Introduction

Being a teenager today opens you up to a social media feed filled with a chaotic blend of viral tree-planting challenges, AI-generated disasters, and sensationalist headlines about the climate crises. You know the planet is changing, you see the floods and feel the heatwaves in your own community. However, what you face online is a barrage of conflicting noises. 

“How do we know who to believe?” This question became the heartbeat of a recent study involving more than 7,000 secondary school students across 43 schools in India. We found that these students are thinking critically about climate change, recognising how its impact varies across social groups, but are also grappling with a secondary crisis: a lack of access to credible, evidence-based information about climate issues.

Between July 2024 and November 2025, these secondary school students in four Indian states logged on to complete an online climate change education module developed by Cambridge University Press & Assessment. Designed as a structured, sequential learning experience, the module aimed to build studentsā€™ understanding of global climate issues, their human causes, and their temporal consequences for ecosystems and communities. Because learners had to complete each section before moving to the next, the design reinforced incremental learning. Participation in the module was  voluntary  rather than completing it as part of a regimented science lesson. An independent mixed-methods evaluation, drawing on surveys and focus group discussions, revealed deeper insights into how young people process climate learning.

Local realities to global inequalities

Through the survey and focus group discussions that formed the studyā€™s research methods, students demonstrated an increased understanding of human causes of climate change and its historical evolution. They articulated how rising emissions affect biodiversity, extreme weather patterns, and public health. Importantly, they connected global processes to local realities such as floods, heatwaves, droughts, and water scarcity. Rather than viewing climate change as an abstract scientific phenomenon, many described it as something woven into their everyday lived experiences.

A striking finding was studentsā€™ nuanced awareness of climate inequality. Many recognised that poor and marginalised populations are often the most vulnerable despite contributing least to global emissions. Consequentially, they highlighted the need for solutions tailored at different levels: local, state, national, and global. Students recognised that mitigation and adaptation require coordinated efforts, but also context-sensitive strategies. Moreover, students demonstrated a sense of agency and motivation to act even through micro initiatives such as reducing electricity use, limiting single-use plastics, planting trees, conserving water, and advocating within their communities.

Proliferation of misinformation 

However, students felt that their ability to act on climate uses was often constrained by a lack of access to credible information. While some students discussed accessing climate content through school subjects such as science or environmental management, and others actively followed reputable news sources, a majority cited social media – particularly YouTube and Instagram – as their primary source of climate information. Students mentioned well-known international and Indian public figures who advocate for environmental sustainability, noting how visible champions make climate issues relatable.

Students described the digital information ecosystem as both enabling and problematic. Viral initiatives such as mass tree-planting and ocean clean-up campaigns helped raise awareness about environmental issues. But they also pointed out that often the solution becomes more visible than the underlying problem: ā€˜when a solution is ordered to combat that problem or some plan is built to combat that problem, then that’s talked aboutā€¦ without that solution, we wouldn’t have known about the problem in the first placeā€™ 

More concerning for many students was the growing prevalence of misinformation, including ā€˜fake newsā€™, sensationalised headlines, and AI-generated content that blurs the line between credible and false information. Thus, the question, ā€˜How do we know who to believe?ā€™ emerged as a central theme in their reflections. Moreover, students linked misinformation and sensationalism to climate anxiety. In contrast, access to accurate, evidence-based information -ā€˜more statistical and analytical data,ā€™ that have had ā€˜a lot of processing behind themā€™-appeared to reduce confusion and restore direction. As one student articulated: ā€˜Accurate awareness gives us confidence, motivation, and ā€¦ direction to take practical steps.ā€™ This difference between crisis-driven narratives and evidence-based explanations proved subtle but significant.  When climate change is framed solely as impending disaster in crisis-driven vocabulary, it can breed despair. When it is explained through evidence, with space for agency and action, it can foster engagement. This raises an important question: how can students access reliable, evidence-based information about climate change?

