2024 Conference Vision

In times of polarization, social conflict, and continuing systemic violence, it is the responsibility of education to play a significant role in addressing this systemic violence, deconstructing hierarchies, and embracing differences. No longer are educational policies bound only to social and political norms dictated within their own states, but are also influenced and shaped by transnational, capitalist corporations that determine the allocation of power (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994). Historically, anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer, labour, student, and feminist political organizing have resisted these structural and cultural injustices. As a part of these movements, transnational feminists, led by feminists of colour, resist homogenizing and exclusionary practices that historically favour white, Eurocentric understandings of the world (Herr, 2014). As inspiration for the 2024 Graduate Student Research Conference (GSRC), we lean on a transnational “feminist ethics of complex solidarity” (Tambe &Thayer, 2021, p. 20). As such, we aim to engage in meaningful conversations and learn from the experiences of collectives that seek to collaborate on shared concerns despite and because of their differences.

Our vision for the 2024 GSRC is to foster these productive dialogues and create space for knowledge exchanges and the development of potential political solidarities among participants that inspire the creation of a more equitable world, rooted in the necessary embracement of our differences. This entails the arduous scholarly task of constructing cross-discipline analyses of power structures and systems that produce hierarchies of sameness and injustice in education (Keating, 2005), in tandem with articulating points of resistance that emerge through local practices. It also encompasses scholarship that centers innovative pedagogies, curricula, and educational leadership strategies that inform the future of transformative and inclusive education. 

This year’s proposed themes for GSRC invite researchers, graduate students at all stages of their research, practitioners, and artists alike to disrupt the presumed legitimacy of dominant educational narratives by identifying the ways in which overlapping oppressions affect each of our educational disciplines, highlighting existing modes of resistance, and imagining new ways of moving forward. Further, we challenge conference participants to consider what a world would look like in which we not only connect, but flourish, at our points of difference.