Studies in the Education of Adults

60th Anniversary Special Issue #1 - Adult Education and Democratic Futures: Revisiting Participation and Agency

Democratic life is never secured once and for all. It is learned, practised, contested, repaired and sometimes denied in the institutions, communities and everyday settings through which adults live. At a moment marked by social fragmentation, political polarisation, economic insecurity, class inequality, racialised and gendered inequalities, ecological fear, forced migration, institutional distrust and increasingly hostile public discourse, the democratic purposes of adult education require renewed scrutiny. This Special Issue invites scholarship that returns to participation and agency as central, but deeply contested, adult education concerns. Participation is often reduced to attendance, enrolment, consultation, programme completion or the appearance of inclusion. Yet adult education has long understood participation more richly: as voice, recognition, influence, cultural legitimacy, collective confidence, public presence and the capacity to act upon the conditions of one’s life. Agency is likewise too easily treated as an individual quality. Adults are expected to be motivated, resilient, flexible, self-managing and employable, even where the social conditions needed to exercise meaningful agency are absent. This issue begins from the premise that participation and agency are not private achievements. They are shaped by material resources, institutions, histories, relations of power and access to collective forms of learning and action.

The issue is designed as part of the 60th anniversary programme of Studies in the Education of Adults. It therefore invites a strong looking-back/looking-forward movement. Contributions may revisit historical debates about citizenship, workers’ education, community learning, popular education, feminist practice, anti-racist struggle, public pedagogy, social movements, adult literacy, cultural work or the social purpose of adult education. They may also examine the limits of those traditions, including the voices, experiences and forms of knowledge they did not fully recognise. The purpose is not to celebrate democratic language uncritically, but to ask what democratic adult education can mean now, under conditions in which participation is both widely invoked and frequently emptied of power.

We are particularly interested in scholarship that examines the unequal conditions through which adults are invited, enabled, constrained or excluded from participation. Social class and economic inequality are central to this question, alongside sex, gender, sexuality, racialisation, coloniality, disability, migration and refugee status, language, age, geography, care responsibilities, poverty, faith, rurality and digital exclusion. We welcome work that critically examines how these conditions shape access to education, safety, voice, public belonging and democratic participation, including in contested institutional and community settings. These concerns should not be treated as a checklist of identities; they should be examined as structural relations that shape whose knowledge is heard, whose participation is legitimised, and whose futures are made possible.

The journal welcomes work that advances theoretical and methodological innovation rooted in critical traditions, engages substantively with international adult education debates, and examines the policy formations, pedagogical norms and institutional logics that shape adult lives. For this issue, that means attending to the ways democratic participation is made possible or impossible in practice. We welcome analyses of formal programmes and of the less visible learning that takes place through care, culture, organising, work, friendship, conflict and collective survival. We are interested in scholarship that takes adults’ ordinary lives seriously without reducing those lives to individual stories detached from wider histories and structures.

Contributions may focus on a particular setting, community, programme, movement, policy or historical period, or they may develop a broader conceptual or comparative argument. What matters is that the analysis clarifies how participation, agency and democratic life are being understood, by whom, and with what consequences. Authors may emphasise possibility, constraint or contradiction; they may examine promising practices, damaged institutions, unfinished struggles or forms of refusal. The issue does not presume that adult education is automatically democratic. It asks when, how and for whom adult education becomes a resource for democratic renewal.

Indicative themes and questions

• Participation beyond access, attendance, consultation and symbolic inclusion; the conditions under which participation becomes meaningful influence, co-production, public presence or collective capacity.
• Agency as socially and institutionally situated; the relationship between individual action, collective organisation, structural constraint, recognition and responsibility.
• Adult education in contexts of democratic fragility, misinformation, authoritarian drift, civic exhaustion, distrust, public anger, conflict and polarisation.
• Community learning, social movements, trade union education, mutual aid, cultural practice, climate activism, anti-racist organising, feminist and queer pedagogies, and other forms of public or collective learning.
• The democratic and educational consequences of classed, gendered, racialised, ableist, migratory and linguistic inequalities, including unequal access to safety, recognition and public voice.
• Democratic learning in universities, workplaces, local authorities, voluntary organisations, prisons, cultural institutions, community settings, digital spaces and transnational networks.
• Adult education policy, governance and funding: how institutional arrangements support, narrow, depoliticise or instrumentalise participation and public learning.
• Knowledge, testimony, lived experience and representation: how research can work with adult voices, conflict and collective learning without appropriating, simplifying or romanticising them.
• Historical and archival re-readings of earlier adult education debates, including analyses that connect classic texts or journal discussions with present-day democratic challenges.