The 2027 Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) will be held in Madison, Wisconsin from April 3-7, 2027. The theme of the conference is “Reimagining Life: Education for Planetary Justice.”
We meet in a moment when life itself—and the fragile promise of internationalism — are under threat. Ecological collapse, imperial and racial violence, democratic erosion, mass displacement, authoritarian resurgence, technological extraction, and widening global inequality are not isolated crises, but interconnected expressions of systems built on dispossession and disposability. Across the world, unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power undermine democratic life, intensify labor precarity, and erode the conditions that have historically sustained internationalism, cross-border solidarity, and a universal commitment to justice and fairness. Education systems too often mirror and reproduce logics of wealth accumulation on the one hand and disposability on the other, legitimizing hierarchies of knowledge, labor, and life, and as such embody the crisis.
Yet such intense and protracted crisis can generate alternative imaginaries and new collective capacities. Everywhere, people are refusing the inevitability of harm and confront extractive development ventures, defend labor and migrant rights, re-root in counterhegemonic knowledge systems, and build solidarities grounded in dignity, care, and planetary responsibility. Indigenous land-based pedagogies, feminist and care-centered economies, worker and union organizing, abolitionist and reparative justice, refugee- and migrant-led knowledge networks, climate justice movements, disability and sexual rights struggles, and pluriversal epistemologies strive to cultivate just ways to live, learn, and remake relationships.
This conference asks: What does it mean to imagine education not as preparation for the world as it is, but as participation in the work of making the world anew? What forms of learning repair and regenerate relationships -- to land and labor, to histories of harm and displacement, and to the more-than-human world? What counter-hegemonic knowledges can illuminate a just future? How can international and comparative education contribute to global solidarity and collective struggle for just futures?
The conference invites inquiries, critiques and experiments in remaking education toward a vision of deep democracy and human flourishing.
Reimagining education as a practice of repair, solidarity and struggle for planetary justice.