Call for Articles: New Special Issue--How do we get to know moving with children? Co-edited by: Shemine Gulamhusein (University of Victoria) Nicole Land (Toronto Metropolitan University)

2026-04-06

International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal

Special Issue Call for New Articles and Contributions

Title of Special Issue:  How do we get to know moving with children ?

Co-edited by:

Shemine Gulamhusein (Assistant Professor, Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria)

Nicole Land (Associate Professor, Early Childhood Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University)

Call for Contributions

This special issue of the International Critical Policy Studies Journal invites contributors to study, expand, and propose otherwise with the question how do we get to know movement with children? In particular, we are interested in thinking together about how we might attend to, craft, and sustain affirmative, responsive, and co-created relations, knowledges, and practices for moving with children. 

We offer two entangled proposals that guide this special issue:

  • We want to unsettle the underlying logics that make moving with children perceptible (Leahy, Wright, & Penney, 2017).
    • This includes interrogating, interrupting, and re-inventing taken-for-granted knowledge politics, body economies, subject formations, and overarching systems of governance, commerce, citizenship, and personhood (Fitzpatrick, 2023; González-Calvo & Gerdin, 2024; Petherick, 2023; Webb, Quennerstedt, & Öhman, 2008).
  • We want to study these dominant formations of children’s movement for their non-innocence, captures, oppressions, uneven consequences, erasures, and fragmentations because we are committed to “collectively thinking what might be necessary to engage in practices of otherwise worlds” (Vintimilla, 2023, p. 19).
    • Our invitation is to think together towards creating imaginaries, grammars, and relations up to the task of knowing movement with children amid increasingly complex, bordered, and changing worlds (Hackett, 2014; Myrstad, 2022).

Context: Doing Moving with Children

Our question of how we get to know movement with children is complex and consequential because our conceptualizations of movement impact possibilities - and impossibilities - for moving with children. We underscore how moving with children is an ongoing political and ethical act, where movement knowledges, practices, and relations are often entangled with powerful emplaced, intersectional, and taken-for-granted narratives of childhood, physical activity, and body politics. Importantly, we emphasize a refusal to think moving as only mechanical, biologically innate, or developmentally determined; we insist that movement exceeds frameworks that attend only to displacement, medicalization and healthism, and normative physical skill acquisition.    

When we use the phrase ‘get to know movement’, we are referring to the knowledges, discourses, relations, conditions, contexts, histories, and futures that shape how movement is understood and given value (MacRae & MacLure, 2021). For example, articulations of the ultimate at-risk child (Ward, 2016) are underpinned by Euro-Western dominant discourses that articulate normative accounts of health (Leahy et al, 2015), moral panic about childhood obesity (Friedman, 2015), and the politics of body desirability, governance, and citizenship (LeBesco, 2011). Here, we get to know movement as a necessary antecedent to health and health as an individualized process, while positioning biomedical formations of physical health (ex. health as the absence of disease) as an unquestioned common pursuit. Universalized chronologies of linear child development and their prescriptive understandings of growth breed colloquialisms like ‘fat children become fat adults’, whereby families are required to “fat proof” (Quirke, 2016, p. 137) their children through surveilling and controlling children’s movement practices.

Children’s movement practices are made knowable as technical, instrumental processes that matter for their consequences in adulthood; deferral and futurity weave with these movement relations. Physical activity becomes a marker of children’s compliance with neoliberal body management expectations (Rinaldi et al., 2017) and health and physical education curriculum invests in producing “the well and skilled body” (Deng et al., 2024, p. 1). Here, movement and morality become co-constitutive, where ‘good’ children move in ‘good’ ways and movement is made perceptible as an ingredient in identity, success, and personhood. Children’s movement experiences become deeply tied to fitness, exercise, and producing a fit, thin, and muscular body (Powell & Fitzpatrick, 2015), while play becomes a technique for ensuring children build the movement skills and behavior required of productive, responsible, and fit adult citizens (Petrie & Clarkin-Phillips, 2017). Movement becomes known through logics of governance, prevention, management, and mitigation, while what ‘counts’ as movement is increasingly narrowly defined and progressively commodified.

Throughout all these formations of movement, contemporary political ecosystems grounded in colonial heteropatriarchy thread children’s lived movement experiences with inequities and oppression based on race, ableism, gender, sexuality, anti-fatness, migration, famine, access, and socioeconomics. Snarled amongst these unjust dynamics are everyday relations with a multitude of interwoven realities (ex. nutrition and food, fashion, technology, social media, and wellness practices). Here, movement becomes meaningful as an incredibly complex ongoing ethical and political practice.

Content Guidelines

Asserting that how we get to know children’s movement is intensely consequential, we invite authors to share contributions that grapple with the question: how do we get to know movement with children - and how might we attend to, craft, and sustain affirmative, responsive, and co-created relations, knowledges, and practices for moving with children? We encourage authors to consider this question as an irresolvable tension that marks both the complex work of figuring out how to move well with children and the generative, exuberant potentials grounded in moving otherwise with children.