Importantly, students did not place responsibility for navigating misinformation solely on themselves. Instead, they described a distributed responsibility: young people must seek reliable evidence, parents and teachers must guide and contextualise, and institutions should provide trustworthy resources. Teachers were seen as particularly important mediators. In a world of algorithm-driven feeds, educators remain anchors of credibility. Several students emphasised the need to ā€˜rely on… our eldersā€™ and informed mentors who can help interpret complex issues.

There was also a call for structural solutions. Many suggested that the government should establish a central, freely accessible repository of climate information, where students and the wider public could engage with verified data, research, and educational materials. Such a resource, they argued, would not only help combat misinformation but also democratise access to knowledge.

Conclusion: The way forward

A key finding from this project concerns how secondary school students access information to educate themselves about climate change and sustainability. As discerning learners, they are questioning sources of information and seeking evidence-based data from a variety of sources they consider reliable. As non-passive recipients of knowledge, they are processing climate learning through their own lived experiences (e.g. of individual responsibility) and contextual knowledge (e.g. of unequal climate impact). These findings corroborate research from other contexts and cohorts (Brandli et al., 2024; Walshe et al., 2024).

While international policy frameworks recognise the importance of contextualised learning (Singh & Shah, 2022), these findings provide for climate educators, policymakers, and parents: young people are asking to be equipped with the knowledge and tools needed to evaluate evidence, interrogate narratives, and act with informed conviction towards more sustainable and equitable futures. 

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of Cambridge University Press and Assessment (India) for facilitating learnersā€™ participation in the survey and focus group discussions, and the Cambridge Humanities Research Grant for funding this research.

References

Brandli, L., Reginatto, G., Salvia, A., & C. Diniz, P. (2024). Student engagement on climate learning: What does the academic community say about it? International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 26, 406ā€“426. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJSHE-06-2023-0219

Singh, S., & Shah, J. (2022). Case Studies on Adaptation and Climate Resilience in Schools and Educational Settings. Global Centre on Adaptation. https://gca.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Case-Studies-on-Adaptation-and-Climate-Resilience-in-Schools-and-Educational-Settings_web.pdf

Walshe, N., Perry, J., & Healy, G. (2024). Student perspectives on climate change and sustainability education in England: Experiences and expectations. UCL Open Environment. https://doi.org/10.14324/ucloepreprints.283.v1

Nidhi Singal is a Professor of Disability and Inclusive Education at the Faculty of Education, and Vice President of Hughes Hall College, University of Cambridge. She also convenes the Cambridge Network for Disability and Education Research (CaNDER). 

Camilla H. Chaudhary is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge. She is co-founder of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network, member of the Executive Team, ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½, and Associate Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Education. 

Educational research is never neutral. It is shaped by who we are, where we stand, and how we are seen. My recent fieldwork in rural Sindh brought this reality into sharp focus. It was my first sustained period of research in a rural setting in Pakistan, and I entered the field acutely aware of my dual insider- outsider position. I am Pakistani, I speak Urdu (the national language) and even understand some basic Sindhi, the local language. I also understand the political and cultural structures (both historical and contemporary) that shape the country and province of Sindh. But I grew up in Karachi, which while the capital of Sindh, is a metropolitan megacity, and a social, economic and cultural melting pot in the country. I was educated in elite institutions (studying British curricula) shaped by colonial legacies, and later studied abroad. I am both from the context and distant from it. 

The tension between belonging and distance accompanied me from the start. Driving to the fieldwork context, I took photographs from the car window both of the rural scenery – mustard fields and guava groves, mud-brick homes, and distant shots of people ā€“ and urbanised communities with levels of development that surprised me. While doing so, I started questioning myself. Was I ā€˜aestheticisingā€™ rural ontologies by turning harsh lived realities into picturesque frames? Concurrently, to what extent was I an outsider that the urbanisation was so surprising to me? I realised that my gaze was shaped by urban privilege and possible learnt bias and, albeit unintentionally, I was entering the rural field with an ā€˜otheringā€™ gaze.

