Deadline: July 24, 2026
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Wednesday, April 14 – Sunday, April 18, 2027
Transcending Borders and Boundaries in Education Research: Toward a Beloved Global Community
2027 AERA Presidential Program Theme
Jerome E. Morris
President
president@aera.net
“But of course, no idea is perfect and forever valid. Always to be living and apposite and timely, it must be modified and adapted to changing facts.” —W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940/2017)
Division B: Curriculum Studies Program co-chairs: Dowan McNair-Lee, University of District of Columbia, dowan.mcnairlee@udc.edu; Saba Khan Vlach, University of Iowa, saba-vlach@uiowa.edu
Division B invites submissions aligned with the 2027 Annual Meeting theme that call us to reimagine education research as relational, ethical, and globally interconnected work. As we gather in Toronto, Canada, we take seriously the responsibility to engage beyond U.S.-centric frameworks and to honor the local, national, and transnational contexts that shape curriculum and educational life.
Under the leadership of Vice President Roland Sintos Coloma, Division B takes up this call with a deep commitment to broadening who is seen, heard, and engaged in curriculum studies. We understand curriculum not simply as content or structure, but as a living, contested, and world-making practice shaped by histories of colonialism, migration, resistance, and community knowledge. To transcend borders is not to erase difference, but to engage it with care, rigor, and accountability, particularly in a moment marked by global inequities, neoliberal constraints, and the uneven distribution of educational resources across the Global South and beyond.
We invite scholarship that pushes the field to think across and beyond boundaries—disciplinary, cultural, linguistic, geopolitical, and epistemological—while remaining grounded in the communities and ecologies that give curriculum its meaning. We especially welcome work that foregrounds the intellectual and lived contributions of Indigenous, Black and Brown, diasporic, differently abled, and sexual and gender minority communities, as well as other historically marginalized knowledge traditions. Division B is a space for your work. We seek to learn from lived experiences, subaltern knowledge, and community-rooted inquiry, and to support actionable solidarities that extend beyond academic discourse.
We pose the following questions as invitations:
• What is the role and responsibility of curriculum in transcending conventional borders in ways that affirm the dignity, funds of knowledge, and communal bonds of various communities?
• How can curriculum studies move beyond established hierarchies of knowledge by centering relational, communal, joyful, and diasporic ways of knowing?
• How do curricula travel, transform, and take shape across borders, and with what consequences for learners and communities?
• How do we cultivate a beloved global community of curriculum scholars and practitioners that is attentive to power relations and benefits marginalized communities?
• How do we critically examine our own positionalities and the boundaries we reproduce within the field?
• How do we engage with the gravity of intellectual rigor, advocacy, and responsibility while working within a praxis that respects the affective necessity of joy and love to sustain this work?
We welcome a wide range of approaches, including conceptual and theoretical work, historical and philosophical inquiry, (auto)ethnography, arts-based and performative research, community-based and participatory methods, policy analysis, and pedagogical studies. We encourage submissions that engage diverse sites of curriculum, including schools, universities, community spaces, diasporic and transnational contexts, digital environments, media and popular culture, and other cultural institutions.
Division B is intentionally building a program that reflects the breadth and depth of curriculum studies as a transnational field. We strongly encourage submissions from scholars across career stages and geographic locations, including those new to Division B, as well as collaborative work across contexts and ways of knowing.
At this moment, curriculum studies must do more than interpret the world. It must participate in shaping it through solidarities that are enacted, not just named. We invite you to join us in advancing scholarship that not only transcends boundaries, but builds meaningful, accountable, and enduring connections with communities, work that moves beyond rhetoric to demonstrate how curriculum is co-created, sustained, and mobilized in the pursuit of more just and humane educational futures.
Section 1: Cultural Inquiry in Curriculum Studies
This section calls for submissions that expand and complicate conversations shaping the culture of curriculum studies. We encourage submissions that explore issues of culture through theoretical discourse, qualitative inquiry, and curricular practice, inside and/or outside of schools.
Keywords: cultural studies, cultural production, cultural analysis, media, popular culture, cultural artifacts, culturally relevant/ responsive/sustaining, digital media and data, cultural imperialism
Section co-chairs: Raul Garza, University of Texas Rio Grande, raul.garza11@utrgv.edu; Maia Sheppard, University of Iowa, maia-sheppard@uiowa.edu
Section 2: Exploring Past, Present, and Future Curricular Questions
This section calls for submissions that engage curriculum questions within the context of the past, the present, and future concerns. We encourage submissions concerning historical and perennial issues such as curriculum policy, textual analysis, and culture wars.
