Call for submissions: Feminist Pedagogy Special Issue: Pedagogies of Peace: Witnessing, Dialogue, and Collective Healing. Deadline: 8 January 2024 abstract; 26 February 2024 full paper.
Special Issue Editor: Caitlin Marie Miles (Denison University, USA).
In the last 20-25 years, our social and political worlds have been marked by a saturation of ongoing political, state-sanctioned, and extrajudicial violence, made all the more visible and palpable by the 24hr news cycle, live streaming, and ubiquity of social networking platforms. The lingering traumas and resultant violences from 9/11, U.S. invasion of Iraq, police killing of unarmed black men and women, civil war in Syria and Yemen, famine in the horn of Africa, coup-attempts stretching across the globe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, humanitarian crisis in Gaza and October 7th attacks, ethnic cleansing in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in addition to other forms of structural violence that increasingly make “life” untenable for many of our most vulnerable neighbors. While these conflicts of the last two decades are certainly bound up in a globally intertwined military-industrial complex, they each resonate with us, our students, our campuses, and classrooms in unique and contingent ways. Moreover, while contending with the traumas of witnessing and experiencing these violences, we must find ways to center peace, dialogue, and community-centered forms of catharsis so as not to perpetuate the normalcy and ontology of war.
With this in mind, this special issue invites critical commentaries (1,000-1,200 words) and teaching/classroom strategies (1,500 – 2,500 words), which may include topics such as:
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Teaching about and discussing political violence such as police brutality, war, ethnic cleansing/genocide, terrorism, and other forms of violence in ways that consider intersecting identities and positionality
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Witnessing as a means of trauma-informed pedagogy and community-building in the classroom
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Approaches to cultivating safe and brave classroom spaces when critically analyzing of complex, intertwined, and politically controversial conflicts
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Centering stories and narratives of empowerment, peace, arts, and culture of communities and places stereotyped as violent in mainstream discourses
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Strategies for connecting urgent and pressing current events to our various course themes
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Media-making, journaling, and other forms of creative expression that foster understanding, catharsis, and/or healing
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The role of setting ground rules and obtaining consent in class discussions on political/politicized violence
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Reflections on successes AND failures in teaching and discussing violent, potentially traumatic, and/or triggering topics
Also of interest are Media Reviews of educational resources and documentaries useful for teaching on these subjects (500-1,000 words). They ask that media criticism be constructive in nature and largely positive. Reviews should note the scope and purpose of the work and its usefulness to educators. They are particularly interested in reviews that detail ways to use the media as a teaching tool.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 