Studies in the Education of Adults

ANNIVERSARY ANNOUNCEMENT Studies in the Education of Adults at Sixty: Looking Back, Thinking Forward

Anniversary year: 2028 | Key submission dates: Sunday, 28 November 2027 and Sunday, 30 April 2028

In 2028, Studies in the Education of Adults will mark sixty years of publishing scholarship that takes adult education seriously: as a field of learning, practice, policy, struggle, imagination and public responsibility. This anniversary is not conceived as a pause for institutional celebration alone. It is an invitation to look back critically at the questions that have shaped the journal, and to look forward to the questions that must now be faced with renewed intellectual courage.
Across six decades, the journal has provided a space for work that theorises and critically examines the education of adults, lifelong learning and the nature of adult curriculum. Its pages have brought together debates on participation, social purpose, community, work, professional practice, literacy, policy, inequality, learning across the life course, and the changing role of the adult educator. They have also shown that adult education does not reside in a single type of institution. It takes place in universities and colleges, workplaces and trade unions, community organisations and voluntary associations, prisons and cultural settings, social movements and public spaces, homes and digital environments. It is shaped by everyday life, collective commitments and the unequal conditions through which adults learn, act and make meaning.

The 60th anniversary programme will build on the journal’s legacy through two linked Special Issues. Together, they will form a 2028 anniversary series that reconnects the journal’s historical concerns with urgent contemporary debates. The first Special Issue, Adult Education and Democratic Futures: Revisiting Participation and Agency, will be published in March 2028. It asks what adult education can contribute when democratic life is strained by inequality, institutional distrust, social fragmentation, political polarisation, ecological insecurity and renewed struggles over voice, recognition and collective life. The second, Knowledge, Work, and Digitalisation in Lifelong Learning, will be published in September 2028. It asks how changing forms of work, technological power, artificial intelligence, datafication, credentialing and digital mediation are reshaping what adults are expected to know, learn, demonstrate and become.

The two issues are distinct, but their concerns are inseparable. Democratic participation is increasingly shaped by digital infrastructures and unequal access to knowledge. Workplaces, platforms and public institutions influence whether adults have time, security, recognition and collective capacity to participate in civic and community life. Lifelong learning can open possibilities for agency and social mobility, but it can also become a language through which responsibility for structural change is shifted onto individuals. The anniversary series therefore begins from a simple proposition: adult education matters not only because adults must adapt to changing worlds, but because they must also be able to interpret, question, resist and shape those worlds together.

The programme will use the journal’s archive as a living resource rather than as a ceremonial backdrop. Earlier debates will be revisited in relation to contemporary concerns, including democracy, social justice, global inequality, social class, sex and gender, sexuality, work, technology, knowledge and power. The aim is neither to reproduce an established canon nor to treat the past as settled. Rather, the anniversary creates an opportunity to ask what earlier scholarship made visible, what it left unaddressed, and how adult education research can remain both historically attentive and intellectually open.

We invite educators, researchers, practitioners, policy thinkers and others working across the many sites of adult learning to engage with the two Special Issue calls. We welcome original empirical research, theoretically ambitious and historically grounded scholarship, comparative and international studies, critical policy analysis, methodological contributions, dialogical work across research and practice, and reflective pieces where these make a clear contribution to adult education scholarship. Submissions should engage substantively with adult education, lifelong learning or adult curriculum, and should demonstrate why the questions they address matter for adults’ learning, participation, work, recognition, dignity and collective futures.