Conference: American Educational Research Association conference
Where: Toronto, Canada
When: April 14-18, 2026
Transcending Borders and Boundaries in Education Research: Toward a Beloved Global Community
The theme for the 2027 annual meeting, “Transcending Borders and Boundaries in Education Research: Toward a Beloved Global Community,” invites the education research community to respond to a critical moment marked by growing distrust of research, attacks on academic freedom, political constraints on intellectual inquiry, and deepening fractures within scholarly and public life. At a time when educational institutions, knowledge production, and historically marginalized communities continue to face intensified threats, this theme calls us to reaffirm research as an ethical, relational, and collective endeavor grounded in humanity, accountability, and care. As qualitative researchers, methodologists, and educators, our work remains essential to documenting lived realities, fostering principled dialogue, challenging inequities, and imagining more connected and humane futures.
We invite proposals that explore how education research can transcend conventional borders and boundaries – across disciplines, institutions, nation-states, epistemologies, and communities – in ways that foster relationality, collective responsibility, and global solidarity. We welcome work that examines how communities engage in collective struggle and healing; how educators, researchers, and students co-create knowledge across difference; how qualitative inquiry can illuminate migration, diasporic experiences, gender and sexuality, disability, intersectionality, policy, and community-based activism; and how research practices can contribute to collective flourishing. We are especially interested in proposals that attend to power, accountability, ethical engagement, and the possibilities of building a beloved global community through education research.
In the spirit of the 2027 theme, we invite proposals that engage dialogic, participatory, creative, and community-centered approaches to inquiry. We encourage scholarship that foregrounds relationality, centers historically marginalized knowledges and voices, and examines the ways that research can move beyond extraction toward reciprocity and co-creation. We believe that gathering together at this meeting is especially important at this historical moment, offering opportunities to strengthen scholarly relationships, build solidarities across contexts and traditions, and renew our collective commitments to qualitative inquiry as a practice of ethical engagement and social transformation.
Specifically, the Qualitative Research SIG invites papers that foreground qualitative inquiry as a methodological, theoretical, and analytic tradition within education research. We are especially interested in proposals that contribute to methodological conversations in the field, including work that examines, extends, critiques, or reimagines the onto-epistemological, ethical, and representational practices of qualitative research. Qualitative inquiry includes a wide range of approaches, including but not limited to interpretive, intersectional, anti-racist, critical, post-structural, and posthumanist frameworks, as well as the many methodological possibilities produced at the nexus of these traditions.
While proposals addressing the yearly theme are encouraged, high-quality proposals on all topics contributing to the advancement of the field of qualitative inquiry are welcome. We invite scholars from all divisions and SIGs to submit proposals. The AERA online submission system is now open, and details about the formal call for proposals and submission deadlines are available on the AERA website.
Proposals for papers, posters, roundtables, and symposia/sessions are invited, and innovative session designs are encouraged. Please select all formats in which you would like to present your work to accommodate flexibility in program decisions. Every year, far more spots are available for poster presentations and roundtable papers than individual papers and symposia. We encourage you to be thoughtful about your use of keywords, as we rely on these to identify the most knowledgeable reviewers for your work. Please also note that “working group roundtables” and “structured poster sessions” count as symposia (even though they are named to suggest otherwise) and thus compete against numerous other proposed sessions for a small number of slots. Neither paper nor session submissions may identify the author(s) in any way. Please note that you cannot submit the same proposal to other SIGs and Divisions. Please share this call for proposals with all who may be interested. The number of proposals and the size of our active membership determine the number of sessions allocated to each SIG.
Please consider our SIG as a place to share your work and renew your SIG membership when you submit your proposals. Encourage students and colleagues to join our SIG, too. All information about the annual meeting can be found at AERA.
Download the call:
QualPage 