CEA CAPA Education Abroad
2026 Woolf Symposium

2026 Woolf Symposium

Keywords in Education Abroad Storytelling: Deconstructing the Language of the Field

Words are not simply tools; they shape the very worlds we inhabit. - Raymond Williams

Language is never neutral. It either liberates or oppresses. - Paulo Freire

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.  - Ludwig Wittgenstein

Announcing the 2026 Woolf Symposium

Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad is pleased to join CEA CAPA Education Abroad to co-host this year’s Woolf Symposium in conjunction with The Forum on Education Abroad’s 2026 Annual Conference. Building on their longstanding annual symposia and Occasional Publications, CEA CAPA began convening the Woolf Symposium in 2023 with the goal of inviting scholars, practitioners, and scholar-practitioners of education abroad into a safe space to exchange ideas, discussions, disagreements, and dissent about underexamined themes and topics in our work.

This year, a new partnership with Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad—our field’s only open-access, peer-reviewed academic journal, published by The Forum—enables CEA CAPA and Frontiers to work together towards their shared goals of encouraging creative and necessary scholarship on education abroad, deepening engagement between scholars and practitioners in the field, and creating spaces for critical reflection and examination of the theoretical, ethical, and philosophical underpinnings of our work.

We have recently closed our call for keyword submissions and will announce an update to the program in January. While registration for the Woolf Symposium is now full, a waitlist is available and we encourage you to add your name if you’d like to be notified should a spot open. 

Rationale

Over the decades, international education has developed a lexicon of terms that has shaped its rhetoric, practice, and pedagogy. Keywords such as globalization, culture, immersion, diversity, and transformation recur in our program descriptions, mission statements, and student reflections. Yet they have become so embedded in our field’s rhetoric that their meanings are often taken for granted. Some have shifted, lost resonance, or become unexamined orthodoxies. Still others may no longer speak adequately to contemporary realities. Are they still relevant, or do they obscure as much as they reveal about our practices, our students, and our world?

Words matter. Journals like Frontiers and the Occasional Publications are made up entirely of words aimed at building shared knowledge and understanding for the advancement of our field and our practice. Through words written now and words documented for posterity, that knowledge and understanding grows. Therefore, it is particularly timely at the outset of this new partnership to focus on the language of the field.  

This symposium seeks to provoke fresh conversations about the language of education abroad and the worldview it sustains. We invite colleagues to revisit and critically interrogate the keywords of education abroad. Our aim is to deconstruct, historicize, and reconsider these terms that continue to shape how we describe, practice, and justify international education today, and to reimagine the language through which we understand and communicate the value and purpose of our field.

• How do these words continue to frame our field?

• What assumptions, histories, or ideologies are embedded in these terms?

• Which keywords still serve our field, and if so, how?  How are they interconnected?  Which feel exhausted or misleading?

• What alternative vocabularies might better capture our realities?  If the words we use shape the field, what kind of future do we want our keywords to imagine into being?

The 2026 Woolf Symposium Organizing Committee is:

• Dr. Anthony Gristwood, Senior Editor, CEA CAPA Occasional Publications Series, Principal Lecturer & Faculty Chair, London, and Chair, Global Faculty Advisory Council, CEA CAPA Education Abroad

• Dr. Elaine Meyer-Lee, Provost, Goucher College & Editor, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad

• Dr. Louis Berends, Associate Provost, CEA CAPA Education Abroad

• Dr. Amelia J. Dietrich, Senior Director for Research and Publications, The Forum on Education Abroad & Managing Editor, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad

• Dr. Martha Johnson, Chief Academic Officer and Provost, CEA CAPA Education Abroad

• Dr. Anas N. Almassri, Executive Editorial Assistant, Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad