CALL FOR PAPERS

Epistemologies of Ignorance and Territorial Formations in Curriculum Studies

Guest Editors: Erik L. Malewski and Nathalia E. Jaramillo
Submissions due January 11, 2027

Click here to download the CFP as a PDF

How is ignorance in curriculum studies actively produced? This special issue locates its production in territorial formations, the lived, legislated, and imagined spaces where teaching and learning take root, and examines how not-knowing is produced, legitimated, and put to work through the boundaries, policies, and place-based arrangements that structure curriculum and education. In doing so, it takes up a question curriculum studies has circled but not yet centered: how educational experience across schools, communities, and transnational settings is shaped by what remains unexamined, unsaid, and unknown.

Drawing from the scholarship of Charles Mills (1997), Nancy Tuana (2006), and Shannon Sullivan (2006), and building on previous work that brought epistemologies of ignorance into education (Malewski & Jaramillo, 2011, 2022), this issue advances the claim that ignorance functions not as the absence of knowledge but as a patterned achievement, willfully refused, deliberately constructed, structurally produced, and cultivated as indifference, sustained through the arrangements that govern curriculum and pedagogy. Territorial formations are not merely backdrops to curriculum but generative conditions, at once material, legal, and lived, through which unknowing is cultivated, normalized, and defended. Not-knowing, as prior work in this journal has shown, can be cultivated as daily institutional practices through strategies of omission, marginalization, and denial operating across an entire provincial curriculum system (Schaefli et al., 2018). This special issue takes that finding as its starting point and extends it comparatively and theoretically, across territorial formations and across the qualitatively different registers through which ignorance is produced. The issue also draws on scholarship in the vein of Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2007), whose analysis of racial capitalism, carceral geographies, and the spatial production of abandonment has shaped how critical geographers and abolitionist educators theorize dispossession and not-knowing as phenomena of place, traditions this issue actively engages as it examines the entanglements of place, capital, and coloniality in the production of ignorance.

This special issue addresses a foundational assumption within curriculum studies: that ignorance is an absence, a gap to be filled by better information, more inclusive curricula, or corrected policy. Against this, we argue that ignorance is actively produced and institutionally maintained, and that curriculum and pedagogy propagate not-knowing in ways that carry profound consequences for who is seen and who is rendered invisible, for whose testimony is trusted and whose is dismissed, and for what kinds of futures become thinkable and difficult to imagine. The issue treats territorial formations not as synonymous with the nation-state but as encompassing the range of governing jurisdictions, including states, provinces, territories, parishes, prefectures, and analogous administrative formations, through which ignorance is differently structured and sustained. Territorial formations, as we use the concept, encompass geographically situated and administratively bounded cases, but they are not limited to them: psychic spaces, physical places, and collections of habituated practice, the sedimented dispositions through which not-knowing is reproduced at the level of the body and the everyday, are all within the scope of this call. Contributors are asked to be explicit about which dimensions of territorial formation their analysis engages and how.

Driving Questions

The taxonomy of willful, constructed, passive, and cultivated ignorance serves not as a set of discrete categories for contributors to select among, but as a generative framework for inquiry into how not-knowing is produced, sustained, and contested through territorial formations. The questions driving this issue cut across all four dimensions: The most consequential cases involve multiple dimensions operating simultaneously, such as willful disavowal reinforced by structural positioning and cultivated indifference sustained by constructed infrastructures of unknowing. Contributors are invited to engage that complexity rather than resolve it into a single register.

  • How do legislative interventions targeting DEI, race-conscious pedagogy, and/or Indigenous epistemologies function as epistemic projects rather than merely political ones?

  • How do territorial formations produce and sustain dispositions of not-caring-to-know about histories of racial violence, ecological harm, or colonial dispossession?

  • How is ignorance codified through legal and bureaucratic instruments, including curricular bans, reporting mandates, and financial penalties, and what knowledges do credentialing bodies and assessment regimes systematically exclude?

  • How do geographies of abandonment, inclusion, and resource distribution produce ignorance as a spatial phenomenon?

  • How are counter-curricular practices mobilized by communities to contest the epistemic conditions imposed upon them, and what forms of unknowing do counter-knowledges themselves generate?

  • How is ignorance produced and sustained at the level of subjective formation, not only through institutional arrangements?

