Time in Inclusive Transition Processes

The proposed thematic issue recognizes time as a key dimension of social inclusion in transition processes across education, care, and counselling contexts. The thematic issue wants to highlight that transitions are not neutral passages but practices, which are socially produced in the context of “doing transitions”—this means structured by normative temporalities that privilege linearity, acceleration, and predictability. Especially for marginalized groups like youth with disabilities, care leavers, refugees, and first-generation students, strict timelines and deadlines, diagnostic framings, and standardized time practices can turn transitions into sites of exclusion.

Policy and professional discourses typically frame inclusion as access, participation, or equal opportunity, treating transitions as functional bridges between statuses. Yet implicit time models, such as deadlines, age thresholds, funding windows, “readiness” or societal expectations, and so on, govern who can get accustomed and follow institutional time(tables). Experiences of waiting, interruption, biographical discontinuity, and the mismatch between institutional and subjective time regimes (Eigenzeit) reveal how time norms produce differentiation and hierarchy.

By bringing transition research, inclusive education, and critical time studies into dialogue, this thematic issue wants to advance a normative–critical temporal perspective: Inclusion requires pluralizing time. We invite contributions that make temporal orders explicit, analyse how they shape subjectivation and exclusion, and propose transformative time arrangements. Relevant frameworks include temporal justice, crip time, politics of time, and theories of acceleration and becoming.

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.