Call for Proposals: Higher Education for the World We Need

Feb 11

An invitation to contribute:

Higher education institutions are simultaneously positioned as places of creativity, inspiration, refuge, and rigid colonial bureaucracy. They contain multiple, competing possibilities. This project draws on the insights of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, la paperson, and Sharon Stein, who urge us to identify the kinds of reforms that are truly liberatory, to leverage components within higher education systems for decolonizing changes, and to wrestle unflinchingly with the extensive colonial roots of the systems we inhabit. We invite scholars, practitioners and community organizers to map the ways in which their higher education innovations re-imagine institutional identities, structures, and assumptions toward more just, even decolonizing, ends. Each contributed blog post/ chapter will offer an example of re-imagined practice, reflecting on how programmatic and institutional shifts resist dominant ontological and applied commitments. By including varied institutional and programmatic types of higher education innovations, the volume will demonstrate how diversely identifying and situated individuals advance decolonizing practices within higher education regimes. Collectively, these pedagogical and partnership innovations support the volume’s core purpose: identifying patterns of inclusion, resource-sharing, community-leadership, expansive imagination, and structural change that foretell more liberatory higher education futures.

A co-edited blog series and anticipated edited volume with Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman.

*Image by* *K. Mitch Hodge* on *Unsplash*

We're looking for applied stories of pedagogical, partnership, and institutional innovation that align higher education's resources and strengths in service of more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities. Philanthropic efforts are sometimes merely a gloss on higher education's histories of enacting exclusion and marginalization; this project aims to wrestle with that legacy while also identifying spaces of new growth and opportunity. These stories could be locally or internationally rooted; this volume aims to disrupt nationalized conceptions of space and invite consideration of interdependence.

Our intent is to amplify and clarify patterns of inclusion, resource-sharing, community-leadership, expansive imagination, and structural change that create space for more liberatory higher education futures. Complete details appear below.

We encourage pieces from any thought leaders and change agents working to leverage higher education systems toward more just ends. Institutional type and/or “insider” or “outsider” positionality is open. We absolutely encourage co-authored, creative, and community-led contributions. Please consider submitting a public-facing short essay (less than 2,000 words), which could potentially develop into a chapter in an edited volume.

Online Short Essay Submission Deadline:

The Collaborative seeks 1,000 - 2,000 word, public-facing, online essays to be considered for publication as part of a collection on the theme - Higher Education for the World We Need - at https://www.cbglcollab.org/blog. The essay submission deadline is March 30, 2023. Blog submissions should identify programming, pedagogy, or partnerships aligned with the theme, describing its commitments through the lenses identified in the description below, specifically attending to: patterns of inclusion, resource-sharing, community-leadership, expansive imagination, and structural change that foretell liberatory higher education futures.
All submitted blog proposals will be considered for invitation to an edited volume. This volume will be co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman. Individuals or author teams invited to the edited volume will be asked to submit a 6,500 word chapter by September 1, 2023.
Submissions will be considered for the blog on a rolling basis. The final deadline for blog submission is March 30, 2023. All submissions should be sent to Eric Hartman at ehartman1(at)haverford(dot)edu as Google docs (preferred) or Word docs. Please do not send submissions longer than 2,000 words (excluding citations). Please use APA Format.
Editors will respond to all individuals or teams who submitted blog posts by April 30, 2023, indicating invitation to develop a full chapter for the edited volume (or not). While the editors anticipate many excellent blog posts, there is a limit to the total number of chapters that can be contained within the edited volume.

Book Chapter Submission Selection Process and Deadline:

All submitted blog proposals will be considered for an edited volume. We are in conversation with a strong, established press. This volume will be co-edited by Eric Hartman, Shorna Allred, Jackline Oluoch-Aridi, Marisol Morales, and Ariana Huberman.
Individuals or author teams invited to the edited volume will be asked to submit a 6,500 word chapter by September 1, 2023.

The Challenge

We expect everything from higher education institutions: opportunity elevation, new knowledge, public service, insightful analysis, spaces for community connection, collaboration, refuge, cultural events - and much more.

