The Covid-19 pandemic has been a critical time for people and organisations around the globe. Critical in the sense of life and death! Critical in the sense of heralding a seismic shift in how we live and work! Critical in illuminating how very differently individuals have experienced this. We’ve been in the same storm, but not all in the same boat!
This stream examines experiences of life, employment and work, perhaps through responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, from a critical perspective, highlighting issues of power, powerlessness, lack of voice and silencing, exploitation, marginalisation, inequity and injustice, amongst others. As such, contributions to this stream will question and challenge personal, professional, organisational and national responses to life, employment and work. Examples from experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic will be particularly relevant and current but are not prescribed.
We invite submissions from a variety of contexts, addressing a variety of critical questions, through a variety of methods. In this sense, we embrace eclecticism.
You may ask: what is Critical HRD? We are eclectic in our view of critical! We do not specify a ‘critical’ approach, but submissions will consider the ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘who’ and ‘why’ of individual and organisational practices during the many crises facing humanity; e.g., global warming and other environmental challenges; growing inequality of income, health care and education within and across nations; concentrations of wealth and power in the few rather than the many; the threat of Covid and similar future viruses.
We are also eclectic in our view of HRD and its sites of practice. For us, Higher Education (HE) is an important site of HRD practice, so we are interested in both critical content and critical process as applied to HE pedagogy. But, given our eclecticism, other important sites include national training and employment systems, communities (geographic, cultural, and professional), organisations and individual/ personal contexts of practice.
The pandemic has highlighted gender, race and other inequalities in health, education and employment, all of which will continue to have impact for many years to come. It has also highlighted the importance of what until now have been classed as low skill, low pay jobs: in social care, transport, logistics and food retail, for example. So, questions arise around how Critical HRD can address these issues by even more closely linking research, theory and practice to have positive impact on reducing inequalities and injustices.
Our eclecticism also extends to methodology and methods, so we welcome papers that innovatively explore, report and critique HRD research, and particularly how HRD has responded to these global crises.
Of course, given our eclecticism, we also welcome contributions which address different but related questions.
We are enthusiastic that critical approaches to HRD have potential to ameliorate individual experiences, enhance organisational practices and inform global policy decisions as we emerge from this pandemic! You can contribute practically to this endeavour by sharing emerging research and scholarship at the conference!
Beyond this, contributions from previous years’ streams have led to special editions of journals, including in JEIT, EJTD and IJTD, and edited books, and we envisage similar publications in 2023, further advancing knowledge and practice.
Come join us and help shape equitable, emancipatory HRD responses to global crises!
- Email Jim Stewart or find out more information about Jim, click here.
- Email Sally Sambrook or find out more about Sally’s work, click here.
- Email Ellen Bennett
