Call for papers

Call for chapter abstracts

Edited Book Collection, under submission to the Bristol Series in Education, Bristol University Press

Editors – Gunjan Wadhwa and Maria Tsouroufli

Drawing on postcolonial and feminist frameworks, along with international and comparative perspectives in education, this edited book collection will critically discuss the dominance of colonial and neo-colonial discourses of development around gender, religion and secularism within education, and beyond, by encouraging authors to take up their empirical, theoretical, and reflective research in diverse national and local contexts. The book aims to highlight the ways in which the international development agenda shapes understandings of gender and religion in education and is imbricated through the colonial discourses of development.

Contributing authors are particularly encouraged to take up ‘alternative’ theoretical frameworks and analyses (namely, postcolonial, feminist, indigenous, decolonial, poststructural) and creative approaches (poetry, artwork) that help undo the dominant ways of ‘knowing’ in each of their varied contexts in relation to the conceptualisations and intersections of gender, religion and secularism. This will allow better to examine the nuanced intersections, linkages and tensions of the global and national imperatives and local practices and confront the complexities in education and development research and policy.

The book will make space for creative approaches, including but not limited to poetry, artwork, oral histories and narratives, by inviting reflective pieces to disrupt the modernist, positivist, and hetero-normative/patriarchal notions of gender. The chapters will bring to fore the significance and intersections of nationality, religion, race, age, caste, class, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and so on in the constitution of gender relations across multiple spaces within and beyond education. Contributions are particularly encouraged from early-career researchers working in and on global South contexts, under-represented in academia, and from migrant, ethnic and religious minority groups and backgrounds.

The volume aims to maintain the connection between gender and religion/secularism in all contributions given its central focus on gendering intersections of religion and secular/ism in education to delineate the mutually constitutive relationship of gender and religion(s). The book chapters can be focused around, but by no means limited to, the following thematic areas, and situated broadly within or interacting with the fields of international education and development:

• Gender, identities (nationality, sexuality, disability, caste, class), and religion
• Race, religion, secularism and (global) citizenship
• Religion, secularism and socio-spatial relations
• Religion and gender relations in work, labour and livelihood practices
• Gender, religion and secularism in youth and childhoods
• Gender, religion and secularism in community and intergenerational ties
• Gender, religion, secularism and the Anthropocene
• Indigenous lives, religion, secularism and gendering ethnicity
• Racialisation and feminisation of religion and religious othering
• Faith, spirituality, secularism and gender
• Religion / secularism as gendered agency and resistance
• ‘Alternative’ theories, frameworks, critical and creative approaches in understanding gender, religion and secularism
• Media, digital technologies, religion, secularism and gender
• Struggles and social movements for diversity, equity, and social inclusion in religion
• Religion, secularism, gender and the nation-state
• Affect, emotionality, intentionality, vulnerability
• COVID-19 pandemic, gender, religion and secularism
• Colonial, neo-colonial discourses, capitalism and neo-liberalism in intersections of gender, religion and secularism 

The edited collection will include 7-8 chapters of approx. 8000 words each and follow the below timeline. Abstracts (300 words) and related queries can be sent to Maria.Tsouroufli@brunel.ac.uk. 

Timeline

• Call for abstracts – 3rd October 2022
• Deadline for submissions – 16th December 2022
• Notification of acceptance of abstracts – 20th February 2023
• Deadline of submission of chapters – 31st October 2023
• Notification of acceptance of chapters – 31st January 2024
• Deadline for final submissions – 31st May 2024

Call for papers: Equality, diversity, and inclusion: an international journal

SPECIAL ISSUE: ‘Reconceptualising the Inter/national subject: Unsettling Equality and Interculturality in Higher Education (HE)’

Editorial Team:

• Maria Tsouroufli, Brunel University London
• Giuliana Ferri, Brunel University London
• Gunjan Wadhwa, Brunel University London

Overview

The proposed special issue will create a space for dialogue to critically examine unproblematised notions of internationalisation, mobility, global citizenship, and equity in higher education. Although seemingly neutral and innocuous, these notions operate to position international staff and students within politicized binaries of indigeneity/alienation, nativism/foreign, natural/unnatural, local/global, instantiating them as inherently pathologized subjects. However, far from being fixed, these binaries are always shifting, negotiated and contested in the daily experiences of transnational and intercultural lives and their associated projects of belonging and othering within and beyond the diverse spaces of higher education institutions.

The proposed special issue adds a new and important contribution to the critique of dominant discourses within HE that are firmly entangled with the promotion and advancement of internationalisation and the shared neo-liberal fantasies of equality and diversity. These discourses obfuscate the colonial legacies of ‘Western’/’Westernised’ education and episteme, and the new racisms that uneven migration and academic mobility patterns present across various national and socio-political contexts. Instead, these dominant discourses operate to responsibilize international subjects for their trajectories in HE, trivializing and shrinking ideas of equality, diversity and inclusion.

Uncritical understandings of the ‘inter/national’ subject in HE tend to mute the multiplicity, plurality and hybridity of identities that are marked as international as well as the materiality and emotionality of identity production within the unequal spaces of higher education sustained by wider inequalities and colonial relations of domination. Narratives of cultural translation, adaptation, and language use further compound and complicate the emotional labour of intercultural learning. Our special issue will aim to attract contributions that will advance our thinking about difference, diversity and othering in higher education through critical, embodied, affective, intersectional and relational approaches to the study of Inter/national/cultural identities.

