2026 - CALL FOR PROPOSALS

 Complicated Conversations on Hope and Renewal in Dehumanizing Times 

Oct. 1-3: Washington, DC Oct. 9: Online 

The Curriculum and Pedagogy (C&P) Organization warmly invites you to our annual conference, which will take place in person from October 1-3, 2026 in Washington, DC, and online on October 9, 2026. We gather across both modalities around the theme, Complicated Conversations on Hope and Renewal in Dehumanizing Times, to consider what it means to sustain humanizing educational work in an increasingly dehumanizing world. Across schools, universities, and communities, we are living amid intensifying conditions of surveillance, polarization, racial violence, anti-immigrant policy, war, ecological crisis, algorithmic harm, and democratic erosion. This year’s theme asks what it means to insist on human dignity despite these conditions. We will gather in Washington, DC, a site of profound contradiction, shaped by democracy and empire, governance and exclusion, public memory and strategic forgetting, political spectacle and everyday survival. As the seat of national power, it is a place where educational policy, migration policy, militarism, and democratic rhetoric converge. At the same time, it is a city with deep and enduring histories of diversity, community organizing, educational struggle, and resistance. This setting reminds us that our work as curriculum scholars, teachers, researchers, artists, and community practitioners must continue to take root in critical, participatory, and humanizing approaches. In the face of systems that normalize burnout, despair, and the fragmentation of collective life, this year’s theme also asks us to take seriously the question: What keeps us in the work? 

We invite educators, scholars, students, activists, artists, and community practitioners from all levels and disciplines to join us in dialogue around the role of curriculum and pedagogy in social justice and collective flourishing. We welcome proposals that challenge dehumanizing paradigms and help us think more deeply about what it means to resist human disposability and imagine otherwise in this moment. 

We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following areas: 

● Interdisciplinary education research and methodologies 

● Classroom practices and pedagogies of refusal and resistance 

● Curriculum theorizing for justice and equity 

● Decolonial, abolitionist, and justice-oriented approaches to curriculum and pedagogy 

● Feminist, queer, and intersectional perspectives 

● Migration, borders, and transnational belonging 

● Language, culture, and human dignity 

● Community-based, youth, and participatory research 

● Critical perspectives on digital media and technologies in education 

● Arts-based methods, storytelling, and public pedagogies 

● Restorative practices, justice, and well-being