Call for Papers: Special Issue on the Future of Engaged Scholarship (Volume 11, Issue 1)

2024-02-17

THE FUTURE OF ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP

Guest Editors:  Isobel M. Findlay and Lori Bradford

Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning is Canada’s online open-access, peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary journal committed to profiling best practices in ‘engaged scholarship’ informed by community-academic partnerships in research, teaching and learning. The journal mission is “to promote and support reciprocal and meaningful co-creation of knowledge among scholars, educators, professionals and community leaders, in Canada and worldwide; to inspire and promote productive dialogue between practice and theory of engaged scholarship; to critically reflect on engaged scholarship, research, and pedagogy pursued by various university and community partners, working locally, nationally and internationally, across various academic disciplines and areas of application; to serve as a forum of constructive debate on the meanings and applications of engaged scholarship among partners and communities.” The collaborative research, teaching, and learning crosses disciplinary, institutional, geographic, social, economic, cultural, and other borders. 

As we approach the tenth anniversary of the journal, we are hosting a special issue to critically reflect on the future of engaged scholarship, considering how far (or not) the journal and the broader body of engaged scholarship have come. As a community, let’s capture and explore the victories or societal changes we have celebrated or are aiming to celebrate. Let’s describe the challenges and opportunities we currently face, and let’s figure out where we go from here.   

If engaged scholarship and the Engaged Scholar Journal in particular have aimed to counter the wasted lives (Bauman, 2003), the wasted talents, knowledges, and voices of those marginalized by or actively excluded from economic modernity and the destructive triad of colonialism, capitalism, and constructions of race, have they gone far enough? How might they more effectively decolonize methodologies (Smith, 1999/2013) and respect, honour, and learn from the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, constitutionalized Aboriginal and treaty rights, and the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Final Report (see Battiste & Henderson (ed), special issue of the Engaged Scholar Journal, 7 (1) [2021]).

How might we more effectively put community first (Andree et al., 2018)? How well do we recognize and reward community-made research contributions, lived expertise, and community ethical protocols? How well do we share institutional resources with community partners? How truly community-driven and community-relevant are our research findings? How effectively have institutional priorities, tenure and promotion standards changed to recognize and reward engaged scholarship? How might we reimagine our research relationships, methods, and protocols for transformative outcomes?    

We invite diverse presentations, papers, reports of research in progress, audio, artistic or visual outcomes, interviews with Elders or community knowledge holders, poetry, stories, research, experiential learning, book or dissertation reviews, podcast and podcast reviews, community service learning and scholarship of engagement. An online link to work will be provided beyond the paper and online journal to support the platform of visual or audio submissions.

Please submit your expression of interest in the form of a 200-word abstract by Tuesday, April 30, 2024. Your abstract can be inserted in the text of your email or as an attachment. Contact information is below.

All submissions will undergo either editorial or peer review. Submissions for the Essays Section of the Journal will be subject to double, anonymized peer review, submissions to other Journal sections will undergo editorial review.

Essays to be subject to anonymized  peer reviewing should:

  • Represent original, unpublished work that is not under consideration by other journals or collections of essays
  • Written in accessible language, to respect multidisciplinary nature of the Journal and the diversity of our readers. Acronyms and abbreviations should be kept to the minimum.
  • Be maximum 8,000 words
  • Include an abstract (200 words) and indicate up to five keywords
  • Be typed, double-spaced throughout, in 12-pt Times New Roman font
  • Be formatted in the American Psychological Association (APA) style, 7th edition
  • Have a separate cover page that includes the names, institutional affiliations, addresses, and contact information of all authors
  • Include author biography/ies (no more than 50 words per author) on a separate sheet
  • Indicate that appropriate Institutional Research Ethics Board approval was secured, if applicable
  • Be formatted and saved in Microsoft Word (no PDF please)
  • Be submitted in two versions, one should include all information to be published, and in the other copy information to be anonymized should be substituted with blank underlined spaces. Information to be anonymized includes all text or data that will have to be removed from the essay for blind peer review purposes
  • Submission should be accompanied by authors’ recommendations of at least four scholars, including community-based scholars when applicable, from the author’s field who the Journal may approach with the request to peer review of the issue’s contributions. Such recommendations should include the description of (a) the credentials of the prospective reviewers as well as (b) the professional distance between the authors and the proposed reviewers.

Deadline for proposals:                           Tuesday, April 30, 2024

Deadline for all contributions:                 Tuesday, July 1, 2024

Expected date of publication:                     Spring 2025

 Please submit your abstract via email at engaged.scholar@usask.ca, and  full manuscripts here.

 

References

Andree, P., Findlay, I.M., & Peacock, D. (2018). Eds. and Intro: Transformations through “Community First” Engagement [special issue, Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 4(2).

Battiste, M., & Henderson, S. (2021). Indigenous and Trans-Systemic Knowledge Systems (ᐃᐣdᐃgᐁᓅᐢ ᐠᓄᐤᐪᐁdgᐁ ᐊᐣd ᐟᕒᐊᐣᐢᐢᐩᐢᑌᒥᐨᐠᓄᐤᐪᐁdgᐁ ᐢᐩᐢᑌᒼᐢ). Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning, 7(1), i–xix. https://doi.org/10.15402/esj.v7i1.7076

Bauman, Z. (2003). Wasted lives: Modernity and its outcasts. Wiley

Smith, L. T. (1999/2013). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.

Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Calls to action. https://archives.nctr.ca/ NCTR-EDU-003-001-004

UN General Assembly. (2007). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.https://www.refworld.org/docid/471355a82.html