BAICE 2026 ECR Conference: Heart-Work, Not Hard-Work – Connecting as Humans in Contested Times

Event Overview

Heart-Work, Not Hard-Work is an invitation to pause, gather, and rethink how we research, relate, and create knowledge together within Comparative and International Education (CIE).

Resonating with the main BAICE 2026 conference theme of meeting difference in contested times, this gathering moves beyond discussing contested spaces to rethinking how academic spaces themselves are structured.

We invite you to be part of this journey. Please come spend the day with us. This is a collective project—a space to bridge institutional gaps, spend meaningful time together, share ideas in development, explore complex questions, and imagine what academia and educational research can become when approached differently.

Core Themes

Our sessions and discussions revolve around five central invitations for exploration:

• Radical Care: Prioritizing well-being, relational responsibility, and human connection over hyper-productivity.

• Collective Connection: Building solidarity and collaborative networks across generations, disciplines, and institutions.

• Heart-Work: Bringing intuition, empathy, and lived experience into academic practice.

• Navigating onto-epistemologies: Exploring alternative ways of knowing, being, and understanding the world.

• Knowledge Hierarchies: Questioning established power dynamics in research and educational spaces.

What to Expect

The day is designed to foster genuine interaction, supportive feedback, and multi-generational dialogue by spending the whole day thinking, being and eating together:

• Interactive Workshops: Creative and participatory sessions involving storytelling, movement, maker-spaces, painting, and poetic expression.

• Living Poster Sessions: Dynamic, hands-on visual and experimental displays designed as starting points for dialogue rather than static viewings.

• Rapid-Fire Discussions & Panels: Concise presentations paired with supportive, collaborative feedback from both peers and senior academics.

• Paper Presentations: Formal research presentations followed by in-depth Q&A.

• Participant-Led Unconference: A fluid, open space shaped collectively by the conversations, ideas, and needs emerging throughout the day.

Who Should Attend

This gathering actively brings together scholars across all career stages to ensure rich, open dialogue:

• Postgraduate Research Students & Early Career Researchers: Master’s candidates, PhD researchers, and Postdoctoral Fellows seeking a supportive environment to share work and build community.

• Senior Academics & Experienced Mentors: Established scholars eager to engage in horizontal dialogue, offer constructive feedback, share experiences, and learn alongside early-career colleagues.

• Scholars, Educators, & Practitioners: Anyone interested in Comparative and International Education (CIE), relational methodologies, and reimagining academic culture.

Venue & Main Conference Note

• ECR & Intergenerational Gathering: 2 September 2026 at the University of Glasgow.

Room: 432 St. Andrews Building

Eldon Street, Glasgow, G3 6NH, UK

• BAICE Annual Conference: Attending this gathering serves as an ideal lead-in to the main BAICE Annual Conference, taking place immediately after from 3–5 September 2026. Registration required - closes 19 August