This recognition came through a process of critical reflexivity, one that was neither singular, nor comfortable. Positionality, often viewed as necessary paragraphs to be inserted into methodology sections, is in fact a visceral, relational phenomenon that impacts how we enter and act in the field. It is a continuous, uncomfortable process of interrogating the assumptions that travel with us into the field. It informs what we say and how we interpret words, actions, and silences, how we respond to gestures (perhaps of hospitality) from participants, how we present ourselves to our participants.

In the field, I expected to encounter gender inequalities that are structurally and socially entrenched in Pakistan, and visible in everyday interactions. They shape social structures ā€“ such as access to education and employment ā€“ and socio-cultural practices that predominantly quieten womenā€™s voices. I carried this knowledge consciously, but withoutĀ  recognising how deeply it had sedimented into the lens I brought to the field: when I met women educators, I expected stories of gendered constraint. While inequalities were evident -particularly in the number of women and children involved in strenuous physical labour, and in the fact that most of the women educators reported to men- I also met agentic women who were self-actualising and strategically navigating the environment and systems they were operating in. I met women teachers who were vividly articulate about how they created impactful practice in highly resource-constrained environments, and female government officials who commanded authority in rooms filled with men. Perhaps the most outstanding example was our local research assistant ā€“ a woman- who was also our gatekeeper in the field, navigating all our field requirements from access to government officials, logistics of travel, and training note-takers.Ā 

I recognise that these women may be anomalies to hierarchical patriarchy, most critically, because they were educated. Nonetheless they challenged dominant narratives that frame rural Pakistani women as passive subjects of patriarchy, flattening the complexities of lived experiences. While structural inequalities undeniably exist, foregrounding them unquestioningly obscures everyday acts of actualisation, resistance, and negotiation. My own surprise at encountering such manifestations of female agency in the rural field context was itself revealing by making me question the epistemic frameworks I had internalised.

As a researcher of comparative and international education, a native of a postcolonial society, I consider myself sensitive to and critical of the colonial genealogies that shape knowledge production. In particular, such shaping tends to highlight inequalities and injustices in the global south, without sufficiently engaging with the complexities of southern lived experiences. By doing so, it creates deficit discourses that serve to reify those very same inequities. However, I realised in this field experience that my own educational and lived experiences ā€“ shaped by those same influences ā€“ had created a deeply embedded bias that I had to let go off and view my context with fresh, situated lens. Critical reflexivity demands turning such an analytic gaze onto ourselves. In order to do this, I recorded my moments of realisation as data about my context and myself, and created an ongoing practice of reflection and self-questioning when I engaged with the data. I adopted consistent and ongoing practices that I internally labelled ā€˜catch your biasā€™.Ā 

Through such practices, I realised that my understanding of gendered lived realities in that setting had also become overly deterministic. I was overlooking the nuanced, context-specific ways in which women can exercise power. This does not mean romanticising agency or denying constraint. Rather, it means holding both simultaneously: acknowledging structural gendered inequalities while recognising womenā€™s capacity to act within, against, and beyond those structures. Such thinking challenges existing binaries in development discourses e.g., rural/urban, traditional/ modern, oppressed/empowered. 

The process of being critically reflexive then, is an ethical necessity requiring us to question how our social identity ā€“ in my case class, gender, education, and location- mediates what we see and fail to see. It can create moments of discomfort (indeed it likely always does) but also pathways for deeper understanding of ourselves and our context. It can come in fleeting moments – such as while taking pictures from the car, in pauses during data collection, and while reflecting on field notes ā€“ that demand recognition and reflection by the researcher. This process was a deeply moving one for me reinforcing that ultimately, awareness of positionality is about cultivating humility. It is about entering the field with openness to being unsettled and letting the field speak back to us.

