Issue: Fall/Winter 2023

Call for Papers: Fall/Winter 2023 issue

Special Issue: Disability Justice in ECE

Guest Editor: Dr. Maria Karmiris

Submission deadline:  August 1, 2023

In “Disability Justice—a working draft” Patti Berne (2015) invites scholars, researchers and activists to consider the following question: “How do we move together - as people with mixed abilities, multiracial, multi-gendered, mixed class, across the orientation spectrum - where no body/mind is left behind?”

Inspired by the ways in which this question desires new and innovative responses to past and present discriminatory practices, this call for papers seeks to foreground the aims of disability justice (Berne, 2015; Mingus, 2018; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) as integral to enacting social justice within ECE.

This call for papers is also inspired by Souto-Manning’s (2022) recent focus on the indigenous and decolonial scholarship of Eve Tuck (2009) and the ways in which both these scholars convey a desire for transformative praxis that is also found Berne's work draft of disability justice (2015).

In attending to and cultivating the conditions for a multiplicity of counter-stories, the guest editor of the upcoming Fall issue of the peer reviewed section of the eceLINK, join Berne (2015), Souto-Manning (2022) and Tuck (2009) in desiring a transformational approach to research, policy, and practice.

One of the key aims is to disrupt deficit, developmental discourses about embodied differences that limit the possibility to learn with and from each other. Thus, we ask, what happens in ECE when embodied differences, including disabled bodies, are not only embraced but are situated within socio-cultural conditions that ensure their interdependent human thriving and nurturing?

With a focus on desiring embodied differences, one of our aims is to seek papers that are focused on critically examining the conditions through which discriminatory practices such as ableism continue to be sustained through the ongoing hegemony of developmentalist discourses (Mills & LeFrançois, 2018) and practices in ECE. Similarly, we are interested in papers that seek to contribute to new and innovative strategies that seek to contest and confront discriminatory practices while offering strategies to transform ECE policies and practices in a manner that substantively foregrounds inclusion through disability justice. In contesting the notion that disability is a problem that requires the imposition of a solution, disability justice is understood as contesting unjust power imbalances in a manner that applies intersectionality (Berne, 2015; Mingus, 2018; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018) as integral to generating the conditions for inclusive practices.

Therefore, we welcome papers that foreground the application and exploration of concepts from Critical Disability Studies (Goodley, 2018; Goodley, Lawthom, Liddiard & Runswick-Cole, 2020), Mad Studies (LeFrançois, 2020), Critical Autism Studies (Broderick & Roscigno, 2021; McGuire, 2016), DisCrit (Love & Beneke, 2021), Decolonial Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Indigenous Studies, Critical Race Theory, Black Feminist Thought, Queer Theory, Crip Theory, Post-structural feminisms, and/or Posthumanisms.

Some questions that potential contributors might consider are:

What kinds of stories in ECE offer opportunities to contest and question the hegemony of developmental discourses?

How might disability, including the experiences and knowledges of disabled children and adults be foregrounded in seeking inclusive and interdependent practices in ECE?

What are ways in which ECEs can continue to critically examine and context discriminatory practices that sustain racism, classism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy in ECE contexts?

How might we cultivate the conditions for mutually supportive networks that work in distinct yet linked ways to transform exclusionary and discriminatory ECE practices into inclusive, equitable and diverse practices?

What is the degree to which spaces exist, within programs, communities and a social infrastructure, for early childhood educators who live with disability? What might other possibilities be?

References

Berne, P. (2015). Disability justice – a working draft by Patty Berne.

Broderick, A. A., & Roscigno, R. (2021). Autism, Inc.: The autism industrial complex. Journal of Disability Studies in Education, 2(1), 77-101.

Goodley, D. (2018). The Dis/ability complex. DiGeSt. Journal of Diversity and Gender Studies, 5(1), 5-22.

Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Liddiard, K., & Runswick-Cole-Cole, K. (2020). The Desire for New Humanisms. Journal of Disability Studies in Education, 1, 1-20.

