Vol. 27 No. 1 (2026): Special Issue: Gradient Voices in Education (Volume II) Listening and Writing Critically in a Time of Retrenchment

We are proud to share Gradient Voices in Education, Volume II, a special issue that brings together nine deeply powerful manuscripts on education, identities, belonging, and the ongoing struggle to be recognized on one’s own terms. This collection grows out of a simple but urgent understanding: education is never only about curriculum, standards, or policies. It is also about who is heard, who is misread, who is welcomed conditionally, who is asked to explain themselves, and who is forced to survive institutions that were never built with them in mind.

This volume returns to the concept of Gradient Voices as a way of thinking about identities and expressions shaped through movement, contradiction, relationality, and uneven recognition. These are not merely “diverse voices” added into an existing conversation. They are voices that reveal how educational institutions continue to sort and regulate human differences while calling that process neutrality, professionalism, rigor, or belonging. The manuscripts in this issue challenge that logic directly. They show that what often gets celebrated as inclusion can still leave people unseen, overmanaged, tokenized, erased, or made legible only on institutional terms.

At the same time, this issue is not only about harm. It is also about the intellectual, emotional, and political work of being, living, resisting, creating, and imagining otherwise. Across critical autoethnography, collaborative autoethnography, oral history, case study, testimonio, phenomenological reflection, poetry, playlist, and Indigenous storywork, the authors in this volume offer more than individual stories. They offer ways of seeing education differently. They invite us to think about voice not as performance, but as a relational process. Not as something granted permission by institutions, but as something that exceeds them. Not as a decorative supplement to educational research, but as central to understanding what education has been, what it continues to reproduce, and what it might yet become.

What makes this volume especially timely is the political moment in which it appears. We are living through renewed attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion, on antiracist teaching, on anti-immigration, on queer and trans life, on historical truth-telling, and on the very language people use to name structural violence. In this context, the stories gathered here matter even more. They remind us that backlash does not come from nowhere. It reveals the fragility of institutions that were willing to celebrate difference only when it remained manageable, marketable, or symbolic. These manuscripts push back against that thin version of inclusion. They ask harder questions about safety, legitimacy, memory, pedagogy, research, and the costs of surviving systems that reward conformity while punishing complexity.

And yet, what fills these pages is not despair. It is honesty, courage, insight, and care. These pieces are critical, but they are also generous. They hold pain and possibility together. They show us how people build relationships in spaces that were not designed for them, how they create meaning in the midst of contradiction, and how they continue to imagine more expansive futures for themselves and for education. Some of these stories will challenge readers. Some will stay with you quietly. Some may unsettle what you thought you knew about teaching, belonging, identities, or institutional change. We hope they do.

As editors, we are honored to share this collection with you. Gradient Voices in Education, Volume II is a reminder that the most important educational questions are often not only about what students learn, but about what schools and universities demand they become. This issue invites readers to linger with that tension, to listen more critically, and to take seriously the voices that expose education’s fault lines while still insisting on more human, more accountable, and more just futures.

We are honored to hold this work with you.

Tipsuda Chaomuangkhong & Jaclyn Naster