Camilla Hadi Chaudhary

Camilla H. Chaudhary is a researcher at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge whose work focuses on educational inclusion, education policy, school leadership, and climate justice education, particularly in low-income communities. Drawing on social justice theories and southern knowledge frameworks, her research foregrounds situated knowledges and more diverse ways of thinking about education. She is co-founder of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network, which explores context-driven approaches to educational research in South Asia, and is a member of the ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½, serving on its Executive Team. She also serves as Associate Editor of the Cambridge Journal of Education.

For usā€”six researchers working with Southern epistemologies across disparate contextsā€”the theme of this yearā€™s ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ conference^[1] provided us the space to tease out some common threads in our doctoral projects, being undertaken with the same supervisor.

The idea of ā€˜(re)bordering educationā€™ evoked for us the demarcation of boundariesā€”epistemic, theoretical, methodological, pragmatic, and axiologicalā€”that define what constitutes a transgressive act. It was the interstices between these boundaries that each of us sought to address in our respective research settings. At the intersections where the established order begins to fray, we each delved into questions around agency, empowerment, and redefinition, anchored heavily in Southern epistemologies.

Away from scholarly or abstract conceptions, we drew on a literal understanding of ā€˜liminalā€™ as something ā€˜on a boundary or threshold […]ā€™^[2]. Liminality, for us, was the potent space where new ideas and frameworks emerge from the testing of entrenched perimeters. This was exemplified in the visceral struggle of our participants (belonging to different stakeholder groups) to redefine themselves against systems that arenā€™t built for them. In Nigeria, it was mothers of children with neurodevelopmental disorders; in Pakistan, it was headteachers reimagining leadership under strain. In South Africa, India, and within Tibetan refugee communities, our stories were about rethinking inclusion, crisis response, and the process of research itself.

The session was built around five provocations, presenting distinct yet interconnected perspectives on how education, in its many forms, is being re-bordered. For each of us, the subject matter and participants in our research represented a breaking of norms. Equally, we ourselves, guided by a common research mentor, wished to challenge through our work, conventions around the topics, processes and perspectives that comprise ā€˜legitimateā€™ research. By exploring the intersections of disability, gender, race, class, and refugee status, we collectively sought conceptual and methodological innovations for ā€˜justā€™ and transformative education systems. By ā€˜justā€™ we mean education systems that confront and dismantle culture, economic, social, and geographical barriers through inclusive policies and transformative practice, ensuring equitable opportunities for marginalised communities^[3].   The foci of the five provocations were the following:

1. Re-bordering Agency: Mothers transgressing boundaries to transform the education of their children with disabilities in Nigeria (Basirat Razaq-Shuaib)

In Nigeria, children with disabilities, particularly children with neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) remain sidelined despite progressive legislation meant to safeguard their educational inclusion. This injustice places mothers in a constant state of crisis, having to continuously renegotiate the absence of support for their childrenā€™s education, resulting in truncated educational journeys and extra costs. Utilising an Afrocentric lens, the presentation explored how mothers carve out new pathways within fraught spaces, harnessing resilience and strategic resistance to transform their childrenā€™s learning experiences. Through the re-bordering of education and its purpose, these mothers re-engineered spaces where their children could flourish. Questioning the legitimacy of expert knowledge and transgressing prescribed sites of learning, this research flipped the narrative from what is broken to what is possible without excusing the governmentā€™s inaction. In doing so, it made a case for context-relevant policies that reflect the ingenuity already at work in the face of systemic neglect.

Provocations: Who defines what education should be like for children with disabilities? What do we do when the prescribed ways of educating children donā€™t appear fit for purpose and able to serve all? Whose knowledge counts in the how of education for children with disabilities?

2. Transgressing Expectations: Headteachers Redefining Headship in Karachiā€™s Low-Income Schools (Camilla Hadi Chaudhary)

Researching with headteachers of schools catering to low-income communities in Karachi, this piece interrogated what constitutes inclusive headship within resource- and time-constrained school environments. Examining headteachersā€™ reflections of their practices, the study found they actualised situated ā€˜transgressionsā€™ in order to support their students and create pathways to their inclusion in environments that were fraught with financial and structural inequities. Headteachers’ commitment to supporting their students transgressed prescribed professional expectations, upturning commonly held perceptions about them lacking professional motivation. By bringing to light these practices we begin to re-border understandings of inclusive headship. Furthermore, by creating micro- spaces for change within their schools and in their studentsā€™ conditions, these headteachers introduced liminality into contexts where extreme inadequacy of resources had created semi-permanent states of crises.

