G.17. Unschooling, Democracy, and the Public Sphere: Rethinking Education, Care, and Citizenship through Plural Perspectives

The choice of home-educating children is often depicted as a withdrawal from the public sphere—an escape from shared civic responsibilities or even a challenge to state institutions considered essential for social solidarity. Consequently, some countries impose strict regulations to ensure government oversight, while others make homeschooling de jure or de facto illegal. However, among home-educating families those specifically embracing unschooling frequently frame their educational choices within a vision of active citizenship, describing unschooling as a space in which democracy is lived and negotiated (English et al. 2024, Kunzman 2021).

This panel aims at examining unschooling through a diversity of perspectives, experiences, and disciplinary approaches, by creating a dialogue among researchers, unschoolers, educators, practitioners and scholars, whose situated viewpoints— academic, experiential, critical, or embodied—can illuminate the complexity of this phenomenon.

We invite contributions that explore whether and how unschooling practices can contribute to:

1. Reconceptualizing the dialectic between private and public spheres

By engaging with multiple positionalities to examine how personal and civic responsibility, individual and collective action, and the interplay between family autonomy and state intervention shape democratic life.

2. Reformulating education through the lens of care

By drawing on varied theoretical and experiential perspectives to challenge the unequal and undervalued distribution of care work, and to open new pathways for articulating a sociopolitical theory of “caring democracy” (Tronto 2013).

We encourage submissions that foreground diverse methodologies, epistemologies, and standpoints—including theoretical analyses, empirical research, ethnographies, autoethnographies, narratives of lived experience, critical policy studies, and interdisciplinary collaborations.