From the left and the right, critics assert that these institutions frequently fail us - at least any meaningfully inclusive conception of “us.” Open-access institutions regularly have retention and graduation rates below 60%. In respect to their student population, elite institutions admit and serve a tiny fraction of any conception of “the public.” These dominant patterns reveal dominant commitments.

Across the board, higher education institutions claim community and public benefit - and feature extraordinary collections of minds and resources. But their institutional structures and operating assumptions are too frequently bound up with harmful patterns of exclusion and accumulation to the point of greed.

Exclusion, for instance, is a marker of excellence in elite institution webpages, measured by particularly low rates of admission. Accumulation is also honored, demonstrating strength through endowment size. Beyond the clearly observable ways in which higher education institutions have historically excluded individuals and accumulated wealth, foundational assumptions regarding what knowledge matters, who gets to speak, how new knowledge is developed, and even how to consider the possibility of multiple truth systems - bear the scars of colonial processes and imaginations.

Even as reforms are underway, these practices are deeply embedded in core operating assumptions in western higher education (Stein, 2019); they inform higher education’s predominant technologies (la paperson, 2017). This is especially true in the United States, where higher education’s political economy has been almost entirely individualized and marketized, incentivizing institutions to compete against one another rather than behaving as resource stewards among a broader, interdependent public and ecosystem. Nonetheless, many students, faculty, community members, administrators, and staff are working to dismantle and reimagine what is possible.

Responses: Innovating and Adapting to Grow New Systems

Numerous scholars are innovating beyond the model of the individual, objective scholar creating knowledge for one’s own peer-reviewed community, hidden behind paywalls and limited to a select, narrow public. In Decolonizing Ethnography, scholars, activists, and community members swap roles and responsibilities to advance understanding, organize, and advocate for people most affected by the many injustices of the current immigration system. Carolina Alonso Bejarano wrote Decolonizing Ethnography with her field collaborators in New Jersey, declaring that decolonized scholarship must be moved beyond individual accomplishment toward, “the shared need to confront the colonial-racist structures, systems, and institutions of society through a collective praxis” (p. 37).

This kind of praxis reimagines who is engaged in research, whose contributions are recognized, and how teaching occurs from what sources. Several thousand miles away from New Jersey, in South Africa, Samia Chasi argues that decolonizing academic spaces is not merely about admitting broader communities of individuals, why we should engage in knowledge production, or how that process should occur. Decolonization is, Chasi suggests, “both an attitude and a practice aimed at rehumanising the world.”

Who is admitted and supported to take part in shared inquiry, how we know what we know, and why - are all implicated in our efforts to understand our actual conditions as interdependent beings - rather than our colonially-influenced understandings of ourselves as independent actors, apart from and upon the world. Building on more than a decade of wrestling through the challenges in this space, a multi-institutional network, the Community-based Global Learning Collaborative, has worked to identify and advance opportunities for related changes in pedagogy and partnerships. Together, these changes are intended to support work aligned with the Collaborative’s mission,, “to advance ethical, critical, aspirationally decolonial community-based learning and research for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities.”

We recognize this work is not easy; nor will it be linear, teleological, or universal in the sense of one innovation working across all populations, institutions, and geographies. Anticolonial innovations emerge and may maintain, however, from within specific communities of collaborators, networks, and place-based organizers and scholars. We seek to recognize and engage conversation among those individuals and networks, from diverse positionalities and localities, who are systematically speaking and creating new ways of thinking, being, and communing in the world; individuals and communities of all backgrounds who are enacting beyond colonial patterns and colonial thinking.

In partnership with WVU Press, we now seek submissions from community organizers, activists, students, staff, faculty, and administrators who will document locations of promising change, reimagination, and restructuring from within the institutions we inhabit. We know this work is underway in diverse locations and from diverse institutional types. A recent special issue in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad featured thirty-one authors and co-authors, over a third of them situated in the Global South, who instrumentalized higher education systems toward ends that support the co-creation of more just, inclusive, and sustainable communities. In a special section in one of the leading journals of community engagement and campus partnerships, the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Canadian co-editors Katie Macdonald and Jessica Vorstermans take the ruptures of the last several years, “as a starting point for re-imagining learning and movement as relational.”This work grows from the margins and from within dominant systems.

