Call for Proposals: Feminist Methods and Community Engagement

Posted by on November 05, 2012

Call for Manuscript Proposals:

“Feminist-infused participatory and action research clarifies the mediated nature of all knowledge construction and exemplifies ‘ways of knowing’ that are frequently absent from mainstream, top-down theory building.”  M.B. Lykes and R. Herschberg

“We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or class; but we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.” — Jane Addams

Participatory action research, social justice, community engagement, service learning – these are just a few of the pedagogical and scholarly traditions currently in vogue.  Within these community-based academic projects, feminist research and solidarity-building stances are foundational, yet often overlooked in programmatic and research design.  This special issue of Feminist Teacher wants to examine this tension the hope of sharing tactics and strategies that can open up new possibilities for students, faculty, administrators and community partners. To this end, we seek contributions that provide project-specific attempts to connect with—or interrupt—community engagement work as a way to generate meaning in the lives of students, faculty, administrators and community partners. In particular, this special issue seeks praxis-oriented, methodological, and/or theoretical explorations of community engagement that can contribute to intersections—and interruptions– between academic communities and the communities in which they reside, as well as between students, teachers and administrators.

In fostering a diverse view across disciplines, we invite contributions that address any of the following kinds of feminist engagement with campus-community partnerships:

·      identifying new directions for feminist administrators, faculty, and students invested in growing community-based engagement efforts as meaningful scholarly, pedagogical, and civic engagements

·      disrupting notions of service learning and community engagement as gendered activities

·      changing definitions and value of feminist community engagement

·      evaluating programs built upon feminist principles of community engagement, including assessment of internal and external stakeholders

·      mentoring student citizen leaders who foster a ground-up rather than top-down approach

·      negotiating the roles of feminist teacher and administrator in developing community engagement initiatives

·      analyzing material conditions that allow feminist community action initiatives to just not survive but thrive

Deadline 500-word proposals:  February 15, 2013

Feedback on proposals:  April 1, 2013

Deadline for manuscripts of 20-30 double-spaced pages:  June 15, 2013

Feedback to contributors:  July 15, 2013

Deadline for revised manuscripts:  Sept. 15, 2013

Abstracts and full manuscripts should follow Feminist Teacher submission guidelines (http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/ft/ftsubmissions.html)

All queries and submissions should be directed to Lee Nickoson (lnickoson@gmail.com)