We are delighted to announce a Call for Papers, Symposiums and Posters for the 12th biennial ERNAPE Conference “Parent Engagement as Power: Empowering Children, Schools and Societies” which will take place in Gdańsk, Poland, September 18 – 20, 2019. More information: ernapegdansk2019.pl

The message embedded in the name of our network is that parents are part of education. If we follow Theodore Brameld’s saying that education is power, we should see parents as sharing and shaping its force. The ERNAPE conference, to be held in Gdańsk, will be devoted to exploring the multiple meanings of parental engagement, power and empowerment.

This broad issue has a complex nature that needs to be examined. On the one hand, we should see parents as citizens whose engagement is crucial in acts of direct democracy: from their “voting with feet” while they make decisions concerning the choice of educational institutions, to their sustained work in social movements and organizations like Our Cities—Our Schools, Sanctuary Schools, Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools, etc. This points to the complex relations between private lives and political activism. As schools have become subject to controversial policies, like those connected to urban marketing or gentrification and school closures, being a parent shows its political face in a direct way probably unknown to previous generations.

One should speak, in this context, of new ways of understanding parental experiences. Not only are the notions of struggle, success or defeat linked to the parent—child relations, concerning issues of upbringing, support or care, being a parent in the time when schools are sites of political struggles the results of which affect the education of children, parental defeat or success gain a political dimension as well. Many researchers have recently recognized this problem; in the context of neoliberal urbanism, for example Pauline Lipman [High Stakes Education (…) 2004; The new political economy of urban education (…) 2011].

There are histories and narratives of spectacular success, as well as those of anger and disappointment to be shared, and we hope to reflect on them and to learn from them during the meeting in Gdańsk. There are sustainable local community schools emerging as the result of parental engagement and self-organization; there are schools that, owing to the engagement of parents in their close cooperation with teachers, local activists and municipalities, truly become shared spaces where one does not have to teach about democracy but where democracy is enacted and experienced. We do not expect or wish to see such complex experiences being told as idyllic and easy, but nor as utterly hopeless; that they are dichotomized between triumph and despair. Following Gert Biesta [Becoming public (…) 2012; The Rediscovery of Teaching, 2017], one may say that all meaningful education implies some interruption, that it involves friction, or collision with otherness. In a sense, meaningful education shares this feature with democracy, which is unthinkable without conflict.

Contributors may want to address any of the following thematic areas but are not restricted to these:
- Power in parenting: parents’ ways of empowering children, schools, education, communities and their democracies
- The family, school and community modi co-vivendi
- Parental involvement, community engagement and parents’ engagement: classic and new paradigms
- Parental Involvement and Inclusion
- Parents, culture and education (contemporary versions of parenting, “good” parent discourses, and modes of “parents in education”; parents as active or passive social and cultural agents; parents in media discourses and in other public arenas; etc.)
- The equity issues in/and/or through home-school-community relations
- Parent(s) nowadays: portraying the dynamic construct in the various frames of different environments, cultures, politics, ideologies, etc.
- Parental engagement today: what for and why?
- The varieties of the contemporary parent engagement
- “The end of public school” and the ways parents face it / act in it / change it (school closures, privatization, etc.)
- Parental grass-root movements, democracy and education (discourse, dialogue and politics of interruption)

You are warmly invited to participate in this conference and submit an abstract for a paper, a symposium, or a poster. The submission of abstracts end on 24th March 2019.