Picturing Care: Re-framing Gender, Race, and Educational Justice

This special issue aims to advance the critical scholarship on carework and care injustice through visual and arts-based educational research. In a time of neoliberal accountability culture, school caring practices are being sidelined, while images of school success and failure are mainly messaged through the display of quantitative assessments—charts, tables, graphs, and statistics. Multi-modal and image-based research can provide tools for reframing discourses on school spaces, activities, and interactions, including care.  Such research can also speak to broader publics and provide a powerful platform for resistance. Taking up Mirzoeff’s (2011) theory of “countervisuality,” this special issue aims to challenge dominant dehumanizing discourses on school settings and populations, and to engage the imaginative and documentary work of picturing care—the multifaceted and largely invisible “healing justice” (Ginwright 2016) and caring work that shapes school life, rhythms, relationships, and “radical possibilities” (Anyon 2005) in education.

We seek submissions that use visual, digital and arts-based forms, such as photography, painting, portraiture, drawing and collage, mixed media, video, performance, sound, poetry and theater as a means of knowledge production, where these approaches are central to data collection, interpretation, and representation.  Research that utilizes traditional methods but is disseminated through alternative visual forms and media in order to make research more accessible and useful beyond the academy will also be considered.

Themes

We seek submissions that take up the following topics and themes:

• Work that troubles or complicates dominant White feminized images of school and family care,
• Youth caring practices,
• Culturally relevant care,
• Models and images of carework rooted in non-Western and/or indigenous cultures/ contexts,
• Decolonizing practices,
• Care and the Movement for Black Lives,
• Carework and worlds of boys and men, etc.

All submissions should speak to the role that visual methods or the arts will play in the articulation of the topics/ themes/ theories.  We invite authors/makers across the globe to submit abstracts and are especially looking for authors/makers from underrepresented and marginalized groups.  We ask that proposals include the following:

• A title and abstract of 350 words
• Details about the author’s/maker’s context: Geography (US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, etc; Urban, suburban, rural);
• Links or attachments with example of visual media if used.
• Please note: the journal can only accept hi-resolution still images and the online format must mirror the print publication. However, please feel free to include links to sound work, video, or other multimedia projects.

Abstracts are due by 1 October 2017. Please send abstracts and inquiries to Victoria Restler (vrestler@gradcenter.cuny.edu) or Wendy Luttrell (wluttrell@gc.cuny.edu). Please note that selected authors will be invited, on the strength of their abstract, to submit a full-length manuscript by 15 January 2018.

References

Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement. New York: Routledge.

Ginwright, S. A. (2016). Hope and healing in urban education: How urban activists and teachers are reclaiming matters of the heart. New York: Routledge.

Top of Form

Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.