Call for Papers

Issue #58: Freedom is a Daily Practice

Critical human geographer Ruthie Gilmore asserts in an interview that “freedom is a place that means we make it, and we make it again, we make it in all these different configurations” (Gilmore et al., 2024, p. 10). In issue 58 of the Occasional Paper Series, we want to learn how people and communities cultivate and grow spaces and places of freedom to support students, teachers, and communities in challenging, if not deadly, times of polycrisis. By “practices of freedom,” we mean the small, yet fully intentional and measured, recurring acts through which young people, teachers, community educators, elders, and families create, care, resist, imagine, and cultivate relations in ways that prioritize healing, solidarity, and communal care.

These do not need to be exceptional, grand gestures. They may be kitchen-table conversations, recipes passed on to the next generation, and the songs and rituals that acknowledge the beauty, strengths, and histories of people and their communities. They are the ways teachers and community leaders lift up community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005)—the strengths, knowledge, histories, and resources already present in their communities—and embody what they have learned about freedom as a daily practice. These expressions of freedom can happen in the in-between spaces of institutions, often without being named as freedom at all.

We hope to connect what happens in schools, libraries, community spaces, and nature with the experiences of everyday life. Practices of freedom emerge when people teach and learn beyond what is scripted or expected. They appear when care becomes an act of courage and self-determination, and when art, joy, rest, and play are valued for their own sake.

As many communities confront violence, exclusion, discrimination, censorship, displacement, and ongoing threats to their survival, rights, opportunities, visibility, and self-determination, sharing our practices of freedom has become increasingly urgent. The pressure to conform and to preemptively comply with policies, mandates, and narratives that constrain expression, memory, identity, and belonging leaves little room to breathe, let alone dream. In response, moving with deliberateness and intentionality to preserve identity, values, traditions, and collective memory becomes an expression of humanity and remembrance. These everyday acts of care, accountability, creativity, cultural continuity, and collective learning are not an escape from the realities of violence, erasure, dispossession, and oppression. They are active and willful commitments to protect what is important, sustain communities, and create more livable futures for generations to come. This special issue invites contributors to identify, name, amplify, and share these practices of freedom—to “(re)member the things we have learned to forget” (Dillard, 2012)—so that others may recognize in them forms of resistance, survival, and possibility they may have always practiced, but never called “freedom as a daily practice.”

We are especially interested in submissions that document, archive, analyze, reflect on, disseminate, or creatively represent practices of freedom in ways that offer insight, wonderings, truth-tellings, but also warnings, for educators, communities, and broader public audiences. We are seeking manuscripts with a maximum length of 5,000 words—narratives, essays, empirical or theoretical research—as well as short films, audio essays, photo essays, and small-scale artistic works. Examples might include creative expressions such as recipes, knitting patterns, family stories, songs, poems, communal cooking practices, photo essays, playlists (public Spotify or YouTube links). Creative expressions must include a reflection of at least 500 words.

We invite submissions from students, teachers, educators, activists, artists, caregivers, librarians, and community members. We especially welcome contributions that highlight diverse perspectives and bring together more than one voice, generation, or form. We welcome collaborative ideas—especially those that bring together desires and visions from across different spaces: schools, libraries, nature, spirituality, community centers, activist hubs and networks, and/or youth organizations.

Questions and grapplings we invite authors to address include, but are not limited to:

• What are some everyday practices, collective experiments, and rehearsals through which people and communities create, sustain, and protect spaces of freedom?
• Within and beyond schools, how are teachers, students, families, artists, organizers, and communities fostering curiosity, cultural expression, creativity, critical inquiry, care, joy, and imagination?
• Who and what have taught us about freedom, and how are those lessons, histories, languages, cultural knowledges, and practices passed across generations?
• What relationships, rituals, forms of collective care, and everyday acts help sustain dignity, belonging, possibility, and collective well-being during socially and politically challenging times?
• What can educators and communities learn from practices of freedom found in homes, libraries, community spaces, cultural traditions, the natural world, and intergenerational relationships?
• How are marginalized communities reimagining freedom, access, participation, belonging, and collective liberation, and what are the possibilities and limitations of freedom as a framework for social change?
• When does the language of freedom fall short? What other values, commitments, or ways of being together are necessary for collective flourishing and liberation?

