Special Issue: Women of the African Diaspora: Letters to Higher Education
Fall Edition: What Does Higher Education Need to Hear?
Women of the African diaspora have shaped higher education across the globe through scholarship, leadership, teaching, and community engagement. This special issue of Dear Higher Education invites reflective letters that explore the experiences of women of the African diaspora working within higher education systems outside the United States and across transnational contexts.
Across Africa, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, Latin America, and other regions of the world, women of the African diaspora contribute to teaching, research, leadership, mentoring, and community engagement in ways that shape institutions and transform lives. Yet their experiences, perspectives, and contributions are often underrepresented in conversations about the future of higher education.
This special issue seeks letters that document, celebrate, challenge, and reimagine the role of women of the African diaspora in higher education. Through personal reflection, critical insight, storytelling, and scholarly engagement, contributors are invited to write directly to higher education about the realities they have experienced, the contributions they have made, and the futures they envision.
We invite letters that engage one or more of the following themes:
How have your experiences as a woman of the African diaspora shaped your path through higher education? What moments, relationships, opportunities, challenges, or turning points have influenced your development as a scholar, educator, leader, or practitioner?
Letters in this category may explore identity, belonging, mentorship, migration, leadership journeys, career transitions, resilience, and personal transformation.
How have women of the African diaspora shaped higher education through scholarship, teaching, leadership, creativity, advocacy, and community engagement? What perspectives, forms of knowledge, and ways of leading do we contribute that are often overlooked, undervalued, or insufficiently recognized?
Letters in this category may explore intellectual contributions, research, innovation, cultural knowledge, institutional leadership, community impact, and the significance of representation across global contexts.
What possibilities do you envision for higher education? What must institutions do to better support women of the African diaspora? What opportunities and challenges lie ahead for future generations of scholars, leaders, and learners?
Letters in this category may imagine new approaches to leadership, scholarship, collaboration, belonging, well-being, and institutional transformation.
Higher education is navigating a period of profound change. Institutions and the people within them are confronting questions about purpose, belonging, leadership, academic freedom, technology, access, institutional trust, student success, well-being, and the future of teaching and learning.
The Fall edition of Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain invites faculty, students, administrators, practitioners, scholars, and others connected to higher education to reflect on this moment and write about what higher education needs to hear.
What would you say if you could write directly to higher education?
What should institutions understand about the experiences of the people who learn, teach, lead, work, and build community within them? What practices should we preserve? What assumptions should we question? What needs to change? And what possibilities should we imagine for the future?
Dear Higher Education invites letters grounded in lived experience, professional practice, scholarly inquiry, and critical reflection. We welcome writing that examines higher education as it is, while also helping us imagine what it might become.
Letters may address one or more of the following themes:
What are you experiencing within higher education that deserves greater attention? What moments, challenges, relationships, or discoveries have shaped how you understand your institution, your profession, or your place within the academy?
What is happening in higher education that we are not talking about enough?
Letters in this category may explore belonging, identity, academic life, leadership, teaching, learning, mentorship, career pathways, institutional culture, community, well-being, resistance, resilience, or moments of personal and professional transformation.
What have your experiences, scholarship, leadership, teaching, or practice taught you about higher education? What ideas or approaches are helping you respond to the challenges facing colleges and universities today?
What knowledge should we carry forward?
Letters in this category may explore leadership, teaching and learning, scholarship, student success, institutional culture, technology and artificial intelligence, community engagement, organizational change, innovative practice, or lessons learned from work within and alongside higher education.
What kind of higher education should we be building?
What possibilities do you envision for institutions, communities, scholars, educators, leaders, and learners? What should higher education reconsider, restore, create, or transform to fulfill its responsibilities to individuals, communities, and society?
Letters in this category may imagine new approaches to leadership, scholarship, teaching, learning, collaboration, belonging, institutional structures, community engagement, well-being, and transformation.
These themes are intentionally broad.
Your letter does not need to offer a solution to every challenge facing higher education. It may begin with an experience, a question, an observation, a contradiction, a hope, or something you believe higher education urgently needs to understand.
We are especially interested in letters that bring together lived experience and thoughtful reflection, helping readers see familiar questions differently or bringing greater visibility to experiences, ideas, and possibilities that deserve attention.
Write from where you stand.
Write about what you see.
Write about what you know.
Write about what higher education needs to hear.
Letters should be written in the style of Dear Higher Education.
We welcome personal narratives, reflective essays, scholarly reflections, and letters grounded in lived experience.
Contributors may include faculty members, academic leaders, researchers, practitioners, graduate students, students, staff members, and others whose work or lives intersect with higher education.
Suggested length: 1,500–3,000 words.
Submission Deadline: September 30, 2026
Publication: Fall/Winter 2026
Dear Higher Education: Letters from the Social Justice Mountain is an open-access publication hosted by the University of Minnesota Libraries. Through letters and reflective scholarship, the journal creates space for thoughtful conversations about identity, leadership, justice, belonging, and transformation in higher education.
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The copyright of these individual works published by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing remains with the original creator or editorial team. For uses beyond those covered by law or the Creative Commons license, permission to reuse should be sought directly from the copyright owner listed on each article.
