Abstracts Submission

In this thematic issue, we invite contributions that examine the livelihood of households in hard times. In recent years, households have been confronted with significant economic challenges, including increasing costs of living and housing, inflation, labour market insecurity, and growing unequal wealth distribution, that intersect with well-known structural inequalities. In addition, tendencies of political polarization exacerbate conditions of social-ecological cohabitation. However, studies that investigate specifically the experience, coping strategies and practices in dealing with these burdens in households are still rare. Research on households in poverty has provided important findings here, but there is evidence that the experience of “hard times” such as financial deterioration and vulnerability extend beyond the poor.

We welcome contributions that explore the conditions under which households are vulnerable to financial hardship and volatile incomes and/or the strategies or habits that households employ to cope with. Complex facets of social and regional disparities may be relevant here as disparate livelihoods may result in unequal resources and access opportunities depending on health services, local infrastructures, networks and communities in urban and rural contexts. Household composition and demographic characteristics may be as relevant as transient or mobile lifestyles, sometimes intertwined with forms of temporally and geographically flexible employment, or critical live events such as death, illness, or separation. Furthermore, welfare state policies play a crucial role in providing a basic safety net, but in current times of austerity, numerous states reduce or cancel social transfers. Against this background, an important aim of the thematic issue is to bring together findings from different welfare states and regions. Interdisciplinary approaches from sociology, social geography, economics and related disciplines are welcome.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Social Inclusion is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.

(Please note: This call for papers may be subject to adjustments in the coming months)

The publishing project "The Discursive Structures of (In)Justice: The Simon Prideaux Legacy Series" proposes to explore, in a cognitive and research-based perspective, the most fundamental questions underpinning global injustice. Following the longstanding idea that language shapes the boundaries of our world—revived so convincingly by Fricker’s notion of epistemic injustice—we start with language, with discourse, with narratives. To understand injustice, we must first critically interrogate the very language through which global injustices are framed, justified, or obscured. In doing so, we align ourselves with a path that was already quite well established by thinkers such as Spivak, de Sousa Santos, Monzó, Ahmed. At the same time, we seek to uncover the symbolic violence embedded within discourse itself—a violence structured by ideology and power, as so incisively analysed even further ago by Žižek, Mouffe, van Dijk, or Bourdieu. Though the mechanisms they describe are now widely recognised, their grip on the social imagination continues to grow. Paradoxically, the more we know, the more overwhelming their effects seem to become. In the emerging age of generative AI—with its power to (re-)produce symbolic and narrative violence on an unprecedented scale—previously dystopian scenarios begin to look increasingly plausible.

The fusion of intelligent discourse-generation tools with advanced techniques of emotional and attentional manipulation draws us closer to a version of 1984 that perhaps even Orwell could not have foreseen. What once thrived in agnotological capitalism now persists through a reconfigured, skewed, subversive awareness—as if the knowledge of our own condition had ceased to be a remedy and instead gave rise to new, more complex injustices.

The first volume of our series is "Justice as Myth: Unveiling the Global Discursive Illusion." At the outset of this journey, we seek to understand how the very promise of justice—a promise conjured in every ideological grammar available on the political marketplace—reveals itself in the early decades of the 21st century. The more intuitive and self-evident the notion of justice appears, the more hollow it becomes as a floating signifier, emptied by overuse. And the more urgently we demand justice in practice, the more vulnerable we become to its instrumentalisation through technocratic and symbolic forms of social engineering. We inhabit a world saturated with the bitterness of injustice, a reality in which resentment and grievance accumulate across successive layers of violence. This ideological palimpsest is written and rewritten through the cynical deployment of justice, a concept increasingly framed from the vantage point of the powerful. In a kind of cognitive potlatch, the strong offer the victims of structural violence a narrative and a promise—a myth of justice—that, rather than healing, burns from within.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Social Inclusion is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.

Community and belonging are widely recognised as crucial components of student well-being, motivation, and success in higher education. For doctoral researchers—whose learning is often independent, relationally uneven, and structurally isolating—the presence or absence of community can profoundly influence identity formation, academic progression, and emotional resilience. These dynamics are even more significant for diverse doctoral students, including home and international candidates, mature students, part-time researchers, caregivers, and those entering academia from non-traditional or marginalised backgrounds.

Although “community” is a familiar term, scholarship shows it is a deeply contested and multifaceted concept. Community is often idealised as inherently positive, associated with warmth, security, and a sense of cosiness, and imagined as something shared or characterised by solidarity. Yet community is also political, mobilised as a policy response to social problems, and invoked to support the integration of minority groups. Community can be imagined, symbolic, or utilitarian, fleeting and temporary, concrete and material, or ephemeral and pragmatic.

This thematic issue uses community as a lens to examine how doctoral students experience inclusion, exclusion, and belonging across the intersecting domains of place, networks, and identity. Doctoral researchers often navigate multiple, overlapping communities—academic departments, research groups, disciplinary networks, cultural and linguistic groups, geographic locations, and family or workplace communities. These communities shape students’ sense of belonging, which Ahmed (2015) describes as “feeling or being a part of, rather than apart from.” For international, mature, and part-time students, places may be unstable or dispersed; networks may be fragmented; and identities may shift as students move between academic and non-academic worlds.

We approach belonging not only as a matter of participation and inclusion, but also as an ethical and relational practice shaped by care, vulnerability, responsibility, and uneven relations of power. In this sense, belonging is always produced through particular institutional arrangements, supervisory relations, and labour conditions that differently enable or constrain who can belong, on what terms, and at what cost. Understanding how these diverse groups create, access, negotiate, or feel excluded from academic communities enables institutions to reimagine doctoral education as a genuinely inclusive, relational, and socially just endeavour. Alongside critical analyses of current conditions, then, the Special Issue also invites contributions that imagine alternative ways of organising doctoral life and academic community, including practices of repair, collective support, and inclusion that both work within and challenge existing institutional structures in an increasingly performance-driven higher education landscape.

This thematic issue seeks to:

• Investigate how diverse doctoral students experience community, inclusion, and belonging.
• Examine the social, emotional, structural, and political processes that shape doctoral communities.
• Illuminate how doctoral researchers build and sustain networks, form identities, and negotiate multiple forms of belonging.
• Analyse institutional practices, cultures, and policies that enable or hinder inclusive doctoral communities.
• Highlight innovations, interventions, and models of support that foster belonging for underrepresented, international, part-time, and mature doctoral students.
• Study the antecedents of participation and its consequences on students’ well-being, persistence, and later career trajectories.
• Through the inclusion of quantitatively oriented research, provide robust empirical evidence on patterns, mechanisms, and inequalities of belonging by making visible the structural and relational dynamics that shape doctoral life at scale.

References
Ahmed, A. (2015). Retiring to Spain: Women’s narratives of nostalgia, belonging and community. Policy Press.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Social Inclusion is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.