Only unpublished materials that are not currently under review by other publications will be considered for evaluation. For further information or to discuss your concepts, please contact guest editors Mayida Zaal at zaalm@montclair.edu, Patricia Krueger-Henney at patricia.krueger@umb.edu, and Carla Shalaby at cshalaby@gmail.com.

Manuscripts Due: December 1, 2026

Submission Guidelines

References

• Dillard, C. B. (2012). Learning to (re)member the things we’ve learned to forget: Endarkened feminisms, spirituality, and the sacred nature of research and teaching. New York, New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
• Gilmore, R. W., Antipon, L. C., Alves, C. N., & Novo, M. F. (2024). Freedom is a place: Ruth Wilson Gilmore and abolition geography. Geousp, 28(1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2179-0892.geousp.2024.222824
• Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69-91.

Issue #57: Education for Democratic Participation Across Places, Cultures, and Peoples

Since the establishment of a free, universal public education system in the 19th century, one of the primary purposes espoused for public schools in the US—as in many other nations—has been to prepare students for citizenship in a democracy. Thus, the Bank Street Occasional Paper Series is launching a timely new issue, #57, to help take stock, assess, and chart a way forward for the relationship between education and democracy. This special issue invites educators, researchers, and policy makers to reflect on how they understand the relationship between education and democracy in this moment, the status of that relationship across different contexts and countries, and how we might imagine this relationship anew.

 Over the last several decades in the US and beyond, student, educator, and school success have been measured mostly via math and reading standardized tests, shifting time and focus away from subjects such as social studies, history, and civics. At the same time, publishers have withdrawn many social studies and civic education curricula from the market, resulting in “teachers are shying away from lessons that were once uncontroversial, on topics as basic as constitutional limits on executive power”(Goldstein, 2025). 

As many teachers have long understood, these evaporating social studies curricula, while essential, are not alone enough to prepare students to live democratically. Across time and place, educators have worked to make sense of the role of schools in sustaining public life. Bank Street founder Lucy Sprague Mitchell emphasized learning through democratic habits of inquiry embedded in everyday communities (Grinberg, 2005). As stated in the Bank Street credo, Mitchell centered “striving to live democratically, in and out of schools, as the best way to advance our concept of democracy.” Mitchell knew what so many educators and scholars of democracy have noted since: To prepare students for citizenship, schools must go “beyond teaching subject-matter content to develop students’ capacities to understand different perspectives, communicate their understandings to other people, and engage in the give-and-take of moral argument” (Gutmann and Thompson, 1996; p. 359).

Grounded in these longstanding commitments, with an appreciation for educator agency and a keen awareness of the fragility of democracy in the US and beyond in the current moment, this special issue seeks papers that explore and question the relationship between education and democracy past, present and  future, across national and state boundaries and from multiple angles—from schools and classrooms to school boards and capitals.

We are seeking essays and manuscripts with a maximum length of 5,000 words as well as short films, audio essays, photo essays, and small-scale artistic works. Issues addressed might include, but are not limited to:

• The relationship between democracy and within-classroom practices and pedagogical strategies
• What education for democracy looks like in early childhood education
• The role of community in how we think about democracy in education
• Explorations of how education and democracy have been conceptualized across different eras, social contexts, communities and identities
• Studies of schools and communities that have maintained a focus on democratic learning amid anti-democratic policies
• Historical analysis of education policies that have supported or compromised educators ability to prepare students for democracy
• Examinations of how civics learning evolves beyond the classroom (e.g., after-school learning, community-based learning, etc.)

Only unpublished materials that are not currently under review by other publications will be considered for evaluation. For further information or to discuss your concepts, please contact guest editors José Vilson, Postdoctoral Fellow, Public Engagement and Research Initiative (PERI), Bank Street College of Education; Amy Stuart Wells, Chief Research Officer, Bank Street College of Education, and Director of PERI; and Xinyu Pan, Postdoctoral Fellow, PERI, Bank Street College of Education, at peri@bankstreet.edu. 

Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2026

Submission Guidelines

References

• Goldstein, D. (October 27, 2025) “How Politics Is Changing the Way History Is Taught.” The New York Times
• Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (1996) Democracy and Disagreement: Why Moral Conflict Cannot be Avoided in Politics, and What Should be Done About It. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; p. 359
• Schwartz, S. (May 03, 2023). “History Achievement Falls to 1990s Levels on NAEP; Civics Scores Take First-Ever Dive.” Education Week