International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal Special Issue
reconceptualizing Early childhood education: turning to hope, making sanctuary

Editors: Janice Kroeger and Iris Berger

Janice Kroeger, acknowledges the lake Erie watershed, the stolen lands upon which she currently lives and works as the ancestral home of the Lenape, Cayuga, and the Tuscarawas people, as well as many others across time, including the Mingo, Kickapoo, Shawnee, Erie, and on ... 

Iris Berger, acknowledges the land on which her study and work take place as the unceded (not surrendered) territory of the Musqueam people who have lived in the Fraser River estuary, including much ofVancouver, for thousands of years.

About the Special Issue:

The geo-politics of late capitalism, including wars, migration, pollution, extreme weather events, and the persistent effects of colonialism have created a precarious future for childhoods and the 'earthly communities of life' (Abram, 2020). As we learn 'to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth' (Haraway, 2016), we, in this volume/collection, acknowledge grief and despondency, while turning to hope (and reconciliation(s)) as a speculative gesture to the possibility that things can be otherwise. We ask how might we do early childhood education in the messiness (and tragedies) of this moment? We highlight movements, doings and undoings, which reconcile justice with childhood in its entanglement with the world by collectively (re)thinking, (re)configuring and (re)conceptualizing early childhood education now, a time of heavy childhoods, without dragging children through the muck. 

Even within rampant consumerism and divisive politics which ultimately shape and contour the practices of educators and opportunities for young children, we are curious about (enlivened by) how others are seeing-and-doing-hope filled-encounters with children in and outside classrooms. In this collection, we grapple with presence, staying present with "the trouble" and not-yet-known futures for justice (or making spaces for justice-yet-to-come). What would acting from where we are be when hope wrestles with despair? Hope in this sense is not naive but an active stance, a doing ... a hope "that enacts the stand" of the assemblage which "actively struggles against the evidence in order to change the deadly tides" (West, 1997; 2011). Hope is also how conceptual and pedagogic come together addressing a seeing-beyond the "consequences of neoliberalism" in ethical and inclusive spaces (Iorio, Parnell, Quintero & Hamm, p. 300, in Bloch, Swadener & Cannella, 2018). 

Post-human thinking concedes to the discursive and material violences impacting the lives of diverse people, often seeing those at the most marginal positions receiving the brunt of nation state failures (as terrified and terrorized immigrants, indigenous peoples, refugees, language minority groups, gender-diverse/queer and other undervalued groups). Yet, we witnessed educators "making sanctuary" (Akomloafe, 2019) even within the injustices of structural and contributory constraints or the totalizing ways that we encounter post-human concerns. We strive for capacity in our thinking to engage hope(full), care(full), and mind(full) practice in early education, recognizing post-human capacities for answerability even while understanding and appreciating the multiple and often competing demands imposed within the standardized time-space of educators and researchers lives and work (Kroeger & Widrig, 2023). 

In this volume we take a decree of hope, selecting authors and contributors who think/value: 

• Thinking beyond nationalism(s) and how this kind of thinking (with place) is related to hope in terms of healing, reconciling purposes (within/out) of colonized statuses (Kroeger & Widrig, 2023). 
• Indigenous education, with actors who rekindle, revitalize, and relearn/invent wise pre-modern and post-modern ways of doing and being to educate in a post­anthropocentric childhood (Simpson, 2014; Todd, 2016). 
• Nature, land based, and outdoor early educational approaches which are revitalizing habitats in-and-out-of-classroom spaces with inquiry opportunities that reject/accept/reconcile post-consumerism, griefs, or the manufactured crisis of early school readiness.
• Demonstrating hope in the fact(s) of rightwing conservatism that attempts to rearrange the world in ways that omit (villainize) rather than honor the perspectives of children in/as undervalued categories (emergent translinguists, non-verbal and differently-(dis)abled children, gender-diverse children). 
• Hope that is above, below, and with/in either the individual or the notions of afterlife (indigenous ideas suggest that the afterlife is to be striven for and understood in relation to the present/presence). 
• Existing with a slowness, even stillness-awareness of post-activism (Akomloafe, 2020) while "making sanctuary" - thinking beyond the walls and wars, finding the cracks - "disrupting the exclusivity of human agency" - to witness an opening to a world that is livable for our children, ourselves, and our multi-species kin (Haraway, 2008).

Timeline: Forthcoming

Submission Instructions
Please be in touch with Janice Kroeger and Iris Berger (guest editors) if you would like to contribute to or be considered for this collection in the International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal.  

Please contact the journal editor with additional questions or ideas for other special issues: Professor Emerita Marianne Bloch. 

References
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press. ISBN-100822363194

Akomloafe, B. (2019, March 15). Making Sanctuary: Hope, Companionship, Race and Emergence in the Anthropocene. Keynote Speech, 'Seeking Connections Across Generations' for Spiritual Directors International at the Seattle Marriott Bellevue. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/making-sanctuary-hope-companionship-raceand-emergence-in-the-anthropocene

Akomloafe, B. (2020, November 13). What I Mean By Postactivism. Blog post. https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/what-i-mean-by-postactivism

Abram, D. (2020). In the ground of our unknowing. Emergence Magazine, 7. https: // emergencemagazine.org/ essay/in-the-ground-of-our-unknowing/

Haraway, J. Donna (2008). When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press.

Haraway, J. Donna (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780

Iorio, J.M., Parnell, W. Quintero,E. P. & Hamm, C. (2018). Early Childhood Teacher Educator as Public Intellectual. In Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and Care-A Reader: Critical Questions, New Imaginaries & Social Activism. In Bloch, Mirriam, M. Swadener, Beth Blue, & Gaile Cannella (Editors). pp. 299-312.

Kroeger, J. & Widrig, C. (2023). Not as strange as dying: Reimagining North American practices in early childhood social studies as place-based and decolonialized. In Be(com)ing Stange(r ): Towards a Posthumanist Social Studies (Editors, Bretton A. Varga, Timothy Montreal, & Rebecca C. Christ). Teachers College Press. 

Weigel, M. (2019, June 20). Feminist cyborg scholar Donna Haraway: 'The disorder of our era isn't necessary.' The Guardian https:f/www.theguardian.com/world/2019/junl2o/donna-haraway-interviewcyborg-manifesto-post-truth

Latour, Bruno. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in New Climatic Regime. Polity Press.

Simpson, L. B. (2014). Land as pedagogy: Nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(3).

Todd, Z. (2016). An indigenous feminist's take on the ontological turn: 'Ontology' is just another word for colonialism. Journal of Historical Sociology, 29(1), 4-22.

West, Cornell (n.d.). Hope and Optimism: Love and Loss. Master Class. https: //www.masterclass.com/ classes/ cornel-west-teaches-philosophy/ chapters/hopeand-optimism-love-and-loss

West, C., & Ehrenberg, J. (2011). Left Matters: An Interview with Cornel West. New Political Science, 33(3), 357-369. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2011.592023