In the introduction to Perspectives on Lifelong Learning and Global Citizenship, theologian Sharon Welch observes, “To counter authoritarianism in all its forms, we need alternative forms of belonging, a self-critical and expansive form of global citizenship that genuinely recognizes and embraces the challenge of seeking the flourishing of all, forthrightly acknowledges the damage of extractive and exploitative economic and political systems of the past and present, and wholeheartedly welcomes the challenge of learning how to live in reciprocity and responsibility with each other and with the natural world that sustains us.”

This is no small order. And it is also underway, all around the world.

In inviting contributions, we draw heavily on La Paperson’s understanding that A Third University is Possible, and that it will arrive through the imagination and reimagination cultivated by change agents working within and against the institutional structures we inherit. We are looking for creative disruptors and radical reformers. To understand where we might all invest more energy, we are guided by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s abolitionist work, which we apply to higher education.

Analyzing and Aligning Efforts toward Liberatory Higher Education Systems

As an abolitionist author and organizer, Gilmore considers which institutional reforms ultimately decrease carceral presence, calling those reforms “nonreformist reforms,” while critiquing the common, “reformist reform,” which may address symptoms of injustice but fail to reach root causes. In that context, addressing carceral overcrowding by building more humane jails, closer to home communities, are reformist reforms. They ultimately expand carceral capacity. Re-investing funds originally used for conventional policing, instead into meaningful mental health services, is a nonreformist reform. Abolitionists do not want reformist reforms that reinvest in the old system - just as individuals advancing “aspirationally decolonizing community-based learning for more just, inclusive, sustainable communities,” do not wish to tinker at the edges, only to find themselves on the new marketing materials of ultimately colonial systems. We will use this lens, renaming moves as either liberatory (nonreformist) or reformist, as we consider higher education disruption, innovation, and organizing.

This collection aims to advance practices of decolonizing higher education systems by mapping and theorizing diverse locations of creative disruption that create wedges for liberatory practice within and among colonial institutions. Tying the volume together, authors will be asked to share their reflections through the lenses of inclusion, resource-sharing, community-leadership, expansive imagination, and structural change that foretell liberatory higher education futures. In particular:

Inclusion. How do their programs, institutions, or innovations expand access for a broader community? Does expanding access systematically work to redress historical exclusion?
Resource Sharing. How do their programs, institutions, or innovations recognize and remunerate off-campus individuals who share knowledge, skill, and time, along with other forms of systematic resource sharing and labor recognition? Does resource sharing ever redress intergenerational harms and trauma? How?
Community-led, Participatory, and Collaborative Methods. How do their programs, institutions, or innovations make space for new models of co-creative knowledge development?
Expansive Imagination and Possibility. How do their programs, institutions, or innovations create spaces for broad approaches to systematic thinking and learning (quite beyond “interdisciplinarity”), opening possibilities for new ways of thinking, being, and learning that advance shared understandings of how peoples collaborate to build more peaceful, just, inclusive, and sustainable communities? How does this expansive imagination and possibility support student exploration of and commitment to shared purposes (e.g. ecological citizenship, commitment to reciprocity, “citizenship” and/or “civic” learning beyond the state).
Structural Change. How seriously do their programs, institutions, or innovations take the insights advanced and assembled through these aspirationally decolonizing disruptions? Are these ruptures leading toward commitments to decolonizing practices that will be sustained in the foreseeable future?

Citations and Influences

Alonso Bejarano, C., López Juárez, L., Mijangos García, M. A., & Goldstein, D. M. (2019). Decolonizing ethnography: Undocumented immigrants and new directions in social science. London: Duke University Press.

Alpert-Abrams, H., & Galarza, A. (2018, Jan 23). Partnering on digital archives and human rights in Guatemala. The Council on Library and Information Resources. Retrieved from https://www.clir.org/2018/01/partnering-digital-archives-human-rights-guatemala/

Altinay, H. (2011). Global civics: Responsibilities and rights in an interdependent world. (Ed.). Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution.

Andreotti (2006). Soft vs critical global citizenship education. Policy and Practice. A Development Education Review. 3, 40-51.

