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This past July, a good friend, colleague, and scholar, Joe Cytrynbaum, passed away unexpectedly at age 36. To commemorate his life and work, Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education Journal will publish a special issue, guest edited by three colleagues and friends from his time in Philadelphia - Dr. Leif Gustavson, Dr. Raymond Gunn, and Dr. Christina Collins. To compose this tribute to a remarkable person and scholar, we invite submissions which focus on the issues and passions that fueled Joe: social justice, creative expression, and youth work. His life and work were devoted to a blend of activism, scholarship, and the arts, all of which we hope to reflect in this issue.
Our goal is to create a multi-media, multi-modal document that weaves together these three themes, honoring the complexity inherent in them. Joe saw the connections among social justice, creative expression, and youth work, and understood that in order to tackle societal problems, these three issues must be in play. Our hope is to show how these themes are connected in interesting and surprising ways. Potential questions to explore: How are these issues connected? What does it mean to write with youth? How can the practice of performance art inform the practice of teaching? How can we work collaboratively to solve the pressing problems of educational inequity, global warming, and political agency? How are these seemingly disparate questions connected? And how did knowing Joe shape your own perspectives and actions on these issues?
Above all, our goals with this issue are to bring together the varied spheres of influence that Joe participated in and helped to cultivate, and to create a hybrid work of art that pushes the work forward and would make Joe proud. We are hoping to collect pieces from the wide range of communities where Joe worked, and look forward to pieces by youth, educators, youth workers, academics, and the like that embody the spirit of Joe's work and commitments. These could include research that has been published elsewhere or that you would like to publish here for the first time: reflections, remembrances, short video clips, images, audio collages, poems, stories, and vignettes, as well as materials you may have prepared for Joe's memorial services in Chicago and Philadelphia. We also welcome suggestions for other types of contributions to the issue. You do not have to have known Joe Cyntrynbaum to submit a contribution to this special issue of the Penn GSE Perspectives on Urban Education Journal; we ask that your submission speak to the issues to which Prof. Cyntrynbaum dedicated his life and work.
Interested contributors are welcome to email comments and queries to the guest editors of this special issue of the Perspectives of Urban Education at raymond.gunn60@gmail.com. Please complete the submission form found on the website (http://www.urbanedjournal.org/submit.html) and e-mail it along with your submission to journal@gse.upenn.edu. Please be sure to indicate in the subject line of your email that your submission is for this special issue. We look forward to celebrating Joe's life and work with his friends and colleagues!
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