Genealogies of Youth Narratives: Race, Voice, and Education in Intergenerational Perspective

Dear Colleagues,

As social tensions, educational challenges, and our collective struggles continue to reshape lives and futures, reflective thinking and practice that honors the history, heritage, and humanity of all human cultural groups have become essential, foundational ingredients for fostering dialogue and dispositions that are inclusive, prosocial, and justice-rooted. This guest-edited, themed Special Issue engages critical terrain: an exploration of how youth narratives, racialized identities, and agency are framed, constructed and contested within educational contexts. It is particularly timely in terms of its intersectional theme and due to intentional focus on intergenerational perspectives. Intersectionality is an analytical tool for understanding the complexity of human experience by considering factors such as race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation socioeconomic status and other markers (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2020). It recognizes that social and political life is influenced and shaped by multiple, intersecting lines of engagement.

This Special Issue, “Genealogies of Youth Narratives: Race, Voice, and Education in Intergenerational Perspective”, aims to critically examine thinking and practice that resides at the junction of multifaceted youth narratives. Its objective is to interrogate how youth narratives have positioned racial and cultural identity and agency – as peripheral, promising, or flawed– and how youth narratives are perceived, understood, leveraged, and/or reimagined as central to a collective, shared human experience (King & Swartz, 2018). This reimagining not only involves the inclusion of marginalized voices but also challenges the binary logic of “us” and “others,” revealing the colonial, racialized, gendered, and imperialist forces that have historically shaped education. This Special Issue calls for contributions that engage with youth narratives and subjectivities where ideas of race, identity, agency, and difference are formed, contested, and reimagined in education across intergenerational perspectives. We seek contributions on a wide range of themes related to how youth narratives manifest within education and other social contexts. Topics might include how race shapes youth narratives in ways that reinforce or challenge dominant norms; the power of youth voice; the rise of resistant characters; and portrayals of historical trauma and/or transcendence. Families, communities, and schools each provide distinct yet interconnected settings in which youth’s social emotional experiences are upheld, marginalized, or strategically reorganized. We also welcome analyses of intersectional identities, the influence of technology and visual culture on constructions of youth narratives, the commercialization of diversity, educational uses of literature to foster empathy and inclusion, and the dynamics of intergenerational perspectives to interrogate, disrupt, and transform education. Ideas about race, ethnicity and nation shape our understandings of “difference” and who we view as “the same” as ourselves at an individual, community or national level. Alone or in combination, these notions are often associated with how youth are served and disserved, harming some and privileging others, indicating the centrality of relations of power.

Building on the substantial body of work that has examined motivations, attitudes, dispositions, cultural theorizing, pedagogy, and youth identity development processes within education, this Special Issue turns its focus to the educational and intergenerational perspectives of teachers, researchers, and other educational stakeholders. We are particularly interested in contributions that adopt a genealogical lens to trace how youth narratives are understood, sustained, modified, or reconfigured across generations. Such an approach also highlights how these trajectories intersect with local, national, and institutional language policies. In addition, it brings into view the intergenerational dynamics of memory, belonging, rupture, and continuity that underpin youth narratives, spatialities, and lifeworlds.

We seek contributions that illuminate these genealogies of youth narratives as they unfold in familial, communal, educational, and policy contexts. Submissions focusing on how migrant, Indigenous, mobile, or dispersed populations understand, examine, and center youth narratives within dominant language regimes and shifting policy environments are particularly welcome.

Possible topics include the following (non-exhaustive):

• Research on the youth narratives informing the lives of marginalized and or dominant group communities;
• Grassroots or community-led infrastructures that preserve and sustain youth narratives, belonging, identity, and linguistic socialization;
• School-based research on youth’s cultural lives, heritage, racial identity, and education;
• The inner dynamics of multicultural youth narratives in education;
• Research on youth agency, autonomy, futurities, and the politics of disposability;
• Intergenerational perspectives that shape and influence how practitioners explore, understand, and interact with youth narratives;
• Quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method analyses of language shift, language use, mobility trajectories, identity negotiation, and linguistic continuity;
• Policy-focused studies examining national, regional, local, or school-level policies, and their effects on the tensions, challenges, and possibilities informing youth lifeworlds;

Before Submitting a Manuscript

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 200 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editor (lkazembe@iu.edu) or to Genealogy editorial office (genealogy@mdpi.com). Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editor for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the special issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Following the acceptance of the abstract, authors will then have three months to prepare and submit their full manuscript, following the journal’s template and submission guidelines on the Genealogy (MDPI) platform. The final deadline for full manuscript submission is November 30, 2026.

Manuscripts undergo double-blind peer review and follow the regular procedures of the journal Genealogy. Ideally, final manuscripts should be between 7000 and 10,000 words, and illustrations are welcome (with the proper permissions).

References

1. Collins, P. H., & Bilge, S. (2020). Intersectionality (2nd ed.). Polity Press.
2. King, J.E., & Swartz, E.E. (2018). Heritage knowledge in the curriculum: Retrieving an African episteme (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781351213233.

Dr. Lasana D. Kazembe
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Genealogy is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• genealogy
• youth
• intergenerational
• pedagogy
• urban education
• race
• ethnicity
• culturally relevant pedagogy
• heritage
• community
• youth agency
• dispositions
• identity