Call for Proposals - Special Issue of the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education (CJSAE). Theme: Adult education and exhibitory strategies in museums. Guest Editors: Darlene E. Clover, Kathy Sanford, and Nancy Taber.

Scholars remind us that museums, art galleries and heritage sites (hereafter simply ‘museums’) are visited by thousands of adults each year and are considered to be some of the most trusted of all knowledge creating institutions in society today (Conn, 2010; Hooper-Greenhill, 2007; Janes, 2015; Hannay, 2018). Regardless of genre – historical, aesthetic, scientific, design, doll, industrial, military, war – museums fuse together objects and artefacts, displays and exhibitions, curatorial statements and labels into narratives that have, to borrow from Giroux (2004), “power over how people think of themselves and their relationship to society and to others” (p. 59). This power is never neutral and museums have a history of elitism, colonialism, racism, and sexism, mobilised through narrow ideas of what counts as reality, history, knowledge and identity to maintain the status quo of power and privilege (Bergsdottir, 2016; Marshment, 1993; Phillips, 2011; Pollock, 1988).Yet many museums are attempting to respond to growing pressures to more socially responsible and responsive - to tell more complex stories, teach and represent diverse histories and art practices, and practise more critical and creative forms of adult education and exhibitionary praxis.

As museums receive greater attention from adult education scholars as sites of teaching, learning, and research, this special edition will advance this scholarship by inviting articles that explore, in diverse ways, the adult education roles and practices of museums, both in terms of their problems and their potentials. Articles will take up, but not limited to: 

• Pedagogies and exhibition practices in response to (or the perpetuation of) issues of identity, colonisation, fundamentalism, neoliberalism, gender, environmental, diversity, and so forth;
• Decolonising methodologies and practices in museums and art galleries;
• Conceptions and practices of visual and/or critical literacy;
• Arts-based and/or creative pedagogical and community engagement strategies and practices;
• Contributions (and challenges) of technology;
• Activism in/through the museum;
• Innovative research practices;
• The pedagogical role of objects, displays and exhibitions;
• Exhibitions as public pedagogy (adult education).

Articles will share empirical research, theorise from the literature, or tell ‘stories’ of struggle and/or potential. They can fit into the Articles, Perspectives, or Field Notes sections of the journal. Articles will be grounded in discourses of adult education (i.e., popular education, social learning, community education, transformative learning, critical and feminist adult education, indigenous adult education, public pedagogies and so forth) but they can also weave in other types of cultural and social theories.

By August 31, 2018, please submit a maximum 500-word (one page single spaced) proposal (including a title and list of citations) to Darlene Clover ([email protected]), Nancy Taber ([email protected]), and Kathy Sanford ([email protected]). The editors will communicate a decision to submitters by Sep. 30, 2018. Those who are successful will be invited to write papers, due 30 January 2019, which will be sent for peer-review. The issue will be published in autumn 2019. This journal uses APA referencing. Please do that from the proposal stage to the end.

Kind regards,