Themes of Interest (but not limited to)

  • Place-based analyses of how territorial formations produce, sustain, or contest specific forms of ignorance in curriculum and education

  • Legislative, bureaucratic, and policy mechanisms through which ignorance is codified and circulated across educational systems

  • Embodied, affective, and habituated dimensions of not-knowing as they are reproduced through curricular routines, institutional silences, and pedagogical practice

  • Counter-knowledges, social movements, and curricular practices through which communities contest the epistemic conditions imposed upon them

  • Comparative and international analyses across provinces, territories, prefectures, parishes, or analogous governing jurisdictions

  • Historical, genealogical, and archival analyses of how territorial formations have structured curricula of unknowing over time

  • Spatial analyses of how geographies of abandonment, district boundary lines, and resource distribution produce ignorance as a phenomenon of place

  • Intersectional analyses of how race, class, gender, sexuality, language, and ability shape the distribution and experience of ignorance in educational settings

  • Analyses that interrogate whether taxonomic frameworks for understanding ignorance themselves encode the epistemic habits they purport to examine

  • Contributions from Indigenous epistemologies, decolonial frameworks, or non-Western intellectual traditions that challenge or complicate the assumptions embedded in dominant accounts of ignorance, including the Mills/Tuana/Sullivan tradition this issue inherits

Submission Guidelines

This special issue welcomes both open submissions and targeted contributions. Authors who have been specifically invited to submit are encouraged to confirm their intention with the guest editors prior to the deadline.

Submissions must:

  • Be 6,000–7,000 words in length, including references and endnotes

  • Align with the aims and scope of Curriculum Inquiry (https://www.curriculuminquiry.org/about) and make a clear contribution to curriculum studies, broadly defined

  • Include a clearly articulated purpose and contribution

  • Engage relevant scholarly literature in curriculum studies

  • Articulate how the submission engages the issue’s central conceptual apparatus; authors are strongly encouraged to address how territorial formations structure the production of ignorance in their specific case and to locate their analysis within at least one dimension of the issue’s generative taxonomy of willful, constructed, passive, and cultivated ignorance

  • Advance existing theory through coherent, well-supported claims

  • Articulate an explicit methodological or analytic approach appropriate to the aims of the paper

  • Follow APA 7 Style (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines)

  • Be submitted through Curriculum Inquiry’s online submission portal: https://rp.tandfonline.com/

  • Include both an anonymous version and a non-anonymized version; authors are responsible for removing identifying information, including name, institutional affiliation, and self-citations, from the anonymous version

Curriculum Inquiry conducts a double-anonymous peer review process. All articles accepted for the special issue will go through this process.

Submission deadline: January 11, 2027

Questions: Please direct inquiries to the guest editors or to the editorial office at curriculum.inquiry.oise@utoronto.ca

Guest Editors

Erik Malewski is Professor of Curriculum Studies at Kennesaw State University. Dr. Malewski’s research addresses topics that include sense of belonging among college students, study abroad and internationalization, the intersections of peace studies and curriculum studies, and ignorance studies within education. Select recent articles and book chapters for Dr. Malewski include Distinct Yet Overlapping Worlds: LGBQ and Gender Expansive Identities in Sense of Belonging Research on Undergraduate Students (2025, New Directions for Higher Education), I Just Can’t Seem to Quit You: My Ongoing Love Affair with Curriculum Studies in Three Parts (2025, Myers Press), Gandhi’s Walking Away: Materialisms, Complicities, and the Stuck Places of Curriculum Studies (2025, Information Age), and Postmodern Curriculum Perspectives (2023, Routledge).

Nathalia E. Jaramillo is Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Kennesaw State University. Her scholarship spans decolonial thought, decolonial feminism(s), epistemologies of ignorance, and critical curriculum studies. She is the author of Immigration and the Challenge of Education (Palgrave, 2012), co-editor of Disrupting Colonial Pedagogies (University of Illinois Press, 2023), and co-editor of Decolonial Entanglements: Praxis, Pedagogy, and Social Theory (Routledge, 2026). With Erik Malewski, she co-edited Epistemologies of Ignorance in Education (Information Age Publishing, 2011). Her forthcoming work engages ignorance as colonial residue.

References

Malewski, E., & Jaramillo, N. E. (2011). Epistemologies of ignorance in education. Information Age Publishing.

Malewski, E., & Jaramillo, N. E. (2022). Epistemologies of ignorance with/in curriculum studies: The politics of not knowing and Black lives mattering. International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 12(2), 35–69.

Mills, C. W. (1997). The racial contract. Cornell University Press.

Gilmore, R. W. (2007). Golden gulag: Prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California. University of California Press.

Schaefli, L., Godlewska, A., & Rose, J. (2018). Coming to know Indigeneity: Epistemologies of ignorance in the 2003–2015 Ontario Canadian and world studies curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 48(4), 475–498. https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2018.1518113

Sullivan, S. (2006). Revealing whiteness: The unconscious habits of racial privilege. Indiana University Press.

Tuana, N. (2006). The speculum of ignorance: The women's health movement and epistemologies of ignorance. Hypatia, 21(3), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2006.tb01110.x