Andreotti, V., & de Souza, L. M. T. M. (2008). Learning to read the world through other eyes. Derby, UK: Global Education Derby. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/575387/Learning_to_Read_the_World_Through_Other_Eyes_2008_

Appiah, K. A. (2006, January). The case for contamination. The New York Times Magazine, p. 30+.

Brandauer, S., Teku, T. T., and Hartman, E. (Eds.). (2022). Special Issue: Listening to and learning from partners and host communities: Amplifying marginalized voices in global learning. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad. The Forum on Education Abroad.

Cameron, J. (2014). Grounding Experiential Learning in Thick Conceptions of Global Citizenship. In Tiessen, R., & Huish, R. (Eds.), Globetrotting or Global Citizenship?: Perils and Potential of International Experiential Learning (1st ed., Vol. 1). Ontario, Canada: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.

Chasi, S. (2020, Aug 27). Decolonisation – A chance to reimagine North-South partnerships. University World News: Africa Edition. Retrieved from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20200826111105105

The Community-based Global Learning Collaborative. (2020). https://www.cbglcollab.org/

Harrison, D. K., Lillehaugen, B. D., Fahringer, J. & Lopez, F.H. (2019). Zapotec language activism and Talking Dictionaries. Electronic lexicography in the 21st century. Proceedings of the eLex 2019 conference, ed. by I. Kosem et al., 31—50. Online: https://elex.link/elex2019/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/eLex_2019_3.pdf.

Hartman, E. (2015). Fair trade learning: A framework for ethical global partnerships. In M. A. Larsen (Ed.), International Service Learning: Engaging Host Communities (215 – 234). New York: Routledge.

Hartman, E., Kiely, R., Boettcher, C., & Friedrichs, J. (2018). Community-based global learning: The theory and practice of ethical engagement at home and abroad. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Hartman, E., Reynolds, N., Ferrarini, C., Messmore, N., Evans, S., Al-Ebrahim, B., & Brown, M. (2020). Coloniality-decoloniality and critical global citizenship: Identity, belonging, and education abroad. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, Special Issue on Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity in Education Abroad (33 – 59). The Forum on Education Abroad.

Health Nexus Santé. (2018, February 22). Cultural Humility People, Principles and Practices Part 1 1. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RhU4gQ6b5c

Hordge-Freeman, E. (2015). Out of Bounds?: Negotiating Researcher Positionality in Brazil, In Bridging Scholarship and Activism: Reflections from the Frontlines of Collaborative Research, eds. B. Reiter and U. Oslender. Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press.

Jackson, M. I. (2020, June 15). What are the demands of decolonising UK universities? Retrieved from https://medium.com/@monishaissano/what-are-the-demands-of-decolonising-uk-universities-291a986c27a4

Kimmerer, R. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions.

La paperson. (2017). A Third University is Possible. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Macdonald, K., & Vorstermans, J. (2022). Introduction to special section: Inequitable Ruptures, Rupturing Inequity: Theorizing COVID-19 and racial injustice impacts on International Service Learning pedagogy, frameworks and policies. The Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 28(2): 23 – 32.

Mitchell, T., & Coll, K. (2017, Jan). Ethnic studies as a site for political education: Critical service learning and the California Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. PS: Political Science and Politics, 50(1): 187-192.

Perry, K.K.Y. (2015). State violence and the ethnographic encounter: Feminist research and racial embodiment, In Bridging Scholarship and Activism in a Globalized World: Rethinking Solidarities, Identities, Responsibilities, and Methodologies, B. Reiter & U. Oslender, Eds., East Lansing: Michigan State University, pp. 151-170.

Russel y Rodríguez, M. (2007). Messy spaces: Chicana testimonio and the undisciplining of ethnography. Chicana/Latina Studies, 7(1), 86-121.

Stein, S. (2019). Beyond Higher Education as We Know it: Gesturing Towards Decolonial Horizons of Possibility. Studies in Philosophy and Education. 38. 10.1007/s11217-018-9622-7.

Szmodis, W., & Stanlick, S. (Eds.). (2022). Beyond the classroom: Perspectives on lifelong learning and global citizenship. Springer.

Tuck, E., & Yang, W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 1(1): 1 - 40.