Dear colleagues,
I am excited to share a CFP for chapters for an edited collection, tentatively titled "Epistemic (In)justice in Language Teacher Education Research: Decolonial Possibilities Through Arts‑Based and Translingual Inquiry," that I am co-editing with Gloria Park and Bedrettin Yazan. Please review the call (attached and copied and pasted below) and consider submitting a proposal by August 1, 2026. I am happy to field any preliminary questions!
Best,
Megan Heise
mheise21
Call for Chapter Proposals
Tentative: Epistemic (In)justice in Language Teacher Education Research: Decolonial Possibilities Through Arts‑Based and Translingual Inquiry
(To be submitted to The Palgrave Series)
Edited by
Gloria Park, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, USA
Megan Heise, Utah Tech University, Utah, USA
Bedrettin Yazan, The University of Texas at San Antonio, Texas, USA
This edited volume examines how epistemic (in)justice shapes the knowledge systems in research practices and pedagogical orientations of language teacher education, and advances arts‑based and translingual inquiry as decolonial possibilities. This book is anchored in the premise that dominant Eurocentric, monolingual, and post-positivist epistemes (or epistemic orientations) continue to delineate which ways of knowing are recognized as legitimate and who gets access to certain knowledge domains, what is included in curricula developed, and in turn, how these are practiced in classroom and research contexts. In particular, just as epistemic orientations and hierarchies are critical, it is equally critical to continue to challenge who makes these decisions about privileging certain epistemic orientations in validating, legitimizing, and making them visible. As such, this edited collection is framed by Fricker’s (2007) Epistemic Injustice: Power & the Ethics of Knowing, which raises fundamental questions about “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower” (p. 1). Specifically, Fricker discusses the differences between testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.
- Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word (for instance, police do not believe you because you are black);
- Hermeneutical injustice occurs at a prior stage, when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experiences (for instance, you suffer sexual harassment in a culture that still lacks that critical concept)… (emphasis added, p. 1).
Within the fields of critical applied linguistics and language teacher education research, we witness many acts of epistemic injustices due to the ways in which English language, English language teachers, and English language teacher education research are positioned and who makes decisions about who the knowers are and what epistemes would be displayed or presented. Thus, our hope in this edited collection is to explore the existing epistemological hierarchies, orientations, and agents circulating and wielding their power over the minoritized communities. As such, the goal of our collection is to bring together scholars who challenge these hierarchies by centering embodied, creative, multilingual, community‑rooted, and historically marginalized forms of knowledge.
In particular, we build on the work of Yazan (2019, 2025) exploring the use of critical autoethnography in pedagogizing identity in language teacher education. Moreover, Kim and Park’s (2020) exploration of sijo poetry in TESOL Quarterly and Park’s (2013) work on poetic autobiographical inquiry exploring identity-in-practice and identity-in-contexts become central in curating this proposed edited collection. Cushman’s (2016) article in College English on the decolonial implications of translingual pedagogies, and Ruiz and Arellano’s (2019) collaborative chapter on “Decolonial epistemologies through medicinal history and quilting as method” further inform our approach to such embodied forms of meaning making. Finally, we include Heise’s (2025) “Hope through archive: Refugee youths’ counterstories in the Ritsona Kingdom Journal,” exploring her arts-based work with refugee youths’ creative counterstories of their experiences challenging the binary identity as villains or victims. As such, this collection builds on emerging scholarship that illustrate how arts-based methodologies, e.g., poetry, visual storytelling, performance, digital multimodality, and aesthetic inquiry, can create epistemic space for diverse intersectional teacher identities, transcultural knowledging, and lived linguistic, cultural, and racial experiences. It also highlights how such approaches foster epistemic justice by valuing ways of knowing that have long been excluded from language teacher education research and practice. For instance, with the current global and political issues around the world, this edited collection invites traditional chapter length submissions as well as shorter arts-based and pedagogical chapters impacted by current global and political issues. In that, this collection raises questions about who gets to validate what counts as epistemes in academia, especially in language teacher education and its research.
