Call for applications: number 38, March-June 2027

The recent initiative by the United Nations to bring the crisis of disappearances in Mexico before its General Assembly in 2026 underscores the global scale of a tragedy that has profoundly fractured our social fabric. Faced with such a devastating reality, in which the number of disappeared persons continues to grow day by day, it becomes imperative to ask: What has been the role of education amid this humanitarian emergency?

We begin from the recognition that attention to this phenomenon has generally fallen upon the justice system, forensic sciences, or sociological analyses. However, forced disappearance deeply alters subjectivity, community life, and the ways in which we relate to one another. In this Issue 38 of Diálogos sobre Educación. Temas actuales en investigación educativa, we argue that this crisis demands discussion from the educational field in its various dimensions.

We propose to examine how families, search collectives, and educational institutions generate tools, methodologies, and sensibilities to understand and address the problem in Mexico, as well as what has occurred in other contexts where disappearance has formed part of necropolitical processes during dictatorships.

We understand that a socio-educational perspective on this phenomenon must focus both on what is occurring in classrooms—where school communities face the enormous challenge of supporting children and adolescents in coping with absence, explaining violence, and preventing it—and on the forms of learning that emerge in public spaces, within search collectives that have had to learn how to search, document, and generate processes of collective memory, as well as in educational processes centered on accompanying the pain of those who suffer the absence of a loved one. Both constitute relevant socio-educational processes that must be analyzed, discussed, and studied within the educational field.

Therefore, this issue is an invitation to make visible, systematize, and analyze these pedagogical practices and forms of learning, recognizing families of disappeared persons as legitimate subjects in the production of knowledge about peace, memory, reparation, and justice.

The following thematic lines are suggested for this issue, although they are neither exhaustive nor exclusive:

• Pedagogies of memory.
• Pedagogies of search.
• Ethics, education, and human rights in the face of the disappearance crisis.
• Teaching and civil society work in communities affected by violence.
• Reparation and healing processes in families of victims of disappearance.
• Emerging educational research techniques in contexts of conflict and search.
• Challenges and opportunities for education in response to forced disappearance.
• Building critical and solidaristic citizenship in the face of absence.
• Care pedagogies and accompaniment practices surrounding the disappearance of persons.