CfP for international edited Book: “Curriculum of the body and the school as clinic: Histories of public health and schooling, 1900-2020”

We have provisional approval from a commercial press for an international edited book provisionally titled as above.

We welcome proposals for chapters that will be 6,000-8,000 words in length.

We particularly welcome submissions from:
[1] Early and early-mid-career scholars, whether as sole, lead or co-author; and,
[2] Scholars who have not previously published extensively in English.

Book Overview

Title: Curriculum of the body and the school as clinic: Histories of public health and schooling, 1900-2020

This international edited collection employs the concept of the ‘curriculum of the body’ (Burns, Proctor & Weaver, 2020) to distinguish a set of educational technologies, schooling practices and school-based public health programmes that have been enacted on or through the body of children and young people—not in isolation but rather “in permanent interdependence with other beings and objects” (Veiga, 2018, p. 22).

The collection focuses on the twentieth century, with some chapters likely to extend into the first decades of the twenty-first. Our intention is to delineate a period during which the belief that every child should spend several years in school gained near universal global agreement, no matter the variations in local provision and practice. Additionally, this was a period in which the imperatives of public health became increasingly systematized and bureaucratized and schools were identified as key sites nationally and internationally for health and welfare interventions (Proctor & Burns, 2017). The rationale for the time period and institutional focus is to pay attention to the development of a set of institutional forms, repertoires of expertise, and bodily practices that became normalized and naturalized as elemental to schooling—and thereby to childhood and adolescence. (…Please find more information here)

The book subsections four key elements of the curriculum of the body, which organize
the collection of chapters into subsections: (1) Formal programmes; (2) Clinical practices; (3)Architecture, spatialities, and materialities; (4) Classroom pedagogies and disciplinary practices. Each subsection will contain three-four chapters. Under these headings we additionally invite contributors to address the collection’s unifying theme – the historical making of childhood and youth in relation to the historical making of systematized and institutionalized expert knowledge.

We have written two papers together offering an expanded idea of our purpose in theorising schools as clinics, and in focussing on the corporeal in the school curriculum and would be happy to send PDF versions to anyone who would like further information about the kind of work we are envisaging, or who is generally interested:

• Burns, K., Proctor, H., Weaver, H. (2020). Modern schooling and the curriculum of the body. In Tanya Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of Historical Studies in Education:
  Debates, Tensions, and Directions, (pp. 1-21). Singapore: Springer.
• Proctor, H., Burns, K. (2017). The connected histories of mass schooling and public
  health. History of Education Review, 46(2), 118-124

Interested contributors are invited to submit a chapter proposal (about 1000 words including bios) to Dr Kellie Burns (kellie.burns@sydney.edu.au) and A/Prof Helen Proctor (helen.proctor@sydney.edu.au) including the following information:
1. Proposed chapter title
2. Conceptual/ theoretical focus
3. Empirical research base / details of the research
4. Proposed thematic link to the collection under one of the four subsections listed above.
5. Brief author bios and/or links to an institutional web page, Google Scholar profile or equivalent (as mentioned above, we are keen to encourage work from new and emerging scholars as well as from scholars who have not previously been read extensively in English).

Proposed timeline:
Abstracts due: 31 March 2021 (or sooner)
Contributors notified: 15 April 2021
Full (6,000-8,000 word) chapter due: 30 November 2021
Reviews and editing, editors’ introductory essay completed November 2021-May 2022 as needed.
Book manuscript submitted: June 2022