CALL FOR PAPERS

The Politics of Care in Higher Education: Pedagogies, Communities, and Institutional Tensions (Routledge companion)

Eds. Gretta Sayers, Dominique Hétu, and Mousumi Majumder

This edited collection offers a timely contribution to the growing body of scholarship on care in higher education (Child & Marvel, 2023; Johnston, 2024; Evans, 2025; Boden et al., 2026). Moving beyond celebratory narratives that romanticize care, treat it as inherently benevolent, or present it as a natural and uncomplicated good, this volume approaches care as a complex and contested practice shaped by institutional structures, power relations, material conditions, and unequal distributions of labour. It examines how care operates simultaneously as a pedagogical ethic, relational practice, and institutional discourse, while foregrounding the tensions and contradictions that emerge in its enactment in higher education. We seek contributions that examine both the transformative possibilities and the political contradictions of care in academic life, engaging urgent concerns surrounding precarity, burnout, institutional rhetoric, and collective responsibility while offering grounded and theoretically rigorous pathways for reimagining academic communities.

Guided by an editorial team working across science, arts, and music, the volume approaches care as a question that exceeds disciplinary boundaries and conventional academic forms. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions exploring pedagogies of care in academia as relational, political, ethical, and institutional practices, and particularly encourage critical perspectives attentive to the tensions between care as transformative praxis and care as institutional discourse.

In keeping with this interdisciplinary and expansive orientation, we welcome not only scholarly analysis but also contributions that engage pedagogical and institutional questions through research-creation, creative and arts-based methodologies, embodied and relational inquiry, and other forms of knowledge-making attentive to care, reciprocity, and collective responsibility.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

Communities of Practice, Solidarity, and Collective Care

Focus on the relationships, networks, and collective structures through which care is enacted, sustained, and negotiated within and beyond academic institutions. Contributions may critically examine communities of practice, mentorship, solidarity, belonging, and collective responses to precarity, exclusion, and institutional change.

• Communities of practice as spaces of relational learning and mutual support
• Collective care and solidarity within academic communities
• Faculty, staff, student, and intergenerational communities of care
• Mentorship, sponsorship, and peer-support networks
• Community-based and grassroots care practices
• Communities of resistance and alternative academic cultures
• Care infrastructures within and beyond institutions
• Transnational, intercultural, and multilingual communities of practice

Critical and Decolonial Theorizations of Care

• Feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, Indigenous, disability, queer, and intersectional approaches to care
• Care as relational, political, ethical, and collective practice
• Relational accountability, reciprocity, and responsibility
• Distinctions and tensions between care, compassion, empathy, wellness, and support
• Decolonizing care and questioning dominant or universalized understandings of care
• Care, power, and the politics of recognition and belonging

Care, Institutions, and Structural Conditions

• Who is responsible for care? Institutional accountability and the challenges of “walking the talk”
• The instrumentalization, depoliticization, or weaponization of care
• “Care-washing,” compassionate governance, and institutional contradictions
• Structural inequities and institutional barriers to caring practices
• Equity, accessibility, and accountability in institutional approaches to care
• Care as institutional discourse, managerial language, or policy framework

Educational Leadership, Governance, and Institutional Contradictions

Focus on educational leadership, governance, and institutional decision-making as sites where commitments to care encounter institutional hierarchies, competing responsibilities, material constraints, and unequal relations of power.

• The tensions between relational leadership and hierarchical authority
• Who is expected, authorized, or positioned to make decisions about what counts as care and for whom.
• Institutional commitments to care alongside austerity, restructuring, precarity, workload intensification, and performance management
• The contradictions of leaders being asked to enact care while administering policies or decisions that may produce harm
• Care as institutional responsibility versus the individualization or downward delegation of caring labour
• Governance, consultation, and participation: whose voices are heard, recognized, or excluded in institutional decisions about care
• Care, accountability, and evaluation: the challenges of recognizing caring practices without rendering care measurable, performative, or managerial
• Leadership, refusal, and complicity: the limits of care within institutions whose structures may themselves reproduce inequity

Labour, Power, and Unequal Expectations of Care

• Gendered, racialized, colonial, and ableist distributions of care labour
• Emotional, affective, and relational labour in academia
• Invisible, undervalued, and uncompensated care work
• Faculty, staff, and student wellbeing beyond individualized frameworks
• Burnout, exhaustion, and care fatigue
• Boundaries, refusal, and care without self-erasure
• Institutional responsibility and the redistribution of care work
• Care, academic precarity, workload, and cultures of overextension
• Precarious labour and the politics of academic support

Research, Knowledge Production, and Ethical Scholarship

Focus on care as an epistemological, methodological, and ethical framework for research and knowledge production. Contributions may explore how care shapes scholarly inquiry, research relationships, academic publishing, and the production, circulation, and validation of knowledge.

• Collaborative, participatory, and community-engaged research methodologies
• Communities of practice as sites of collective knowledge production
• Decolonial, Indigenous, and community-accountable research practices
• Knowledge production, epistemic justice, and the ethics of listening
• Care as a research methodology and analytical framework
• The production, negotiation, and contestation of safe spaces in research and educational contexts
• Slow scholarship and alternative temporalities of knowledge production

Critical and Creative Interventions

• Arts-based and creative approaches to care
• Case studies of care-based initiatives and institutional tensions
• Failures, ambivalences, and unintended consequences of care
• Pedagogies of refusal, repair, and institutional critique
• Reimagining academic cultures through justice-oriented and decolonial care
• Futures of care in higher education

We particularly welcome contributions that critically and creatively engage the possibilities and limits of care, foreground questions of equity and justice, and explore the conditions under which pedagogies and communities of practice may foster, constrain, or complicate more accountable, inclusive, and transformative academic cultures. Please submit your detailed abstract (max 500 words, in a .docx or PDF file) to carecommunity@brandonu.ca by Jan. 15, 2027, along with a bio (250 words).

Detailed Abstract Requirements
Submissions should include a detailed abstract of up to 500 words outlining the proposed contribution. The abstract should present:

• its central argument, question, or inquiry;
• its conceptual or theoretical grounding;
• its methodological and/or creative approach;
• the texts, creative works, practices, or other materials on which the contribution will draw.

Proposals may also take the form of research-creation projects or involve alternative, multimodal, or community-engaged approaches to knowledge production and dissemination. In such cases, the abstract should clearly describe the proposed form and its relevance to the contribution. Contributions should normally range between 4,000 and 8,000 words. Creative and hybrid contributions that take forms for which word count is not the most appropriate measure are invited to discuss format and length with the editors.

Tentative Timeline:

Works Cited

Boden, C., et al. (2026), “The Hidden Curriculum of Care: Emotional Labor, Burnout, and Compassion Fatigue in Higher Education,” Innovative Higher Education.

Child, S., & Marvell, R. (2023). “Care-experienced students in higher education: A case for re-figuring higher education worlds to widen access and further social justice.” British Educational Research Journal, 50(2),474-494.

Ellis, K., & Johnston, C. (2024). “Resilience, higher education and widening participation: Generating change for care experienced students.” Higher Education, 87(1), 1-16.

Evans, C. (2025). “The ethics of love and care in higher education: Perspectives of students with care experience.” Higher Education. doi.org/10.1007/s10734-025-01563-4.