Guest Co-Editors:

Belén Hernando-Lloréns, Assistant Professor, San Diego State University

Ligia (Licho) López López, Lecturer, University of Melbourne

Brenda N. Sanya, Assistant Professor, Colgate University

Cameron McCarthy, Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Submit abstracts (500-600 words) for consideration by February 1, 2021 (more info below)

“Conviviality in education and the making of difference” aims to feature the work of established and emerging scholars worldwide from a variety of academic fields and disciplines that explore critical approaches to understand the colonial legacies of conviviality in education today using a wide range of methodological and theoretical frameworks. Conviviality tends to denote an ideal where individuals and groups from different political, racial, or cultural experiences come to live together in harmony, leaving conflict behind (Itçaina, 2006). This interdisciplinary special issue aims to theorize and critique the cultural thesis of conviviality and how it may attempt to order lives and societies and the resistances to such order. We are interested in the epistemes that produce conviviality within various cultural/historical spaces, and its role in the fabrication of “human genres” (Wynter, 2006), in the production of colonial modes of governance (Mbembe, 2001), in the construction of notions of humanness (Fanon, 1967; Wynter, 2003), and as a technology of modern governmentality (Hernando-Lloréns, 2019a; 2019b).

The paradoxical existence of both conviviality and the police executions of Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, George Floyd, and other Black people raises many questions regarding the proximity of conviviality and violence, brutality, and control (Gilroy, 2004). The publicization of these recent killings–brutal legacies of chattel slavery upheld by settler colonialism’s modes of subordination–along with the protests they catalyzed, and the violent suppression of those protests lay bare the ideological work of conviviality begging the question: what is it to live together? How have notions of conviviality been thought, imagined, and practiced in colonial/colonized spaces? Moreover, the fixation on looting and the calls for peace when the world watched the unflinching torture and execution of Floyd for close to nine minutes, relies upon notions of conviviality that focused on the neutralization of the response as opposed to addressing the colonial legacies that make these brutal events possible.

This special issue aims to disentangle the multiplicity of meanings that conviviality takes up as a practice of modern governmentality and how it has been thought and practiced historically as it relates to race, ethnicity, gender or religion. Thus, we are interested in bringing together critical scholarship that expands, complicates, and interrogates the discourse of conviviality in education beyond harmonious coexistence or conflict resolution in diverse societies to probe the interrelationship of conviviality with the production of difference and (in)equality. We invite works from scholar worldwide that focus on the production of categories of difference, questions of the human, educative practice, historization of conviviality, law and legal definitions, or the performativity of conviviality. We welcome post/decolonial, post-foundational, womanist, feminist, new materialist, posthumanist, critical race theory, antiblackness, indigenous, afrofuturistic, and/or queer perspectives engaging with conviviality in and out of education and in relationship to difference. Rather than starting from pre-given categories of difference, this special issue seeks contributions that can extend Achille Mbembe’s (2001) call for inquiries of how “ordinary people” engage conviviality within post/decolonial modes of governance and inquiry: “the myriad ways ordinary people guide, deceive, and toy with power instead of confronting it directly” (p. 128).

For more information on this special issue and the call for papers, please visit the call for papers.