CALL FOR PAPERS

Racial Capitalism and Education

Editor: Gabrielle Monique Warren
Submissions due: February 22, 2027

Click here to download the CFP as a PDF.

Racial capitalism, understood as the mutually constitutive relationship between racialization and capital accumulation, has become an increasingly vital framework for analyzing education’s role in the reproduction and naturalization of differentiation. Drawing on the Black Radical Tradition articulated by scholars including Cedric Robinson (1983/2021), racial capitalism names a system of power that is neither reducible to race nor to class, but operates through their entanglement (see also Kelley, 2017). The concept has since been extended and debated in work on its modern US formation (Burden-Stelly, 2020), on its colonial dimensions (Koshy et al., 2022), on its co-production with settler colonialism (Pasternak, 2020), and on its place in critical ethnic studies (Melamed, 2015). From K-12 schooling to higher education, and from policy architecture to pedagogical practice, educational institutions participate in the simultaneous production of differentiation and the extraction of value from populations.

This analytic has a specific history. Racial capitalism emerged as a South African anti-apartheid Marxist concept around 1976 (Melamed, 2015) and was later theorized by Robinson (1983/2021) as a global condition: racial capitalism is capitalism. On this account, racism is not external to capitalism. Capitalism extends and incorporates preexisting hegemonies and hierarchies. Racial logic too often naturalizes inequity by treating socially produced differences as innate, whether biological, cultural, or environmental (Koshy et al., 2022, pp. 2–3). Therefore, a racial capitalist analysis demands observing how “group differentiated vulnerabilities onto premature death” works across distinct yet interconnected places and scales (Gilmore, 2022, p. X).

This special issue invites scholarly work that grapples with racial capitalism as an analytic for understanding curriculum, pedagogy, schooling, and futurity. We welcome contributions that move beyond documenting inequity in education to theorize how education functions as a technology of accumulation, dispossession, and containment. Recent scholarship has begun this work. Gerrard et al. (2022) argue that education and racial capitalism are inextricably linked, and Au (2022) traces how standardization and high-stakes testing reproduce inequality by design. Other work takes up racial capitalism and education in specific places: STEM education in Chicago Public Schools (Morales-Doyle & Gutstein, 2019), school discipline reform and student disposability (Koon et al., 2024), the university town (Serrano, 2023), marketized reform and policy borrowing in Cape Town (Herbert, 2023), corporatized reform and plantation legacies in Liberia (Hook, 2023), and the ordinary extractivism of British elite schools overseas (Courtois & Donnelly, 2024). Neaves et al. (2026) examine “organised abandonment” as an educational phenomenon. We seek to build on this scholarship while also attending to the intellectual genealogies, epistemologies, and fugitive practices through which educators and communities have resisted and reimagined educational possibility.

We encourage contributors to illuminate how racial differentiation and accumulation are constituted together in particular settings, attending to historical variation and contradiction. We also welcome arguments about the limits, tensions, and explanatory reach of current racial capitalist frameworks.

We are interested in examinations of inclusion, equity, reconciliation, social mobility, and educational opportunity that ask how far such projects leave accumulation and dispossession intact, or help institutions secure legitimacy.

We invite critical examinations of how schooling helps organize land, labour, property, knowledge, and differential life chances. This includes interrogations of the institutional practices through which education makes people available for exploitation, legitimizes dispossession, or normalizes abandonment. We also encourage analyses of how curricular knowledge authorizes ownership, occupation, development, merit, productivity, and particular accounts of the human. Whose histories make existing relations appear legitimate? How do curricular narratives present racial and capitalist regimes as inevitable, or colonial violence as complete? How do assessment and credentialling assign differential value to people, knowledge, and labour?

Drawing on frameworks from the Black Radical Tradition (see Johnson & Lubin, 2017), critical geographies, critical policy studies, sociology of education, and anti-colonial theories we welcome work that asks:

  • How do curriculum and pedagogy both reproduce and potentially disrupt the logics of racial capitalism?

  • How have education systems, policies, and practices been entangled with racial capitalist formations, historically and today, including (but not limited to) settler colonialism, imperialism, neocolonialism, the afterlives of slavery, genocide, fascism, the carceral state, techno-feudalism, and hyperpolitics (Durand, 2024; Hartman, 2007; Jäger, 2026)?

  • How do communities produce knowledge, aesthetics, and educational practices that resist capitalist rationality and reimagine collective futures?

  • What does it mean to teach, learn, and organize in the ruins and possibilities of contemporary education systems?

  • How are these critical practices sustained, who performs the labour, what do they redistribute, and how do institutions absorb or commercialize them?

  • How does research itself participate in extraction through precarious academic labour, the conversion of community knowledge into scholarly authority, and institutional rewards for critical expertise?

Scope and Themes

We welcome contributions across multiple registers, including but not limited to:

  • Theoretical essays that develop or extend frameworks for understanding racial capitalism in educational contexts

  • Historical analyses tracing the genealogies of racial capitalism through educational institutions, policies, and practices, including colonial legacies and their contemporary manifestations

  • Critical examinations of contemporary education policy (standardization, assessment, privatization, charter expansion, surveillance, streaming) as racial capitalist governance

  • Studies of curriculum as epistemic disobedience

  • Ethnographic and qualitative work examining pedagogical resistance, collective care, marronage, and fugitive educational practices within and against state schooling

  • Aesthetics and cultural production in educational contexts—how art, music, literature, and cultural work offer frameworks for curriculum and pedagogy beyond capital

Submission Guidelines

Manuscript length: 6,000–8,000 words (including references)

Submission deadline: February 22, 2027

Style guide: Curriculum Inquiry follows APA 7. We recommend consulting the APA website for further information (https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines)

Submission system: Manuscripts should be submitted through Curriculum Inquiry’s online submission system (Submission Portal), which you can access via the following link: https://rp.tandfonline.com/

Cover letter: Submissions should be accompanied by a cover letter which includes a short statement on how the submission engages with the call and states specifically how the work engages with racial capitalism as an analytic of curriculum, pedagogy, schooling, and/or futurity.