Potential topics

Potential areas of research and inquiry might include (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• EDI, neo-liberalism and international identities in HE
• Internationalization and Intercultural Learning in the Global South and Global North
• Internationalization and multiple marginalities/exclusions in HE
• Transcultural belongings and gendered/racialized othering in HE
• Neo-colonization of HE and international subjects in Western Europe, Oceania and South-Asia
• Intercultural competences and EDI in neo-liberal academia
• Language inequalities and intercultural lives in HE
• Global citizenship agendas in HE: discourses, practices, critiques and possibilities
• Navigation and negotiation of identities and subjectivities in HE
• Alternative and critical understandings of international education discourses
• Resistances to dominant notions of internationalisation

Submission Information

Manuscripts must be submitted in MS Word (.doc or .docx) format with a separate title page that includes the title of the paper, full names, affiliations, email addresses, telephone numbers, complete addresses, and biographical sketches of all authors.

All submissions must follow the APA (6th ed.) style and be between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including a 250-word abstract with 5-6 keywords, references, and notes.

Submissions of papers should be made by 1^st August, 2023, through Scholar One at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/edi. Author guidelines and format for submitted manuscripts can be found on the journal’s website. 

Symposium 17th March 10am to 4pm 2022

Deadline for abstracts 28th February 2022

Abstracts to be submitted to giuliana.ferri@brunel.ac.uk

Organisers: Giuliana Ferri, Maria Tsouroufli, and Gunjan Wadhwa, hosted by the Interculturality for diversity and global learning at Brunel University London, https://www.brunel.ac.uk/research/Groups/Interculturality-for-Diversity-and-Global-Learning

Dominant discourses within HE are firmly entangled with the promotion/advancement of internationalisation and liberal values of equality and diversity. These discourses, however, disregard the neo-colonial legacies of ‘Western’/’Westernised’ and predominantly Anglicised education systems and their implications for (re)producing institutional and global hierarchies of power. Uncritical understandings of the ‘international’ subject in HE tend to mute the multiplicity, plurality and hybridity of identities that are marked as international, thereby generating new exclusions and othering within HE. Physical and symbolic borders inscribe differing and dialectic modes of belonging, from peripheral to honorary and full membership, while marginalities and liminalities are either normalised or further excluded. Moreover, unproblematised notions of internationalisation, mobility, and global citizenship although seemingly neutral and innocuous, operate to position international students and staff within politicized binaries of indigeneity/alienation, nativism/foreign, natural/unnatural, local/global, instantiating them as subjects in the making. The paradoxical nature of hospitality is encapsulated in this series of binaries that far from being fixed, are always shifting, negotiated and contested in the daily experiences of transnational and intercultural lives. In this sense, narratives of cultural translation, adaptation, and language use in the host country consolidate the emotional labour of intercultural learning as a responsibility of international others.

In this special issue, we open up space to discuss bordering, boundary, and othering practices that shape, shift, disrupt, rupture and reconfigure inter/trans-national and/or migrant subjectivities in Global South and Global North HE institutions; in physical and virtual spaces; learning, teaching, scholarship and research environments. We call for critical intercultural, decolonial and intersectional contributions from various disciplines including language studies, education, migration, feminist, ethnic and racial studies to generate dialogue and critique of normative conceptualizations of international others and internationalization. In so doing, we encourage the contributions to re-centre discussions on translocational positionalities, intersectional identities and their agonistic and agonising projects of belonging, unfolding with gendered and racialized practices, disadvantages, and affordances of citizenship, mobility, migration, and transnationality.

We invite papers on topics including but not limited to:

• Resistances to dominant notions of internationalisation
• Internationalising locals
• Language practices in internationalised HE and the exclusion of non-native ‘others’
• The burden of intercultural learning and emotional labour in internationalised HE
• Autobiographical work on the international subject
• Global citizenship agendas in HE: discourses, practices, critiques and possibilities
• Navigation and negotiation of identities and subjectivities in HE
• Alternative and critical understandings of international education discourses
• Inequality and othering practices in neo-colonial, ‘Western/Westernised’ neo-liberal HE

Biographical notes of organisers

Professor Tsouroufli’s international research has been concerned with intersectional inequalities in gender-based violence in schools, intersectional inequalities in women’s medical and academic careers and identities; gendered and racialized othering; and neo-colonialism in the context of EU funded cross-cultural research. Dr Ferri’s work in interculturality has engaged philosophically with the themes of otherness and intercultural ethics, uncovering the intersectional character of gendered and racialised otherness. Dr Wadhwa’s work with rural and Adivasi communities in India troubles the dominant discursive norms that produce the post-colonial nation-state and carry implications for expressions of identity in Global South contexts. Her focus on rural youth identities and community rights in zones of conflict uncovers historical marginalisation, discursive othering, subalternity and exclusion from citizenship rights (Wadhwa, 2020, 2021).

Professor Tsouroufli and Dr Ferri founded and lead the Interculturality for Diversity and Global Learning research group; a collective committed to promoting international and interdisciplinary scholarship and facilitating intercultural research.  Dr Gunjan joined the group when awarded an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship in 2020 and since then she has been working towards the inclusion of multiple and diverse perspectives through the formation of a network of international scholars working in and on the Global South, the development of a research collective, international journal publications, and collaborative research with local community groups. 

Following the symposium, a call for papers will be circulated for a special issue in a peer reviewed international journal.