AIMS & SCOPE
Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education (TRAUE), an open-access, peer-reviewed journal, takes its name from the program in which it is housed: Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY. This program emerged in New York City, but this ain’t just a journal about New York. It’s a journal that draws inspiration from the hoods, the barrios, the communities across the world that face oppression and disinvestment but still show up for each other in schools, parks, households, museums, stoops, and all the places we live, love, and learn. It’s about crisis and creation, beauty and pain, trauma and healing. It’s about reppin’ what’s both beautiful and complex in your world, honoring your ancestors and surfacing radical possibilities. To be clear: we are a journal about the learning that happens, within and beyond schools, among people who face and fight interlocking systems of oppression and injustice.
We want to center communities that don’t just engage with urban education, but communities that live and breathe both within and beyond the confines of traditional urban education. For clarity, we accept work that features people from a range of locales; rather than defining urban literally as a city, we use the term urban colloquially, to suggest that we center and honor Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, social justice practices, and anti-oppressive pedagogies.
We invite you to consider with us: How can urban education incite, produce, uplift, and extend experiences of healing, love, or community? What kinds of scholarship–widely conceived–support us in our mission to to create justice in urban educational contexts? These questions guide our work insofar as they help us think about who education is for, why it is being provided, how it is being engaged, and toward what individual, social, political, economic or communal ends it is moving. These are (some of) the questions we hope you will grapple with in your contributions to this journal.
So you ask, what does this mean for me and how can I get down? We thought you’d never ask.
If you’re an emerging scholar — especially a graduate, undergraduate, community college, or high school student, if you’re a community scholar without an institutional affiliation, such as if you’re a poet, organizer, teacher, or incarcerated person — we’d love to feature your work. We want to honor work that shows love to peoples and communities that are traditionally marginalized; to showcase the variety of voices that exist within communities; to publish work that moves the needle and does not just repeat the same ol’ same ol’.
So if this sounds like a wave you’d like to get down with, then hit us up!
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