Call for Papers: Rethinking Education Policy and Methodology in a Post-truth Era

2017-07-12

Call for Papers:

Rethinking Education Policy and Methodology

in a Post-truth Era

Special Topic: Rethinking Education Policy and Methodology in a Post-truth Era, guest-edited by Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Travis M. Marn, Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, and Shaun M. Dougherty.

 

Education Policy Analysis Archives (EPAA/AAPE) announces a call for papers for a special issue exploring education policy and methods in the recent and still oncoming era of post-truths. During this time, many research epistemologies, ontologies, processes, and policy discourses have lost their moorings in T/truth. This unsettling of T/truth, amidst continuously shifting and unstable intersections between policy and methodology, generates challenges and opportunities for scholars to rethink the purpose and value of their work. This special issue offers a space for scholars of education to grapple with education policy and methodology in an era of post-truth.

 

The Trump administration’s election and policy (un)making may mark an unprecedented time in U.S. and global history in which scientists must rethink the political ethics of their scholarly work. They might ask: Should scientists become activists for science and science policy? How should an activist scientist or politically passionate scholar function and act? What role(s) should scientists and research (now) play in educating a civil society and informing policy?

 

Perhaps we are now fully in the ruins of scientifically based research (SBR) in education (Lather, 2013). If the election of Trump was a referendum (Klein, 2016) against centrist liberals and their support for neoliberal policies in education, (e.g., SBR, standardized testing, value added modeling), then scholars may (again) question the role SBR can or should play in education policy-making. Do educational researchers unite under a common arch to advocate for (a return to) SBR or something else not possible or thinkable before the era of post-truths? How have educational researchers been confronted by the new political climate? How has the Trump election and current world politics urged educational researchers to rethink their methodologies, designs, methods, agendas, and the overarching political ethics of their works? What new political and research dilemmas do educational researchers face and how do they position themselves and their scholarship for an uncertain political future? What (new) spaces have opened up for them and what has closed down? What might educational researchers fight for?

 

With these and many other questions faced by education scholars in mind, the purpose of this special issue is to provide authors the opportunity to share their (re)conceptualizations of education research and policy in light of the global rise of right-wing populism, post-truths, and anti-science sentiment. We invite raw, honest, imperfect but immediate, and timely papers from across the educational research community (from [post]positivist to post-post-humanist and everywhere or nowhere in between) addressing (but not limited to) themes such as:

 

* Neoliberalism and scientifically based research

* Activism and educational research

* Rethinking, problematizing how educational research informs policy

* Rethinking data, evidence, and/or fact in education policy-making

* Imaging policy method and methodology to come and become

* Trump election as a productive intervention in thinking policy and research

* Non-traditional ethics of education research and policy

* Alt facts, post-truths, and/or gaslighting in education policy and research

* Reconceptualizing (the onto-ethico-epistemology of) research ethics and validity

* Rethinking research agendas, scholarship, the academy at the time of post-truths

* Researcher identities in an era of post-truth   

* Non-thinkable activist scholarship

* Radical yet ethical public science

Research papers using interdisciplinary or mixed media (images/audio/video clips) formats are highly encouraged.


References

Klein, N. (2016, November 9). It was the Democrat’s embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate

Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What we do in the afterward? International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 6, 634-645. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2013.788753

 

About the Journal: Celebrating its 25th year, EPAA is a peer-reviewed, open-access, international, multilingual, and multidisciplinary journal designed for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and development analysts concerned with education policies. EPAA/AAPE accepts unpublished original manuscripts in English, Spanish and Portuguese without restriction as to conceptual and methodological perspectives, time or place.

 

Submission Information: Those interested in contributing to this special issue should submit a 500-word abstract (including proposed title) by September 15, 2017, to the special issue section, Rethinking Education Policy and Methodology, at http://epaa.asu.edu/ All manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the EPAA website and follow the Journal’s submission guidelines.

 

The guest editors invite original articles of about 6,000 words, as well as viewpoints (brief personal reflections, explorations, or conceptualizations) of 3,000 words. Word limits for original articles and Viewpoints are inclusive of an abstract (maximum 150 words), keywords, citations, footnotes, tables, figures, endnotes and the reference list.

 

Abstract submission deadline: September 15, 2017

Invitations to submit manuscripts: October 15, 2017

Invited article submission deadline: March 15, 2018

Submission of final manuscripts: October 1, 2018

 

Please direct any questions about this special issue to Jennifer R. Wolgemuth, University of South Florida, jrwolgemuth@usf.edu; Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Arizona State University, mirka.koro-ljungberg@asu.edu; Travis M. Marn, University of South Florida, marnt@mail.usf.edu; Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, Sam Houston University and University of Johannesburg, tonyonwuegbuzie@aol.com; or Shaun M. Dougherty, University of Connecticut, shaun.dougherty@uconn.edu