Chapters span global (southern) contexts and foreground translingual, transmodal, and decolonial perspectives that resist the dominance of English-centric and Euro-American paradigms. Together, they demonstrate how arts-based inquiry not only broadens what counts as valid research but also supports teacher-learners in reimagining pedagogical possibilities, cultivating critical reflexivity, and engaging in transformative knowledge-making. This collection offers clinical practitioners, teacher-scholars, teacher educators, and researchers a framework for revisiting research methodologies, challenging epistemic inequities, and re-envisioning language teacher education as a space where multiple epistemes can coexist, interact, and lead to tensions at times. In our edited collection, our goal is to provide authors more freedom to engage in creative ways of presenting their work that is aligned with their epistemic orientation. Thus, while the below provides a template of organization, each author can create their own headings/organizations without feeling restricted epistemologically:
- Arts-Based and Translingual Inquiry as Avenues toward Epistemic Justice (Empirical and Conceptual, Full-Length Chapters) (5000-5500 words, all inclusive), which should include the following suggested heading areas:
- Framing the Issue–this section should include both a brief introduction and literature background to set the stage for the argument
- Method of Inquiry (Be specific about the context(s) of the inquiry, who the participants are, what the data sources are, how the data were collected, and how the data were analyzed.) Please try to use visuals to supplement the descriptions of the method of inquiry sub sections.
- Results and Discussion of Emerging Themes (Major Section)
- Pedagogical and Research Oriented Implications (Major Section)
- Author Takeaways
- Pedagogical and Research Tasks & Additional Readings
- References (including DOIs)
- Artful Ways of Knowing: Responding to Current Issues (Pedagogical Chapters) (1000-3000 words, all inclusive)
- This section will curate all types of arts based images, visuals, short poems or epistles that are stand alone pieces with brief descriptions of how these arts based work can be used in challenging the epistemic injustices around the globe. These can accompany discussion questions, classroom activities, and pedagogical tasks.
Therefore, we welcome abstracts focusing on the abovementioned areas that continue to challenge the epistemes validated, constructed, and legitimated in the fields of critical applied linguistics and language teacher education.
Please adhere to the following timeline, and we appreciate you following directions for submissions:
Timeline & Due Date Information:
- Needed August 1, 2026: 400-500 word abstract due (including references and DOIs). Please email the abstract with clear subject heading of “Epistemic (In)Justice Proposal—Last Name(s)” to gloria.park
- October 1, 2026: Authors will be notified of the results of their proposal submission.
- May 15, 2027: Full length chapters, shorter chapters, and current issues transformed into arts based work (please refer to the above suggested heading areas)
References
Cushman, E. (2016). Translingual and decolonial approaches to meaning making. College English, 78(3), 234–242. https://doi.org/10.58680/ce201627654
Fricker, B. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.
Heise, M. (2025). Hope through archive: Refugee youths’ counterstories in the Ritsona Kingdom Journal. Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric, 27(2), 1-9. https://doi.org/10.37514/PEI-J.2025.27.2.15
Kim, K., & Park, G. (2020). “It Is More Expressive for Me”: A translingual approach to meaningful literacy instruction through Sijo poetry. TESOL Quarterly, 54(2), 281-309. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesq.545
Park, G. (2013). My autobiographical poetic rendition: An inquiry into humanizing our teacher-scholarship. L2 Journal Special Themed Issue: L2 Writing and Personal History, 5(1), 6-18. http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2wx585r5
Ruiz, I. D., & Arellano, S. C. (2019). La cultura nos cura: Reclaiming decolonial epistemologies through medicinal history and quilting as method. In R. García & D. Baca (Eds.), Rhetorics elsewhere and otherwise: Contested modernities, decolonial visions (pp. 141–168). National Council of Teachers of English.
Yazan, B. (2019). Identities and ideologies in a language teacher candidate’s autoethnography: Making meaning of storied experience. TESOL Journal, 10(4), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.1002/tesj.500
Yazan, B. (2025). Pedagogizing identity in teacher education through critical autoethnographic narrative. RELC Journal, 56(1), 165–183. https://doi.org/10.1177/00336882241293835
FINAL-Epistemic-(In)Justice)-EditedVolume-AbstractCall (1).pdf