Call for Proposals

What does it mean to be a contemplative practitioner attentive to issues of power, racism, and marginalization in higher education today? How has your contemplative practice impacted your work as a teacher, scholar, leader, community activist? How does your practice sustain you? How do you navigate non life-affirming structures and harmful environments while seeking to transform them?  

This volume centers the stories and narratives of contemplative practitioners in higher education who are working to manifest a more liberatory, compassion centered, and antiracist academy. Their stories invite us to meet them in their fullness, and share with us how contemplation anchors their transformational work and their commitments to creating more just and equitable institutions. Stories can provide inspiration, recognition, affirmation, encouragement; through the personal stories of differentially located practitioners we learn about life-affirming practices that allow for individual and community healing and the creation of decolonizing structures. Such stories offer critical, context-specific efforts and examples that enable us to explore wide-ranging contemplative practices that sustain holistic, liberatory work in the academy. 

We invite proposals for personal narratives + practice-descriptions that arise from the experiences of people from all identity categories; we particularly welcome proposals from groups historically marginalized in the academy. Proposals need not be limited by your role as an adjunct, professor, dean, etc.; we invite stories that explore the capacity to bring one’s full self into all higher educational contexts. In addition to sharing a story of how your practice shows up in your work, we ask that contributors share a contemplative practice or process that is deeply meaningful to them, contextualizing the description and discussion of the contemplative practice within specific histories, locations, and cultures. Such contextualization helps readers understand the embeddedness of contemplative practices, highlights the importance of the practitioner, educator, or author’s own contemplative practice journey, and challenges the field to attend to issues of ahistoricism, cultural appropriation, and relations of power.

This volume uses a multi-vocal and multi-modal approach to foreground the interconnectedness of individual stories and experiences. Neither a monograph nor simply a collection of essays, this book will be shaped in part by the collective narrative work of four editors to highlight connections, respond to ideas, and raise questions across themes, practices, and stories, interstitially weaving a conversation amongst contributors’ materials. By placing individual stories in relationship with one another, this volume will itself tell a different story of higher education, one that centers people, relationships, contexts, and practices.

Our intention is to build upon and expand the important work of the foundational 2014 text by Daniel Barbezat & Mirabai Bush, Contemplative Practices in Higher Education: Powerful methods to transform teaching and learning. Barbezat and Bush’s text opened contemplative pedagogy to a broader audience, provided examples of practices in different disciplines, and gave shape and contour to an emerging field while allowing for individual interpretation, adaptation, and application of practices. Now, ten years later [intended publication date 2024], our volume centers the people who engage in these practices in order to explore more deeply the notion that one’s own contemplative journey is a critical foundation for undertaking this work in the world. 

Furthermore, this text seeks to reflect the evolution of this field as it confronts the historical and contemporary forms of racism, cultural appropriation, spiritual bypassing, and other forms of oppression and marginalization that have shaped both contemplative studies and higher education more broadly. Thinking with, through, and beyond the work of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society's (CMind) Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (ACMHE) conferences and their forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Contemplative Inquiry's (JOCI) Transcendent Wisdom and Transformative Action: Reflections from Black Contemplatives, we invite work in contemplative inquiry and study that foregrounds healing, liberation, and interconnectedness that assists us in reweaving our current realities. This volume is intended to showcase the deep and varied ways contemplative approaches enhance teaching and learning, inspire resistance, and bring healing to people in many areas of higher education including those working in outreach, scholarship & research, leadership, and student affairs. As such, it charts an epistemological path for the field that more honestly and inclusively attends to power and difference.

This book serves as an invitation to anyone working in or interested in higher education seeking to understand how contemplative processes and practices can serve our work. This book will also be of interest to theorists and practitioners of liberatory, Critical, feminist, womanist, anti-oppression, queer, Indigenous, decolonizing, Open, trauma-informed, and other similarly aligned pedagogies, methodologies, and epistemologies who wish to see how contemplation supports their work. This book may be of particular benefit to higher education administrators and leaders as it unveils both the structural and interpersonal ways that higher education has caused harm and the ways contributors have persisted nonetheless by bringing a human and justice-grounded approach to their teaching, research, and service. We hope this volume can offer a place for contemplatives, educators, and higher education professionals to pause, reflect, re-align, expand, and replenish our wells as we learn from one another how to create more just, inclusive, life-affirming experiences of higher education. 

Request for proposal 

We invite proposals for personal essays + contemplative practice descriptions from contemplative practitioners in higher education, including community colleges and 4+-year institutions. We welcome proposals that invite readers to meet you in your fullness, to share with readers how contemplation anchors your transformational work and your commitments to creating more just, equitable, and liberatory institutions. We ask that you pair your essay with a description of a practice that is meaningful to you so that readers may further explore practices offered by contributors. 

We are particularly interested in proposals that explore contemplative practices and methods that arise from the experiences of groups historically marginalized in the academy and that advance the creation of more equitable, just, and caring communities. We welcome proposals from contemplatives working across higher education including activists, scholars, administrators, practitioners, staff, students, librarians, and teachers who connect contemplative methods to liberatory, Critical, feminist, womanist, anti-oppression, Indigenous, decolonizing, Open, trauma-informed, and other similarly aligned pedagogies, methodologies, and epistemologies. 

Accepted proposals (due April 1, 2022) will showcase the deep and varied ways contemplative approaches enhance the lives of folks working in higher education as well as their students, colleagues, collaborators, programs, and institutions. Completed essays (due November 1, 2022) will range from 1,000-7,000 words including Practice Description. 

To submit a proposal, please send by April 1, 2022 the following items as an email attachment to :

1. ~750 word response to the prompt below
2. Brief biosketch that includes any currently and/or previously held academic appointment
3. Description of any images or artwork you intend to use

Prompt: We invite you to bring all aspects of yourself to this writing. Your somatic, creative, spiritual, intellectual, historical, ancestral, personal, professional, communal, and other ways of being and knowing are welcome. 

• What drives and inspires your contemplative life? 
• How does your contemplative life enable/sustain the transformative/purposeful work you do in higher education?
• What contemplative practices are meaningful to you and why? 
• If not addressed above, please describe your proposed contribution to this volume, including which specific practice you will share. 

Editors:

Michelle Coghill Chatman

David Robinson-Morris

LeeRay Costa

Karolyn Kinane