Provocation: How can transgressions become process for ā€˜justā€™ goals? What is the role of policy and training?

3. Transgressive Spaces of Inclusion: Reimagining a Pedagogy of Play for Autistic Children in South Africa (Stephanie Nowack)

The South African education reform underscores the importance of inclusion and play in fostering learners’ holistic development. However, most autistic children are educated in special schools, where play policies overlook geo-political and neurodivergent dimensions. Building on the experiences of predominantly Black participants, this research illuminates the intersectionality of autism and race, historically overlooked. The research delves into transgressive spaces of education by exploring educatorsā€™ experiences with a pedagogy of play (PoP) in South African autism schools. Through immersive exploration in pre-school classrooms, findings indicate that educators in these settings emphasised exploration, enjoyment, and empowerment, underpinned by trust and structures, which form the core of a PoP. The research highlights the importance of harnessing learnings from these liminal spaces.

Provocations: How can we harness what can be learnt from transgressive special schools? Why are they rendered invisible if this is where the education of autistic children in South Africa is taking place?

4. Leveraging Crisis: Pandemic Responses in Indiaā€™s Under-Resourced Schools (Nikita Jha)

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically affected schools across India, particularly those operating with minimal resources. This presentation examined the experiences of an educational NGO in Punjab, where schools found ways to innovate and adapt in the face of crisis. Without governmental support, these schools found avenues to balance education provision, community engagement, and compliance with regulations. The research shed light on how roles, spaces and processes were recast by schools during the pandemic, transgressing traditional notions of schooling. This adaptability and resilience offer important lessons on how non-mainstream schools can effectively navigate crises, emphasising the need to centre these experiences in future educational responses to emergencies.

Provocation: What can we learn from the crisis experience of such ā€˜invisibleā€™ schools? What ā€˜legitimateā€™ learning role do these schools occupy within the education ecosystem?

5. Improvisation as transgression: Reflections from an ethnographic study with Tibetan refugees-in-exile (Surya Pratap Deka)

The final presentation explored the potential of improvised fieldwork practices in research, using fieldnote writing as an example. It highlighted how an ethical dilemma in the field left the ethnographer at a loss for words, and how this disorientation was captured on paper through a doodle. Workshopping the doodle highlighted the improvisational nature of fieldnote writing and its epistemic value in inscribing and articulating untranslatable field experiences. These multi-modal improvisations challenge the conventional methodological view of writing as a passive transcription of experience. Building on this example, the presentation argued that improvisations are not exceptions but a feature of deep-immersive fieldworkā€”and of social life more broadly. In fact, improvisation in the face of uncertainty is a defining reality for the Tibetan refugee community-in-exile as they navigate the liminal experience of statelessness in their daily lives. Taking improvisation seriously in our research can redefine the methods-practice boundary, expanding the conversation from how methods shape practice to how, in turn, field practices can transform methodological thinking. In this particular case, it also serves to honour the lives of the people we study.

Provocations: How have you navigated fieldwork contingencies and uncertainties? What new insights have arisen from these experiences? How do your fieldwork improvisations challenge the methodological status quo and contribute to a more context-sensitive and just research agenda?

Concluding reflections

By challenging geographical, methodological, and pedagogical boundaries in education, this symposium sought to probe what constitutes just research, especially when held against taken-for-granted, Northern frames of reference for educational best practices. We each examined and made visible the transgressions that materialise in the interactions between subject and context, individual and structure, policy and practice, and between institutional structure and field reality.

