Spring 2025 Special Issue: Call for Abstracts and Author Guideline

CJE Spring 2025 Special Issue: Bridging Social and Ecological Justice in Education
Guest co-Editors: Carrie Karsgaard and Patrick Howard

CJE is pleased to announce a call for abstracts for a Spring 2025 Special Issue on “Bridging Social and Ecological Justice in Education.”

Interested authors are invited to submit a 500-word abstract proposal to Carrie Karsgaard (Carrie_Karsgaard@cbu.ca) and Patrick Howard (Patrick_Howard@cbu.ca) by February 29, 2024. We strongly encourage submissions from authors who identify as belonging to structurally marginalized groups. All articles in this Special Issue will be in English. Guidelines for submission are in the following section. 

Contributing authors for successful abstracts will be contacted by March 15, 2024. Final papers of 5500 to 7000 words (excluding references) are due on June 15, 2024.

THEMATIC INFORMATION

Despite the important focus of social justice education on power dynamics, intercultural conviviality, and action for social change, an overwhelming focus on the social may disregard the ecological components of our social and educational systems. What are the ecological consequences of social injustices such as racism, displacement, warfare, or prison? How are Canadian education systems, as social institutions, complicit in ecological injustice? How might such systems be transformed? Such questions are particularly important considering education’s “digital turn,” and the neglect of the socio-ecological and climate implications of digital technologies (Emejulu & McGregor, 2019; Estrada & Lehuedé, 2022; O’Brien & Fingerhut, 2023).

On the other hand, environmental issues can be more deeply considered through the lens of social justice. What, for instance, is the social angle of fracking, mineral extraction, or climate change in various contexts across Canada? As education seeks to address climate crisis, ecological degradation, and food insecurity, how can education better attend to the social components of environmental issues? How can we understand relational ontologies (Thayer- Bacon, 2017) through education that promotes the “nested – I” (Bollier & Hefrich, 2019), spanning the falsely constructed social-ecological divide by way of pluralistic participation and intra-acting (Barad, 2007) in larger life flows?  Particularly considering the pervasive whiteness, class privilege, and coloniality of environmentalism (Cronon, 1996; DeLuca & Demo, 2001; Gilio-Whitaker, 2019; Gómez-Pompa & Kaus, 1992), any environmental education that looks to be truly sustainable, inclusive, and momentous will be thoroughly incomplete without social justice.

While social and ecological issues are mutually embedded, education in Canada often fails to make connections across research traditions, disciplines, and departmental divisions to holistically address these issues. Characterized at times by historical divisions, separate funding structures, and hierarchical divides, educational sites must engage in significant bridging work to bring together the social and ecological, whether in teaching or research.

Inviting articles that utilize diverse methods, this special issue will explore the intersectionality of socio-ecological issues in Canadian education and the bridging efforts necessary to address these issues holistically. Spanning educational sites and contexts, and intentionally bridging across the disciplines of social justice and environmental education, the special issue will invite scholarship positioned among various feminist, queer, disability, Black, Indigenous, anti-colonial, rural, and diasporic theories, with particular attentiveness to the Canadian context. Recognizing the embeddedness of education in broader systems, the issue will consider how various forces such as capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and colonialism are simultaneously elemental to both socio-ecological crises and the inadequacy of mainstream education as it stands to address such crises (Komatsu et al., 2020). At the same time, the issue will invite articles that explore the critical interventions and creative alternatives of various educators, activists, and learners to explore how educational responses can work – and are already working – towards ecological transition in ways that undermine isolated individual identity and unjust power relations and create more healthy and equitable futures. Some potential topics include but are not limited to:

  • Ecological elements of education systems and infrastructures, including the digital;
  • Dialectics between socio-ecological activism (climate justice, anti-pipeline, divestment, public transportation, green space, right to repair, etc. movements) and formal education;
  • Creative, pedagogical, and policy interventions that bridge social and ecological justice in formal, non-formal, and informal education, including as connected with Indigenous, anti-colonial, Black, queer, disability-oriented, and migrant/diasporic communities and theories;
  • Explorations of pedagogies for relational and participatory epistemologies towards an understanding of being as foundationally relational;
  • Articulations of socio-ecological justice in the arts, cultural practice, social media, and other forms of public pedagogy;
  • Links between social and ecological justice in relation to education’s decolonial impetus and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action;
  • Interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary/polydisciplinamorous possibilities.

ABSTRACT INFORMATION

Once the paper is accepted, an abstract in both English and French is required as well as a list of keywords in both languages. The final version of the abstract can be up to 150 words in English and up to 180 words in French. The abstract should summarize the purpose of the study, the procedures employed, the results obtained, and the conclusions reached. 

MANUSCRIPT INFORMATION

  • Articles are to be emailed to the guest editors in .docx format.  Articles should be between 5500 and 7000 words, excluding references. Articles that exceed 7000 words will not be considered. 
  • A running head of no more than 50 characters should be provided.
  • Tables, figures, and graphic material are accepted only when necessary for the rigour of the argument. The editable version, or a high resolution version, of the file should be provided. If the table/figure/graphic was previously published elsewhere, you must ensure copyright clearance is provided.
  • Manuscripts must be in 12-point type (including quotations, notes, & references).
  • To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. Please ensure:
    • The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
    • With Word documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file as follows: File > Info > Check for Issues > Inspect Document (Inspect) > Document Properties and Personal Information (Remove All). For Mac users, click on Tools > Protect document > Remove personal information from this file upon save.
    • Many authors share interim information about their scholarship through blogs, conference or grant proposals, or online research notes. These online postings can impact the CJE’s double-blind review process. In such cases, authors must submit a “working title” for their CJE article. The working title can be changed to a final title once the article is accepted.

STYLE GUIDE

Please adhere to the most recent edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). English spelling follows the most recent edition of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary.

COPYRIGHT

Articles published by the CJE will be given the Creative Commons Licencing CC BY-NC-ND.