Karen Gravett, University of Surrey

Naomi Winstone, University of Surrey

Kieran Balloo, Southern Cross University

This special issue explores relational pedagogies—teaching practices emphasizing meaningful connections between teachers and students, and engagement with both human and nonhuman entities like digital technologies—within contemporary higher education contexts shaped by generative artificial intelligence. Relational pedagogies foster emotional and affective dimensions of education while challenging competitive individualistic approaches.

The rapid emergence of GenAI is fundamentally reshaping how educators and students interact, redefining educational practices politically, practically, and ideologically. The special issue seeks critical perspectives on how GenAI reconfigures relationality in higher education, addressing questions about student engagement with AI outside educator control, evolving assessment and feedback practices, care in digitalized contexts, equity implications, and the ethical and environmental concerns these technologies raise.

Appel publié par Teaching in Higher Education. Lire l'appel complet sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Discourses surrounding GenAI and pedagogy
• Relationality with respect to assessment practices
• Relational feedback processes
• The role of care and its connection with GenAI in contemporary universities
• The intersection of AI technologies with notions of mattering and belonging
• Research into academic work and relational connections
• The materiality of education
• Political and ethical questions regarding digital technologies such as surveillance, datafication, and agency
• GenAI's environmental impacts and their intersection with pedagogical, ethical, and political questions
• Posthuman, sociomaterial and feminist materialist perspectives
• How does students' use of GenAI reshape relationships and pedagogies?
• What role do emotions, affective relations, and embodied experiences play for students and educators in an age of GenAI?
• How do relational pedagogic encounters with GenAI blur the boundaries between human and machine?
• How are GenAI technologies changing relational assessment practices in higher education?
• How are relational feedback processes evolving as a result of GenAI technologies?
• What new methods are needed to understand our relationship with digital and GenAI technologies in higher education?
• What questions does GenAI raise for equity perspectives on relationality?
• What new theoretical and critical approaches are being engaged to investigate relational pedagogies and relationality in the age of GenAI?

Timeline

• April 20, 2026: Abstract deadline
• May 18, 2026: Expected date for abstract decisions to be communicated to authors
• October 26, 2026: Manuscript deadline for invited draft full papers

Juuso Henrik Nieminen, Deakin University

Jan McArthur, Lancaster University

Tim Fawns, Monash University

Assessment profoundly shapes students' lives and identities through grades, examinations, scores, and metrics, yet scholarship has largely overlooked its political dimensions of power, equity, and social justice. This special issue invites critical examination of how assessment functions within higher education, challenging the prevailing view of assessment as neutral and objective.

The issue seeks both theoretical understanding and practical transformation of assessment practices toward greater justice and equity. Authors are invited to submit empirical studies, conceptual analyses, policy reviews, or research syntheses that adopt explicitly socio-political and critical approaches to assessment, engaging with themes such as agency, identity, inclusion, technology, and epistemic justice in assessment.

Submissions must clearly engage with socio-political perspectives while allowing diverse interpretations of what constitutes critical scholarship. Authors should reference the accompanying points of departure article and may engage with or critique its arguments.

Appel publié par Teaching in Higher Education. Voir l'appel sur le site de l'éditeur. Fiche de l'appel sur kerostig.

Potential topics

• Teacher and student agency: Who decides how and why assessment is done?
• Identity, diversity and inclusion: How does assessment exclude and marginalise, and how can it be more equitable?
• Grading and ungrading: How to disrupt the status quo?
• Critical theory: How to challenge power and privilege in assessment?
• Epistemic injustice and colonisation: What counts as legitimate knowledge in assessment?
• Politics of technology: How does assessment take place in a digital world?

Timeline

• November 2, 2026: Abstract deadline
• November 30, 2026: Expected date for abstract decisions to be communicated to authors
• May 24, 2027: Manuscript deadline