LeFrançois, B. A. (2020). Psychiatrising children. In Exploring childhood and youth (pp. 177-190). Routledge.

Love, H. R., & Beneke, M. R. (2021). Pursuing justice-driven inclusive education research: Disability critical race theory (DisCrit) in early childhood. Topics in Early Childhood Special Education, 41(1), 31-44.

McGuire, A. (2016). War on autism: On the cultural logic of normative violence. University of Michigan Press.

Mingus, M. (2018). “Disability Justice” is Simply Another Term for Love | Leaving Evidence (wordpress.com)

Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care work: Dreaming disability justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.

Souto-Manning, M. (2022). A call for a moratorium on damage-centered early childhood teacher education: Envisioning just futures for our profession. Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education, 43(2), 213-235.

Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending damage: A letter to communities. Harvard educational review, 79(3), 409-428.

Please email submissions to: [email protected]

Download Full Call for Papers and Submission Guidelines

Aims and Scope of the Peer Reviewed Section

• Centre the voices/lived experiences of ECEs in the knowledge production process.
• Create a space for ECE professionals and allies to critically engage with contemporary pedagogy, policy and practice issues in the ECE sector (and beyond):
  • What are the current limitations of ways of knowing and being an early childhood educator in our sector?
  • How might ideas about children, childhood, education, educators, parents and families (beyond developmentalism) create space for new possibilities in the ECE?
  • We encourage submissions to trouble existing power relations at the interpersonal, community, state and global level.
• Contribute to building a community of scholars committed to positioning ECE pedagogy and practice as deeply ethical and political: 
  • Recognizing the AECEO’s unique space as an organization dedicated to building the collective voice of ECEs, we understand this publication as a venue for generating dialogue from perspectives that disrupt what already is.
  • New ways of conceptualizing professional practice, children, care, and individuals (and relations) involved in ECE through critical theory, cultural studies, and deconstructionist (and reconstructionist) lenses.

Understanding the eceLINK as contributing to the overall role of the AECEO in advocacy and activism, we seek articles that:

• Conceptualize pedagogy, curriculum, and relationships as work that disrupts existing systems of capitalism, developmentalism, neoliberalism, and ongoing settler colonialism.
• Position the sharing of robust, collegially-reviewed articles as a strategy to deepen the richness, creativity, and political power held through lived knowledges in the field.
• Embrace the sharing of peer-reviewed articles as an opportunity to build allies.

Peer Review Process

Manuscripts submitted undergo a rigorous peer review. Two peer reviewers who have or are working towards a PhD in early childhood studies or a related discipline provide a detailed assessment of the manuscript based on the following criteria: relevancy of subject, writing style, interest level for AECEO-eceLINK readers, organization, and presentation of ideas/research.

Possible outcomes of the peer review process are:

• accepted for publication with no revisions
• accepted for publication with minor revisions
• invited to resubmit the manuscript with accompanying document showing how feedback has been addressed. When resubmitted, the manuscript will be accepted or rejected
• rejected

Manuscript Guidelines

Form and Style

Style should be consistent with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th Edition). The journal uses Canadian spelling; please consult the Oxford Canadian Dictionary.

• All citations must contain DOI information where relevant.
• An abstract should be included at the start of the manuscript and not exceed 100 words.
• 4-5 keywords that represent the content of the article should be included following the abstract.
• Footnotes should not be used. We prefer that endnotes be avoided, but if you find it necessary to include them, please use the Insert Endnote function in Microsoft Word to insert them into your text rather than typing the numbers manually. This will ensure that your endnotes do not get lost in the journal's copyediting process.
• Manuscripts must be 5000-7000 words
• In order to enable blind review, manuscripts must be anonymized.  No author information should be included in the manuscript.
• When using names of children in your article, please use pseudonyms and advise us that you have done so.
• Please use Times New Roman 12-point font and do not use any special formatting or styles.
• Articles should be submitted in Microsoft Word format as per the submission instructions below.

Acceptance and Publication