Please share with interested colleagues our call for papers for a special collection to be published by the International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education.

Submission details and guidelines are available here.

Our societies face enormous economic, demographic, political, ecological, and social challenges. In this environment of uncertainty, doubts about the future of higher education have proliferated, particularly as demographic changes take hold, technology rapidly advances, wealth inequality increases, and climate destabilizes. In the face of these challenges, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many have argued the time is right to not only tinker with the status quo, but to imagine otherwise, to imagine alternative higher education futures that are more hopeful, more equitable, and more just.

This collection invites prospective authors to turn towards reimagining the futures of education, and to contribute scholarship that speculates what higher education at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology could look like.

This is not a call for papers grounded in technological solutionism or technological determinism. The educational technology literature is replete with papers which are optimistic about the possibilities of technology. Rather, this call invites writing that imagines higher education and its practices otherwise, writing that engages the imagination from diverse and justice-oriented perspectives. In Houlden and Veletsianos (2022), for example, we noted that hopeful futures are shaped by themes such as “connection, agency and community and individual flourishment” and we have suggested that “hopepunk, solarpunk, and visionary fiction” can serve “as models of storytelling grounded in hope which imagines more liberatory education and learning futures.”

We are especially interested in scholarship that engages critically with educational technology issues while resisting oppression and despair; scholarship that begins with the ongoing undoing of colonial, racist, ableist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist structures of power; and scholarship that invites hope as a practice of change and not as a return to an idealized past.

This collection is open to diverse forms of research and scholarship, including empirical, theoretical, speculative, and anything in-between.

Topics of interest include higher education futures at the intersection of justice, hope, and educational technology that engage with

  • Speculative methods and pedagogies
  • Indigenous, Black, Queer, and (Dis)ability issues and methods
  • Reimagining technology in higher education
  • Co-creation with learners and/or other communities
  • Local and contextual realities

Research questions of interest may include but are not limited to

  • What does the intersection of hope, justice, and educational technology look like, or ought to look like?
  • How do current education systems need to transform to enable just and hopeful education futures?
  • How can we understand hope and justice in the context of higher education futures?
  • What is the role of hope and justice in imagining diverse education futures?
  • What are the roles and limits of technology in desirable, just, and hopeful higher education futures?
  • In what ways are hopeful and/or just technology-infused higher education futures similar or different across contexts?
  • How can hopeful futures be enacted beyond envisioning in higher education systems? For example, how might speculative futures scholarship address problems higher education faces today?
  • What do hopeful, speculative futures approaches reveal about current contexts and future orientations for higher education practices and policies?
  • What methods might be used to support generative higher education futures that are at the intersection of hope, justice, and educational technology?
  • What might empirical approaches to such futures look like within higher education settings?
  • Whose voices and perspectives are made explicit in generating hopeful educational futures, and how?

 

Houlden, S., & Veletsianos, G. (2022). Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00348-7

 

Call opens: May 1, 2023

Call closes: October 31, 2023

Guest editors: 
George Veletsianos, Royal Roads University, Canada
Shandell Houlden, Royal Roads University, Canada
Jen Ross, University of Edinburgh, UK
Sakinah Alhadad, Griffith University, Australia
Camille Dickson-Deane, University of Technology Sydney, Australia