call for proposals 2027

The 2027 CRSEA Conference theme centers on Critical Race Praxis. While some attendees may be deeply familiar with this framework and others encountering it for the first time, we invite all participants to engage Critical Race Praxis as an evolving conversation about the relationship between Critical Race Theory and the pursuit of racial justice in the world.

Disturbed by Critical Race Theory’s inability to “explore the difficult dynamics and racialized settings of coalition formation and action” (Yamamoto and Su, 2002, p. 386), Legal Scholar Eric Yamamoto introduced Critical Race Praxis, a conceptualization of Critical Race Theory that attempted to unite race scholars and activists in their contributions to progressive social-justice movements, like the ones he and his law students were engaged in alongside garment workers in Los Angeles in the 1990s. For Yamamoto, Critical Race Praxis combined “critical, pragmatic, socio-legal analysis with political lawyering and community organizing to practice justice”. Yamamoto's intervention challenged scholars not merely to theorize racial subordination but to situate knowledge production within ongoing struggles for racial justice, thereby positioning Critical Race Praxis as both a conceptual and political project.

In this sense, Critical Race Praxis encourages race scholars—practicing and emergent—to “explore the experiences of racial communities and locating theory development and application within their antisubordination struggles” (Yamamoto, 1997). Yamamoto’s four starting points of Critical Race Praxis—the conceptual, the performative, the material, and the reflexive—offer critical race scholars in all disciplines a frame to “spend less time with abstract theorizing and more time in communities experiencing injustice” (Wilson et al., 2024). Since Yamamoto’s introduction of Critical Race Praxis to the field of legal studies, education scholars have taken up Critical Race Praxis in their work to illuminate the endemic nature of racism and to advance racial justice projects in communities across the world (Annamma et al., 2022; Jayakumar & Adamian, 2015; Kohli, 2025; McCay, 2010; McGee & Stovall, 2015; Stovall, 2004, 2005; Stovall et al., 2009; Wilson et al., 2024). 

Inspired by Yamamoto's vision and the generations of scholars, educators, organizers, and youth who have extended it, CRSEA 2027 seeks to create a space for critical reflection, collective dreaming, and strategic action. Together we will examine the conditions shaping our present, learn from ongoing struggles for educational justice, and imagine new possibilities for socially transformative futures. We welcome proposals that explore how critical race scholarship informs and is informed by educational practice, community engagement, organizing, policy advocacy, artistic expression, youth leadership, coalition building, and additional efforts to advance educational justice. We are particularly interested in work that grapples with the opportunities, tensions, contradictions, and possibilities that emerge when Critical Race Theory is taken up in the everyday work of creating more just educational worlds.

The Bay Area is particularly suited for the 20th convening of the CRSEA conference. It’s home to many critical race scholars, and it’s been the site of the solidarity work that Critical Race Praxis advocates for and memorializes. From the birth of social movement organizations like the Black Panther Party, to the long-standing P-20 ethnic studies movement, to current struggles to protect all peoples and all lands, the Bay Area has roadmaps, stories, ideas, and practices that we can bridge to and through the context(s) of our homeplaces.