Call For proposal Special Issue:
Regenerating Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development: Intradisciplinary Pathways and Sociocultural Commitments
To be published in Social Sciences (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci)
Indexed within Scopus, ESCI (Web of Science), RePEc, and other databases.
Impact factor 1.7 and Cite score of 3.5
Lead editor: Alejandro J. Gallard Martínez, Ph.D., Professor and Goizueta Distinguished Chair of Education
Call for Papers
Amid an accelerating climate catastrophe, educational systems continue to privilege technical solutions over sociocultural understanding. Many climate change education (CCE) initiatives remain anchored in frameworks that marginalize the communities most affected by environmental degradation. This Special Issue interrogates these assumptions and challenges the belief that sustainability can advance without addressing power, history, and inequity.
A borderlands lens offers a critical vantage point for examining how intersecting histories of identity, knowledge, and epistemic hierarchy shape CCE. It reveals how dominant paradigms privilege Western scientific rationalities while displacing Indigenous, local, and community‑rooted ecological knowledge, a displacement reinforced by contextual mitigating factors (CMFs) embedded in curriculum, assessment, and teacher preparation.
Centering the lived realities of marginalized communities reframes CCE as a sociopolitical struggle rather than a technical domain, highlighting how learners navigate linguistic hybridity, cultural identity, and historical memory in their encounters with climate content.
Regenerative climate change education (RCCE) refers to approaches that rebuild educational ecosystems disrupted by technocratic, decontextualized models. RCCE treats Indigenous and community‑rooted knowledge as foundational; cultivates multilingual, place‑based, and culturally sustaining pedagogies; and positions learners as ethical agents capable of transforming the systems that produce climate vulnerability.
Despite global efforts to integrate climate content, dominant approaches continue to reproduce technocratic logics that obscure lived experience and reinforce CMFs. A borderlands and regenerative lens makes visible how community knowledge is positioned as peripheral rather than central. Reimagining CCE, therefore, requires systemic transformation: legitimizing diverse epistemologies, reshaping assessment practices, and preparing educators to navigate identity, power, and planetary responsibility.
A borderlands lens strengthens sociocultural climate change education by illuminating the ecological, cultural, and political intersections that shape learners’ experiences. Because climate impacts are unevenly distributed, borderlands thinking makes visible the asymmetries that communities navigating displacement, environmental precarity, and contested knowledge systems face. A borderlands lens perspective highlights how diverse ways of knowing, linguistic practices, and community histories can inform climate learning, aligning with sociocultural commitments to context, relationality, and justice.
This Special Issue invites contributions that reconceptualize CCE through a borderlands lens to develop multiple pathways toward justice‑oriented sustainable development. Grounded in United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.7, we seek scholarship, case studies, and theoretical reflections, as examples, that position CCE as both a site of resistance to decontextualized approaches and a platform for systemic regeneration.
Submissions may address:
• Sociocultural perspectives on environmental literacy and community resilience
• Critical pedagogy and decolonial approaches to CCE
• Integrating Indigenous and local knowledge into sustainability education
• Intersectional analyses of environmental justice and access to education
• Arts‑based, experiential, or place‑based learning for ecological consciousness
• Methodological bricolage and interdisciplinary frameworks for climate research in education
We especially welcome work that bridges theory and practice, illuminating how policy, curriculum, teacher preparation, and community engagement can coalesce to foster empowered, climate‑literate citizens. Ultimately, this Special Issue seeks to amplify voices that challenge extractive logics and reimagine education as a regenerative, relational practice, one that cultivates not only knowledge about climate change but also deep responsibility and capacity for collective action. We encourage submissions that take seriously the borderlands of climate education, those material and epistemic thresholds where communities confront overlapping histories of dispossession, environmental precarity, and sociocultural transformation. To ensure alignment with this vision, submissions must be clearly grounded in sociocultural frameworks and the Chicago manuscript style.
Please send an abstract to Prof. Alejandro José Gallard Martínez at agallard@georgiasouthern.edu by August 1 for review—deadline for manuscript submissions: November 30, 2026. If you have any questions, please get in touch with Prof. Gallard Martínez.