Coordinator:
Abirlal Mukherjee (University of the People, California, USA)
Description:
At a moment when development is increasingly entangled with ecological breakdown, geopolitical fragmentation, technological acceleration, digital colonialism, and the renewed concentration of economic and epistemic power, education cannot remain merely an instrument for producing adaptable workers for an unstable future. This Working Group asks a more fundamental and disruptive question:
What if education were reclaimed as a collective infrastructure through which people could contest extractive systems, democratize knowledge, defend ecological commons, and collectively construct alternative futures?
Drawing critically on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ epistemologies of the South, Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal thinking, Elinor Ostrom’s commons scholarship, and wider decolonial, feminist, Indigenous, ecological, and critical traditions, the Working Group explores popular education, formal education, and participatory/action research as practices of collective empowerment rather than technologies of individualized human-capital formation.
The central concern is particularly urgent amid the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, Big Tech, platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, data extractivism, and digitalisation. These technologies do not simply transform classrooms. They reorganize labour, social reproduction, knowledge production, resource consumption, and geopolitical power. Data centres intensify demands for energy and water; digital infrastructures generate new material and ecological frontiers; AI systems reproduce linguistic, cultural, and epistemic hierarchies; and platform economies increasingly mediate who can work, learn, speak, organize, and participate.
The Working Group therefore asks: Who produces technological knowledge, and who controls its infrastructures? Whose languages, memories, bodies, territories, and labour become data? Can digital technologies become commons rather than new architectures of extraction? What would technological sovereignty look like from the Global South? And can education cultivate collective technological agency rather than technological dependency?
A particular focus will be placed on participatory action research as a counter-methodology to extractive development research. Rather than positioning communities as passive recipients or objects of intervention, action research can make them co-producers of knowledge, diagnosis, policy, and transformation. We welcome contributions on popular and community education, critical pedagogy, critical digital literacy, youth-led research, feminist and Indigenous methodologies, environmental education, South–South knowledge production, decolonial research, digital commons, degrowth, pluriversal futures, and struggles surrounding land, water, biodiversity, labour, and ecological justice.
The Working Group ultimately seeks to move beyond the familiar binary of technological optimism versus technological pessimism. Its ambition is to explore education and research as infrastructures of collective resistance, ecological care, epistemic justice, democratic participation, and transformative world-making.
The question is therefore not simply how education can prepare people for an uncertain future, but who gets to define that future, whose knowledge counts in producing it, what forms of life it sustains, and whether development itself can once again become a project of collective emancipation rather than adaptation to an increasingly unequal world.
Indicative Themes
- Critical pedagogy and andragogy, popular education, and emancipatory learning
- Participatory action research and community-led knowledge production
- Decolonial education, epistemic justice, and Indigenous knowledge systems
- Artificial intelligence, digital education, and technological sovereignty
- Digital commons, open knowledge, and educational equity
- Environmental humanities, ecological education, and climate justice
- Feminist, intersectional, and Indigenous research methodologies
- Youth-led research, democratic participation, and transformative citizenship
- South–South collaboration and alternative development models
- Digital labour, platform capitalism, and the political economy of education
- Degrowth, commons governance, and pluriversal futures
- Digital inequality, critical digital literacy, and inclusive access
- Research methodologies for social, political, and ecological transformation
- AI infrastructure, energy consumption, water sustainability, and environmental justice
- Collective empowerment, knowledge democracy, and emancipatory futures
We welcome conceptual, empirical, methodological, and practice-based contributions. The list is indicative rather than exhaustive, and submissions engaging critically with related themes are encouraged.
Type of call:
Call for Papers/Participation:
- We welcome abstract submissions from researchers, educators, practitioners, activists, and community-based scholars working on the themes outlined below.
- We welcome panel discussions, session speaker interests, and keynote interests.
Participation mode:
Hybrid (in-person participation at the University of Helsinki and online participation via Zoom)
Submission details and funding note:
- Submission email for both EoI and abstracts: research.abirlal@gmail.com
- Abstract length: Maximum 300 words.
- Full papers: Abstracts are invited at the initial submission stage. Full papers are not required at this stage; any subsequent requirements will be communicated to accepted participants.
- Funding and travel assistance: The Working Group does not currently have dedicated external project funding for participants’ travel or accommodation. Participants are expected to arrange their own funding and travel support.
Contact:
Prof. Abirlal Mukherjee
University of the People, California, USA
research.abirlal@gmail.com