Contributions might be inspired by, but are not limited to:

  • Inheriting and creating trouble for formalized relations with children’s movement - and risking existing logics that bind how movement can and cannot be understood
  • Interrupting taken-for-granted knowledge hierarchies for knowing movement - and generating meaningful logics for knowing movement otherwise with children
  • Agitating what ‘counts’ as movement - and noticing what becomes possible for moving with children through valuing often excluded or erased ways of moving
  • Foregrounding movements that resist, refuse, or recompose dominant constructions of children’s movement -and creating more just, affirmative, and situated practices and logics for moving with children
  • Broadening the grammars, referents, and scales for knowing movement with children - and what does this open for moving with children as an ethical and political event?

We welcome conceptual, research, practice, community or collective, and/or lived experience-based global perspectives that reconceptualize the concepts, processes, practices, relations, ethics, and politics that nourish possibilities for how we get to know movement with children. Importantly, we hope to move beyond critical analysis to share articles that propose alternative, inventive, and locally meaningful practices for getting to know movement with children.

Contributions from across contexts are encouraged, including work from early childhood education/studies/sociology, physical education, childhood recreation/sport/music/art, community or cultural spaces, or postsecondary education/working with emerging educators. We invite engagements that weave together situated and interdisciplinary knowledges (ex. migration studies, cultural studies, social justice, gender, dance, athlete development, curriculum, or pedagogy) and that use participatory, situated, creative, and responsive methodologies (ex. photography, art-making, pedagogical documentation, poetry, or qualitative and postqualitative methods).

Please contact Shemine Gulamhusein (shemineg@uvic.ca) and Nicole Land (nland@torontomu.ca) with any questions. 

Thank you very much for your interest in this special issue, and making a contribution and creating a collection of important work regarding the physicality of our work in ECEC, specifically movement with children.

Deadlines:

  • Full article submission through journal website to special issue editors and to special issue co-edited by:  Shemine Gulamhusein and Nicole Land (See Submissions, Special Issue "How do we get to know moving with children?")     By July 6, 2026
  • Editorial review and subsequent anonymized peer-review process (4 months)
  • Review decisions shared (November 6, 2026)
  • Revised manuscripts submitted (December 20, 2026)
  • Second editorial review and anonymized peer-re-review as needed (2 months)
  • Final acceptance decisions (February 2027)
  • Publication expected late Spring, 2027

 Submission Steps. Register as user of www.iccpsonlinejournal.org; submit article as submission to Special Issue Section How do we get to know moving with children? Co-edited by:  Shemine Gulamhusein and Nicole Land

Please adhere to the submission guidelines for the International Critical Childhood Policy Studies Journal. This includes formatting, length, and citation criteria. Images or other visuals can be integrated in manuscripts as Figures.  We suggest a maximum of 5-6 images given manuscript length, and complexity of formatting for publication.  Please adhere to APA 7th Ed. Style Guidelines in preparing your manuscript.  

References

Deng, J., Fitzpatrick, K., & Powell, D. (2024). Producing the well and skilled body: A critical discourse analysis of health and physical education curriculum policy in Aotearoa New Zealand. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2024.2367506

Fitzpatrick, K. (2023). Physical education: A reflection on subject status, the critical, and the wellbeing agenda. Sport, Education and Society, 28(8), 873-886. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2022.2077718

Friedman, M. (2015). Mother blame, fat shame, and moral panic: “Obesity” and child welfare. Fat Studies, 4(1), 14-27.https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2014.927209

González-Calvo, G., & Gerdin, G. (2024). Bodily uncertainty, precarious body: An embodied narrative of a physical education teacher from an autobiographical perspective. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 1, 1-9. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2023-0275

Hackett, A. (2014). Zigging and zooming all over the place: Young children’s meaning making and movement in the museum. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 14(1), 5-27. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798412453730

Leahy, D., Wright, J., & Penney, D. (2017). The political is critical: explorations of the contemporary politics of knowledge in health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 22(5), 547-551.https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2017.1329141

Leahy, D., Burrows, L., McCuaig, L., Wright, J., & Penney, D. (2015). School health education in changing times: Curriculum, pedagogies and partnerships. Routledge.

LeBesco, K. (2011). Neoliberalism, public health, and the moral perils of fatness. Critical Public Health, 21(2), 153-164. https://doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2010.529422

MacRae, C., & MacLure, M. (2021). Watching two-year-olds jump: Video method becomes ‘haptic’. Ethnography and Education, 16(3), 263-278. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2021.1917439

Myrstad, A., Hackett, A., & Bartnæs, P. (2022). Lines in the snow; minor paths in the search for early childhood education for planetary wellbeing. Global Studies of Childhood, 12(4), 321-333.https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610620983590

Petherick, L. (2023). Reading curriculum as cultural practice: Interrogating colonialism and whiteness in Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2023.2232807

Petrie, K., & Clarkin-Phillips, J. (2018). ‘Physical education’ in early childhood education: Implications for primary school curricula. European Physical Education Review, 24(4), 503-519. https://doi.org/10.1177/1356336X16684642

Powell, D., & Fitzpatrick, K. (2015). ‘Getting fit basically just means, like, nonfat’: Children's lessons in fitness and fatness. Sport, Education and Society, 20(4), 463-484. https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2013.777661

Quirke, L. (2016). Fat-proof your child”: Parenting advice and “child obesity. Fat Studies, 5(2), 137-155.https://doi.org/10.1080/21604851.2016.1145483

Rinaldi, J., Rice, C., LaMarre, A., McPhail, D., & Harrison, E. (2017). Fatness and failing citizenship. Somatechnics, 7(2), 218-