIES, Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a site of contestation and local engagement. We highlighted how it had become the epicenter of Black Lives Matter and wider global racial justice protests confronting the long history of structural racism in the US and other societies, and how this region of the US is home to struggles for refugee/immigration rights, indigenous rights, workers’ lives, and climate justice. We visited with local activists outside CIES to learn with them. In 2023, we intend to approach the new CIES site in Washington, DC in a similar way as a site of contestation and local engagement where democracy itself is under assault, reactionary pushback against progressive progress is the current policy norm, and where civic activism resists these efforts. We see the CIES gathering in 2023 as an important opportunity to communicate the power of more just economic systems and social relations (what we call “progressive alternatives”) in the global and national power center that is the US capital city. We invite you to propose papers or panels for the 21st Century Socialism and Education thematic track for the CIES 2023 conference - the call for submissions period is now open. Your paper or presentation or panel proposal does not have to tackle the whole theme. The theme is meant to be evocative, not restrictive. You can propose an individual paper on a topic of your choosing, an individual paper that fits with one of the suggested topics below, or an entire panel. We are particularly interested in research and perspectives from the Global South.- What is Socialism for the 21st Century? What is the Role of Education in Promoting this?
- Education and the Climate Emergency
- Education and Social Movements
- Educator and Youth Resistance and Organizing
- Education and the Re-emergence of Labor Activism
- Racial Capitalism, Education Policy, and Politics
- Global and Cross-National Perspectives on Black, Feminist, and Queer Movements in and through Education
- EcoSocialism and Eco Pedagogy
- Educational Alternatives: Global Examples of Concrete Praxis
- Indigenous Approaches to Education and Development
- Imperialism, Empire, Neo-colonialism, and Learning
- Militarism and new forms of 21st Century War
- The Internet, Social Media
www.cies2023.org by the CIES 2023 deadline on Monday, August 8, 2022. Feel free to contact any one of us below with questions. Also, if you know others who might be interested in proposing a paper or panel for this track, please share this invitation with them. Organizers: Frank Adamson Diana Rodríguez-Gómez Salim Vally Michael Gibbons Mark Ginsburg Sangeeta Kamat Steve Klees Hugh McLean Nanre Nafziger Carol Anne Spreen Roozbeh Shirazi Krystal Strong Becky Tarlau Alice Taylor
If interested, please submit your paper or panel proposal to the 21st Century Socialism and Education track in the All-Academic system (listed with the SIGs) accessible online at