New Imaginaries of Hope: Responding to the (Difficult) Conditions of our Times
“Hope is not at the expense of struggle but animates a struggle”
~ Sara Ahmed, 2017
“Either pedagogy—like all the human sciences—is remade, reconstructed and updated based on the new conditions of the times, or it loses its nature, its function, its proper capacity to correspond to the times it lives in, and above all to foresee, anticipate and prepare the days of tomorrow”
~ Malaguzzi (as cited in Cagliari et al., 2016, p. 143)
As Ahmed (2017) and Malaguzzi (2016) counsel, responding to the (difficult) conditions of our time entails turning toward and grappling with the specificities of our contemporaneity. As an editorial collective, we are committed to activating change in early childhood education. Through thinking together, composing questions and responses, co-creating alternative narratives and futures for children, childhoods, human beings and all our relations, including more-than-human entities, in this call for papers, we invite authors to share their responses to difficult questions, such as,
How might we, as early childhood students, educators, and researchers
- not only foresee and anticipate but prepare for the days of tomorrow?
- confront the injustice, dismissal of law, political corruption, dehumanization, cruelty and genocides often carried out with rising far-right ideologies?
- resist turning away along with the desire to preserve ‘childhood innocence’ – leaning into the struggle of enacting minor gestures (Manning, 2016) of hope?
Through this call, we are committed to activating conditions for lively engagements and storying that might seep into, flood and infiltrate our thinking and doing toward the enactment of new pedagogies of radical hope. We invite submissions of iterations, projects, and imaginaries that constitute minor gestures of hope within moments of daily living together.
We offer these provocations as a starting point for new ways of imagining…
- What new pedagogies of hope might offer early childhood educators grappling with the current socio-political crisis?
- How might we courageously turn toward and not away from current injustices, as refusals of whitewashing discourses that negate the diverse social, cultural, economic and political realities that many children live in?
- What might it mean to stay tethered to these current conditions, whilst also standing against it?
- What projects, practices, and encounters might orient us towards a future, whilst also holding our past and present realities?
- What ‘minor gestures’ might activate a presencing of hope?
- How might we become aware of and embody a sense of hopefulness as a resistance movement, and a capacity to correspond to these times and within these present currents of hopelessness?
We invite submissions from:
- Current and former early childhood education students
- Early childhood educator instructors
- Practicing educators and teachers
- Early childhood researchers
We welcome individual and collaborative innovative, creative, and multimodal project proposals and/or paper proposals that portray situated stories of hope, resilience, resistance, and reimagining.
Submission and Publication Timeline:
- June 30, 2025: Abstract submission (300-500 words, excluding references). References may be shared as a part of your submission. Email abstracts to ecestudentjournal@gmail.com
- July 11, 2025: Decisions on and/or suggestions for abstracts sent from the Editorial Collective.
- September 30, 2025: Full manuscript submission (up to 6000 Words) uploaded directly to the journal submission portal.
- October – December 2025: Manuscript review process (including revisions).
- January 2026: Anticipated Publication.
References
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press.
Cagliari, P., Castegnetti, M., Giudici, C., Rinaldi, C., Vecchi, V., &, Moss, P. (Eds.). (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches 1945–1993. Routledge.
Manning, E. (2016). The minor gesture. Duke University Press.