–We echo Jack Halberstam's 2016 Post-Election Commentary:
Winter is coming!—published in Issue 53.1 of this journal.
The 53rd Volume of Educational Studies, the official journal of the American Educational Studies Association (AESA), coincided with extreme distress in the US and beyond. Indeed, the sustainability of the whole planet and all on it is at stake. In defense of truth, love, justice, and difference, the editorial team began featuring scholarly commentary like Halberstam's in Issue 53.1. As educators, we must do our work and teach where and however we can. Sara Childers, for example, reminds us in her Commentary on the Women's March in Washington that one can become a million and that “Love really can be, as Cornel West said, what justice looks like in public” (Issue 53.3).
Therefore, we hereby open space for scholarly conversation and extend a welcome invitation for Commentary, in general, and in response to the AESA Executive Council's Statement of Concern, published in Issue 53.3, in particular. The Statement calls for “educators' courage, creativity, and wisdom.” It reaffirms AESA scholarly commitments to public education, democracy, cultural diversity, environmental sustainability, and equity. It also condemns discrimination, violence, and hateful speech and actions. To be clear, the statement rejects dogma and concludes as follows:
These challenges impart practical urgency to AESA members' rigorous educational inquiry, thought, and criticism. They require our deliberate curricular, pedagogical, program, policy, and community initiatives, in pragmatic ethical responses to these challenges. They demand our strategically vocal, conscientious engagement in public controversies concerning them as well.
Importantly, we call for Commentary to go beyond US and Euro-American exceptionalism. As one of us is currently based in the UK, we cannot help but compare the native racism in recent political rhetoric both in the US and the UK. Curtailing immigration is one reason the UK voted for Brexit, and will leave the European Union. However, for many people and places within and beyond the US and UK, recently heightened challenges are not new crises or conversations but persistent, and part and parcel of deep ongoing structural inequities and injustices. Privilege is elusive too often, but winter still comes.
As editors of an academic journal, we seek to publish truth to power, against fear, hate, and fabrications. Commentary should be provocative and generate questions and conversations. This is research. This is education. For examples, please see Halberstam's Commentary at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131946.2016.1269497 or Childers' at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131946.2017.1297303. The AESA Executive Council Statement of Concern is at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2017.1325740
Commentary may take various forms (essays, letters, interviews, guest editorials, poetry, etc.). The suggested length for Commentary is 2000–5000 words. Please follow APA, 6th edition formatting and submit online at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/heds
For any questions, please email us at [email protected].