We believe that illuminating the liminality, the capturing of transgressions doesn’t happen by chance, but needs to be a conscious part of the research design. Data on its own is not valid or accurate- it is also the lens that we, as researchers. bring to it- the questions we choose to ask, the methods we employ, and the research processes we participate in. In each of our contexts, we entered the field, not to simply reproduce deficit discourses of education, which abound in the field of education and international development, but rather to also seek out the transgressions, which make systems function despite the many challenges. The ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ conference theme provided us with a way of rethinking how these transgressions are essential for transformation, but remain overlooked within competing agendas of international funding bodies, simplistic notions of ā€˜what worksā€™, and so on. Educational transformation needs more acts of transgressions to be identified and supported, and not silenced.

Finally, as a research group, we are bound by a conviction that ecosystems of knowledge production and practices (both research and otherwise) do not have firm answers, but invite conversations that beckon further inquiry, challenging us to confront the hidden hierarchies and biases embedded within the very frameworks we rely on, given that all of us operate in an institution which is deeply anchored in (and promotes) Northern knowledge structures. We seek not only answers to these challenges, but a reimagining of the questions themselvesā€”a call to unsettle the boundaries of what we deem possible, and in doing so, to cultivate a more expansive, inclusive vision of justice. In our manner of doing so, as a collective research group, we also aim to transgress and reimagine what it means to be a doctoral student and supervisor in a higher education setting.

About the Team

The six participating scholars are based at the Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, and are members of the Cambridge Network for Disability and Education Research (CaNDER). Dr Basirat Razaq-Shuaib is an advocate for parental wellbeing and disability inclusion in Nigeria, author of three childrenā€™s books, and founder of The Blooming Mum as well as the Winford Centre for Women and Children. Dr Camilla Hadi Chaudhary is co-convenor of the South Asian Approaches to Researching Education (SAARE) Network and the Climate and Sustainability Education Seminar (CASES) Series at the Faculty. Dr Stephanie Nowack is a South African psychologist focusing on early childhood education and development, and completed her doctorate at Cambridge as a LEGO Foundation and Cambridge Trust Scholar within the PEDAL and REAL Centres. Surya Pratap Deka is a current Gates Cambridge doctoral researcher at the Faculty. He is the Communications Officer at ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ and the founder of Flourishing Minds Foundation, an education non-profit based in India. Nikita Jha is a Gates Cambridge doctoral researcher at the Faculty, and a mentor at Project EduAccess, a non-profit supporting access to higher education among marginalised communities in the global South. Dr Nidhi Singal is Professor of disability and inclusion at the Faculty, and Vice President of Hughes Hall College.

^[1] Transgression and transformation: (re)bordering education in times of conflict & crises

^[2] Oxford English Dictionary. (July 2023). Liminal, Adjective. OED. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/liminal_adj?tab=meaning_and_use#308505961

^[3] British Association for International and Comparative Education. (2024). Just learning: Teachers, curriculum, pedagogies and literacies. In Transgression and transformation: (Re)bordering education in times of conflict & crises (ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ 2024 Conference).

The theme for ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ 2024 calls for a ā€˜radical re-imaginingā€™ and ā€˜re-borderingā€™ of the work of education that goes beyond the rhetoric. Our starting point for the borderless sub-theme was a desire to reimagine (some of) the borders within the parallel-session convention of academic conferences. In our call for abstracts we suggested that conferences themselves can represent, reproduce and reify borders of practical and intellectual inclusion: who can attend, who feels welcome and whose knowledge is incorporated, endorsed and validated (see related article links below this post). In this blog we share an expanded explanation of our justification for, and hopes for, this sub-theme. How might these borders be disrupted? How might spaces and edges in parallel sessions be shifted, blurred, merged and transposed in ways that feel enriching, inclusive and generative? 

Our re-imagining focuses on three things that we think have potential for re-bordering: themes, projects, and the boundaries of space and time in presentation rooms.

