ISSN: 2053-4272
Issue 40 Call for Contributors
Development Education and Class
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Deadline for abstract submissions is Friday, 27 September 2024
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Deadline for article submissions is Friday, 6 December 2024
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Publication date is Spring 2025
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
Policy and Practice is a peer reviewed, bi-annual, open access journal published by the Centre for Global Education, a non-governmental development organisation based in Belfast. First published in 2005, Policy and Practice aims to provide a space for development education (DE) practitioners to critically reflect on their practice, discuss the main challenges faced by the sector and debate new policy developments. Development education uses an active learning, participative approach to education that addresses the root causes of poverty and injustice and seeks to enable learners to take action toward positive social change. It draws upon Paulo Freire's concept of praxis that combines reflection and action to support a meaningful intervention in reality. Policy and Practice aims to: share new research in development education; celebrate and promote good practice in DE; enhance collaboration between development education and related adjectival education sectors; further mainstream development education within the statutory education sector in Ireland; and provide opportunities for exchange and debate between educators from the global North and South.
Policy and Practice has a designated website (www.developmenteducationreview.com) which contains an archive of all previous 36 issues which are available for viewing online and for downloading. The journal is listed on Scopus (H-Index 2) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). In 2023, the Policy and Practice web site received 149,435 unique visits from countries in the global North and South. Policy and Practice articles have generated 4,827 citations that have appeared in 671 journals, 385 books and 428 dissertations.
ABOUT THE THEME
The Centre for Global Education is inviting contributions to Issue 40 of our bi-annual, peer reviewed, open access journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review on the theme: Development Education and Class. As the Joseph Rowntree Foundation argues ‘social class and processes of class reproduction remain important, particularly for the continuity of poverty over time and across generations’. And so it is remarkable that that such an important determinant of poverty and inequality is largely absent from development education discourse, particularly the role played by education in maintaining privilege, wealth and elitism. As Elizabeth Meade argued in Issue 38 of Policy and Practice: ‘A lack of conscientisation around class, as a crucial concept for understanding growing inequality under neoliberalism and capitalism more generally, leaves an epistemic gap that can be exploited by far right discourse’. Culture wars that conflate migration with economic inequality have been effectively used by far-right platforms across Europe to advance nativist and populist views and secure electoral traction.
One of the dominant narratives of neoliberalism is its claim to enlarge individual opportunities and freedoms, and to reward enterprise and innovation. And those who fail to prosper in this system are the ‘undeserving poor’, whose individual behaviours, fecklessness or moral failings are the main causes of their own poverty. The focus on individual failings, like the ‘othering’ of migrants, is a distraction from the chaotic crisis-prone neoliberal system that unraveled so spectacularly in 2008. The austerity-driven response to this crisis was to target the working-class hardest through wage suppression, cuts to public services and attacks on welfare spending. Just as George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier was ‘horrified and amazed’ to find men ‘ashamed of being unemployed’ (1937: 76) so welfare services today can negatively stereotype and stigmatise those experiencing poverty. Social class and how we start out in life remains a key factor in shaping our access to education, housing, employment, and cultural and leisure activities. A survey carried out across European OECD countries found that children with the greatest socio-economic disadvantages grow up to earn as much as 20 percent less as adults than those with more favourable childhoods. The same survey found strong support for measures that could improve social mobility such as increasing taxes on top earners, expanding benefits for low-income households, and introducing or increasing the minimum wage. These are the kind of interventionist measures that have been abandoned by governments in the period of neoliberalism together with a hostility toward the trade union movement and the right to take industrial action. Trade unions provide a strong space where the structural causes of poverty remain at the forefront of conversations and represent an important corrective to the attempts by neoliberal governments to blame migrants for our economic ills.
In a recent speech to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, President Michael D. Higgins commended trade unions for ‘providing a strong voice in support of universalism [and] a strong welfare state’. He added that ‘Membership of a trade union has secured and protected the irreducible right to dignity in the workplace and in our society, ever more important in changing economic conditions globally and locally’. However, he noted that membership of trade unions in Ireland is in decline with only a quarter of the workforce affiliated to trade unions, compared to 91 percent in Iceland, 81 percent in Cuba and 67 percent in Denmark. Trade unions are not only a vital form of worker representation in the workplace through collective bargaining but an important source of class consciousness and worker education. These were the factors that led Margaret Thatcher, as part of her neoliberal project in Britain, to quash the trade unions when she came into office and introduce a spate of anti-union laws. This issue of Policy and Practice is a reminder that social class is a strikingly neglected issue in the development education sector despite its much vaunted aim ‘to tackle the root causes of injustice and inequality’. The connection between class and inequality should be fertile ground for development educators yet it remains one of the sector’s deafening silences. We have an opportunity to correct that in this issue of the journal. Authors are invited to consider submitting contributions to Issue 40 of Policy and Practice that address one or more of the following:
- The role of trade unions in asserting class identity, protecting workers’ rights and delivering work-based education. How could the development education and trade union sectors more effectively collaborate in combatting the myths and stereotypes of neoliberalism?
- The role of private schools as progenitors of entitlement and re-producers of class privilege.
- Drawing on Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, discuss how class intersects with race and gender to perpetuate inequalities, and / or discuss the use of intersectional approaches in development education.
- The role of climate heating in increasing the vulnerability of working-class communities in the global North and South.
- Social class as a determinant of educational attainment and social privilege. How can the cycle of private education as a means toward maintaining privilege, wealth and opportunity be interrupted?
- Neoliberalism and the concept of meritocracy as a bulwark to class inequality.
- Reconceptualising class and its role in late Fascism, countering the ‘pseudo-class’ discourse deployed by the far right as a supplement to racism and nationalism, as suggested by Alberto Toscano in ‘Late Fascism’ (2023).
- How can the development education sector introduce the concept of class into its public engagement work, peer education activities and advocacy strategies?
- The use of university rankings to maintain educational elitism in higher education.
Authors interested in submitting an article to Issue 40 should send a completed abstract submission form to journal editor, Stephen McCloskey, by Friday, 27 September 2024. Please email: stephen@centreforglobaleducation.com. The submission date for commissioned articles is Friday, 6 December 2024.
Article Types
There are four kinds of article published in Policy and Practice.
- Focus articles are peer reviewed, between 5,000 and 6,000 words, and should have a strong critical and theoretical analysis of their topic.
- Perspectives articles which are 3,000 – 5,000 words in length and more descriptive, addressing an aspect of development education practice.
- Viewpoint articles which are 2,000 – 4,000 words in length and opinion pieces on burning issues related to DE policy and practice.
- Review articles are 1,000-2,000 words in length and offer an opinion of a new book, film, teaching resource or online site on development issues.
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Policy and Practice is funded by Irish Aid.
This document has been published as part of a development education project funded by Irish Aid at the Department of Foreign Affairs. Irish Aid is the Government’s overseas development programme which supports partners working in some of the world’s poorest countries. Irish Aid also supports global citizenship and development education in Ireland to encourage learning and public engagement with global issues. The ideas, opinions and comments herein are entirely the responsibility of the Centre for Global Education and do not necessarily represent or reflect DFA policy
For further information contact:
Stephen McCloskey
Editor
Centre for Global Education
9 University Street
Belfast BT7 1FY
Tel: (0044) 2890 241879
E-mail: stephen@centreforglobaleducation.com
Web: www.centreforglobaleducation.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/centreforglobaleducation
X: @GCEDevEdReview
www.developmenteducationreview.com
July 2024