Call for Papers: Making Up Inclusive Education: How Educational Realities Are Made? (MUIE)

2026-08-20

Special Issue Editors

  • Elias Helge Braun, University of Koblenz
  • Lea Klöpfer, University of Koblenz 
  • Emma Shubin, University of Luxembourg 
  • Olivera Ilić, University of Belgrade 
  • Prof. Dr. Thorsten Merl, University of Koblenz 
  • Dr. Olja Jovanović, University of Belgrade
  • Prof.in Dr.in Michelle Proyer, University of Luxembourg 

Context and Origin

This Special Issue of the European Journal of Inclusive Education (EJIE) arises from the international Spring School "Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Equity and Community in Inclusive Education" held in April 2026 at the University of Koblenz. Organised by the Universities of Belgrade, Koblenz and Luxembourg, this initiative brought together emerging researchers from psychology, pedagogy, philosophy and cultural studies backgrounds to engage in critical dialogue on inclusive education across disciplinary and national boundaries. While this issue showcases contributions that were developed for and refined during the spring school, we warmly welcome submissions from emerging scholars beyond this group whose work speaks to and extends the themes of the special issue.

For the purpose of this call, we use ‘emerging researchers’ to refer broadly to PhD candidates, early-career researchers and all those who are beginning to establish their own lines of inquiry within a research community. We recognise that this process takes different forms and does not necessarily follow a linear career path. We therefore welcome contributions from researchers at different stages of developing their independent research, including those working alongside more experienced colleagues as well as those beginning to formulate and lead their own research.

Thematic Rationale

Inclusive education is a process of community-building. While it aspires to create schools where every learner belongs (Slee, 2019), building an inclusive community inevitably involves deciding who belongs, how resources are distributed, and whose voices are heard (Fricker, 2007). These processes unfold through sedimented and emerging categories that do not simply describe educational realities, but actively shape them (Mouffe, 2011). Such categories are produced, stabilised and normalised through broader social narratives, policy frameworks, institutional structures and procedures, and professional practices concerning norms regarding difference. They are also lived in the everyday worlds of classrooms, families, peer groups, and other communities, where they may be accepted, negotiated or resisted. Finally, they are sustained, challenged, and/or reimagined through research itself—through the concepts it privileges, the methods it employs, and the stories it tells about learners, teachers, families, and communities.

This special issue invites contributions that examine how inclusive education is made and remade across these interconnected domains: through policies and institutional arrangements, through everyday educational practices, and through research and knowledge production. Taken together, these perspectives can illuminate inclusive education not simply as a policy aspiration or pedagogical approach, but as an ongoing struggle over how educational communities are built, who is recognised within them, and what kinds of participation they make possible (see Felder, 2018, Rix, 2023). By bringing these perspectives together, the special issue seeks to foster richer and more timely understandings of how inclusive education is imagined, built, and sustained. But this is not only a matter of understanding existing practices and arrangements. As Ian Hacking (1986, p. 169) claims:

“What is curious about human action is that, by and large, what I am deliberately doing depends on the possibilities of description. [...] Hence if new modes of description come into being, new possibilities for action come into being in consequence.”

Therefore, we hope that this special issue will bring us new descriptions of experiences, structures, procedures, narratives that may help reshape how we think about inclusive education and, consequently, how we work to develop it.

Scope of the special issue

We invite emerging researchers from a range of disciplinary perspectives, working in diverse educational and socio-historical contexts, to contribute high-quality theoretical, empirical, and review papers to this special issue. We are particularly interested in contributions that examine how inclusive education is shaped through social, cultural, institutional, and interpersonal processes. In particular, we welcome papers that engage with questions such as:

  • How is inclusive education shaped by broader social, cultural, scientific and political narratives about difference?
  • How do children, young people, families, and educators negotiate, resist, or use the categories through which inclusive education is organised?
  • How does research itself participate in making up inclusive education—through the concepts it privileges, the voices it amplifies, the methods it uses, and the stories it tells about learners, teachers, and communities?
  • How do educational policies, procedures, structures, and actors shape what counts as inclusion, who is eligible for support, and which educational pathways become available?

References

Felder, F. (2018), The Value of Inclusion.Journal of Philosophy of Education, 52, 54-70. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12280

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford University Press.

Hacking, I. (1986). Making up people. In T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, & D. E. Wellbery (Eds.), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (pp. 222–236). Stanford University Press.

Mouffe, C. (2011). On the Political. Routledge.

Rix, J. (2023). In Search of Education, Participation and Inclusion Embrace the Uncertain. Routledge.

Slee, R. (2019). Belonging in an age of exclusion. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 23(9), 909–922. https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2019.1602366

Submission information

Authors are invited to submit full manuscripts of up to 7,000 words (excluding references). All submissions must comply with the author guidelines of the European Journal of Inclusive Education.

All manuscripts submitted to this special issue will undergo the journal’s double-blind peer-review process and will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. Only original and previously unpublished manuscripts will be considered for publication.

Manuscripts should be submitted through the EJIE submission system: https://tidsskrift.dk/ejie/about/submissions

Important dates
  • Paper submission deadline: 20 February 2027
  • Expected publication of the special issue: end of 2027

For any questions regarding this call for papers, please contact the special issue editor Elias Braun (ebraun@uni-koblenz.de).