First, we suggest that conference sub-themes and parallel sessions can create silos around bodies of work. This implies a particular way of organising knowledge and framing ideas in relation to the overarching theme and can limit opportunities for transgressing boundaries and seeing connections. The terminology doesnā€™t help: parallel lines never meet! In our borderless sub-theme, we invite abstracts with a broad perspective that complements (but may also challenge) the parallel sub-themes. We welcome contributions that centre a concept of (re)bordering education but sit outside or across the other sub-themes.

Second, most conference presentations focus on a project. Often this project is already complete – the data has been generated, analysed, prepared and polished for an audience. Even if a project is ongoing, it is usually a fixed entity: the literature has been reviewed, and the team, budget, locations, stakeholders, research questions and research design are in place. When we present projects we draw and assert boundaries around them, as well as our place within them. In our borderless sub-theme, we invite abstracts that centre an idea. What drives your work under the overarching theme of crises and borders in education? What frustrates it? What theories or approaches are at its heart? Do normative definitions or framings enrich or limit possibilities in this area of work?

We anticipate that ideas will likely draw on projects as inspiration, but we strongly discourage presentations that summarise project process (e.g., a chronological walk through research questions, approach, analysis, findings, discussion). Instead, we encourage presentations that showcase a particular aspect of a project with the intention of starting conversations and creating connections: if someone wants to find out more about the finer details of your project, you can tell them about it over lunch!

The third set of borders we have been thinking about are in relation to the (traditional) classroom set up of presentation rooms. There is a clear boundary between the presenter and the audience, and rigid timings dictating how long we get to spend on each side of the border: conventional patterns of hierarchical interaction that can . What if we didnā€™t sit in rows facing the front? What if we sat in a circle, facing each other? What if we didnā€™t have three people talking for fifteen minutes followed by a chaired Q&A? What if there were no power-points, but pictures, poems or objects to represent ideas? What if each presenter introduced their idea and then engaged in a supported dialogue around connections between them?

In the borderless sub-theme, we are hoping to explore these possibilities and welcome suggestions for others. We invite abstracts with ideas unfettered by normative conceptual presentational borders, from colleagues enthusiastic about engaging practically with new spaces and edges in a presentation room.

These ideas are complementary to the work of the ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ 2024 conference committee, which is working hard to identify, question and re-shape normative conference borders in a wider sense. We will be working closely with them to see what might be feasible in our strand. We will also work closely with the inclusion sub-committee; we are conscious that conventional conference formats have in-built features and processes to support inclusion, and that well-meaning and enthusiastic ideas for change can be unintentionally exclusionary. However, returning to Freire whose pedagogy is a key inspiration in our initiative, we hope colleagues in the ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ community will consider submitting an abstract to the borderless sub-theme, and join our attempt to become ā€˜ever more curiousā€™ in terms of noticing the ā€˜directiveā€™ nature of conference borders, and re-imagining alternatives.

A further note from the coordinators: 

Coordinating this sub-theme has been an opportunity to critically reflect on the idea of borders within the parallel session convention. We plan to write an extended and more academic piece, but we wanted to share our thinking at this point when we know colleagues are preparing their abstracts. If you submit an abstract to this sub-theme, please share your idea, how it originated, the research it draws from (if appropriate), how it relates to the conference theme and sub-theme, and suggestions for how you might introduce it in a borderless session (for coherence and transparency the panel will be guided by the main ĢĒŠÄ“«Ć½ 2024 abstract review criteria of relevance, originality, clarity and significance). To help us develop the grounded groupings of ideas, please include 2-3 keywords.

We recognise that some people may have already submitted their abstract (and others may not read this blog post prior to submission). We will review these abstracts with enthusiasm and no one will be disadvantaged if their abstract does not align with the submission suggestions above: we set out in our initial call that this sub-theme was an opportunity to collectively connect ideas into a grounded and purposeful agenda. We will invite the authors of all successful submissions to be a part of this process and anticipate that all abstracts may develop accordingly.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with Alison Buckler, Camilla Hadi Chaudhary or Hiba Salem.

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