Keywords: temporal, archaeology, genealogy, history of the present, (re)membering, storytelling, counter-story, dystopia, utopia, futurisms
Section co-chairs: Alexander Pratt, University of Memphis, ajpratt1@memphis.edu; Elizabeth Isidro, Western Michigan University, elizabeth.isidro@wmich.edu
Section 3: Theories, Methodologies, and Philosophies of Curriculum Studies
This section calls for submissions that take on approaches and ideas that are shaping curriculum and curriculum studies, including topics concerned with the following: curriculum and social theory, theories of history, methodology, and activist engagement.
Keywords: critical theory, post-/anti- theories, discourse, affect, structure, agency, identity, qualitative, critical quantitative, hybrid, abolition, empire, settler colonialism
Section co-chairs: Jonathan Tunstall, Bowdoin College, j.tunstall@bowdoin.edu; Jen Bartee, University of District of Columbia, jennifer.bartee@udc.edu
Section 4: Policies and the Politics of Curriculum
This section calls for submissions that critically engage varied policies and politics informing curriculum and curriculum studies. We encourage submissions that speak to curricular issues arising at the institutional levels of classrooms and schools as well as district, state, national, and international policies. We also invite submissions centering questions related to contemporary political contests over curricula and curriculum policies that affirm marginalized social identities and histories.
Keywords: curriculum policy, curriculum standards, curriculum development, curriculum wars, PK–12 schools, higher education, community education
Section co-chairs: Hilary Tackie, SUNY-New Paltz, hilary. tackie@gmail.com; Angel Jones, University of Washington, AngelJonesPhD@gmail.com
Section 5: The Places and Praxis of Curriculum
This section calls for submissions that consider spaces where curriculum and curriculum studies are encountered and what that may accomplish. We encourage submissions that consider the containment and leakage of curricular knowledge in spaces through a range of modes of inquiry. We invite submissions about curriculum that might refuse containment and be encountered in spaces-in-between. We welcome considerations of curriculum that might be “out of place” and the affordances and losses.
Keywords: spatial, formal or informal spaces, borders, bordercrossing, public and counter-public spaces, undercommons, environment, ecojustice, land, labor, liminal, transnational
Section co-chairs: Erin Bailey, Reading is Fundamental, ebailey@rif.org; Ed Curammeng, California State University, Dominguez Hills, ecurammeng@csudh.edu
Section 6: De/Colonization and Transformative Curriculum Studies
This section calls for submissions that engage realms of possibility in and through curriculum and curriculum studies. We encourage submissions that engage questions about curriculum as a pathway to freedom and transformation.
Keywords: de/colonization, intersectionality, Afrocentricity, Indigeneity, mestizaje, Latinidad, Global South, comparative, sovereignty, liberation, discontinuity
Section co-chairs: Eduardo Munõz-Munõz, San Jose State University, eduardo.munoz-munoz@sjsu.edu; Tony Castro, University of Missouri, castroaj@missouri.edu
Section 7: Materiality and Subject Matters of Curriculum
This section calls for submissions that examine the material dimensions of curriculum: the tangible and embodied elements that shape teaching and learning across educational contexts. We encourage submissions that investigate: curriculum subjects and subjectivities; transdisciplinary connections between curriculum studies and content areas, standards, textbooks, instructional materials, and pedagogical resources; and the conditions under which teaching and learning occur. We welcome inquiries that explore how materiality mediates educational experiences, and how the physical, digital, and embodied aspects of curriculum shape knowledge production and pedagogical encounters.
Keywords: subject matter knowledge, material culture, teaching conditions, learning environments, curriculum assemblages, sensory experiences, digital technologies, experiential education
Section co-chairs: Stephanie McCall, Teachers College, Columbia University, sdm36@tc.columbia.edu; Durell Callier, callier@udel.edu
Questions related to the Division B call for submissions and review process can be sent to the section chairs listed above or to the program chairs: Dowan McNair-Lee, dowan.mcnairlee@ udc.edu; Saba Khan Vlach, saba-vlach@uiowa.edu.
We look forward to receiving your submissions and to working with you as a presenter, discussant, or chair.