Review process: We seek reviewers and contributors who bring rigorous intellectual engagement, theoretical sophistication, and commitment to scholarship grounded in justice-oriented inquiry. You can find more information about Curriculum Inquiry’s review process here: https://www.curriculuminquiry.org/editorial-review-process

Copyright considerations: Where submissions include artistic or creative materials (e.g., poetry, song lyrics, visual art, etc.), authors are responsible for ensuring that all materials are either original, in the public domain, used under a Creative Commons license that permits commercial reuse, or accompanied by written permission from the copyright holder. You can find our copyright guidelines through the following link: https://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/publishing-your-research/writing-your-paper/using-third-party-material/

All submissions must also adhere to Curriculum Inquiry’s research article submission guidelines, including expectations regarding:

  • Purpose and contribution. A clearly articulated purpose and a persuasive account of the manuscript’s significance for the field.

  • Scholarly engagement. Substantive engagement with relevant literature in critical curriculum studies, the Black Radical Tradition (see Johnson & Lubin, 2017), critical geographies, critical policy studies, sociology of education, anti-colonial theories, and/or related fields.

  • Claims and implications. Coherent, well-supported claims, with implications that attend to education as an interlocking system of relations, including (but not limited to) ongoing enclosures and dispossession, racialized divisions of labour, and the extraction of value (see Gerrard et al., 2022).

  • Methodology or analytic approach. An explicit methodological or analytic approach, justified in relation to the aims of the paper.

  • Organization and style. Clear organization and scholarly writing consistent with the journal’s style.

 Should you have any questions about the special issue, we encourage you to reach out to us at curriculum.inquiry.oise@utoronto.ca

We look forward to receiving work that advances our collective theorization of education’s entanglement with racial capitalism and the liberatory possibilities harbored within educational struggle.

Click here to download the CFP as a PDF.

References

Au, W. (2022). Unequal by design: High-stakes testing and the standardization of inequality (2nd ed.). Routledge.

Burden-Stelly, C. (2020, July 1). Modern U.S. racial capitalism. Monthly Review. https://monthlyreview.org/2020/07/01/modern-u-s-racial-capitalism/

Courtois, A., & Donnelly, M. (2024). Racial capitalism and the ordinary extractivism of British elite schools overseas. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 45(3), 432–449. https://doi.org/10.1080/01596306.2024.2335008

Durand, C. (2024). How Silicon Valley unleashed techno-feudalism: The making of the digital economy (D. Broder, Trans.). Verso.

Gerrard, J., Sriprakash, A., & Rudolph, S. (2022). Education and racial capitalism. Race Ethnicity and Education, 25(3), 425–442. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2021.2001449

Hartman, S. V. (2007). Lose your mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Herbert, A. S. (2023). Shareholder schools: Racial capitalism, policy borrowing, and marketized education reform in Cape Town, South Africa. Comparative Education Review, 67(S1), S66–S88. https://doi.org/10.1086/722271

Hook, T. (2023). Schooling as plantation: Racial capitalism and plantation legacies in corporatized education reform in Liberia. Comparative Education Review, 67(S1), S89–S109.

Jäger, A. (2026). Hyperpolitics: Extreme politicization without political consequences. Verso.

Johnson, G. T., & Lubin, A. (Eds.). (2017). Futures of Black radicalism. Verso.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2017, January 12). What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism? Boston Review. https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-introduction-race-capitalism-justice/

Koon, D. S.-V., Pham, H., Jordan, C., Chong, S., Haro, B. N., Harris, J. N., Huddlestun, D., & Prim, J. (2024). Racial capitalism and student disposability in an era of school discipline reform. American Journal of Education, 130(2). https://doi.org/10.1086/728229

Koshy, S., Cacho, L. M., Byrd, J. A., & Jefferson, B. J. (Eds.). (2022). Colonial racial capitalism. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478023371

Melamed, J. (2015). Racial capitalism. Critical Ethnic Studies, 1(1), 76–85. https://doi.org/10.5749/jcritethnstud.1.1.0076

Morales-Doyle, D., & Gutstein, E. R. (2019). Racial capitalism and STEM education in Chicago Public Schools. Race Ethnicity and Education, 22(4), 525–544. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2019.1592840

Neaves, C., Sriprakash, A., Wilson, A., Willatt, A., & Látìnwọ̀-Ọlájídé, V. (2026). Organised abandonment in education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 47(2), 353–370. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2025.2592127

Pasternak, S. (2020). Assimilation and partition: How settler colonialism and racial capitalism co-produce the borders of Indigenous economies. South Atlantic Quarterly, 119(2), 301–324. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8177771

Robinson, C. J. (2021). Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition (3rd ed.). University of North Carolina Press. (Original work published 1983)

Serrano, C. (2023). Schooling in the university town: The racial capitalist foundations of education. Antipode, 55(2), 599–619. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12904

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after Man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015