Human Dignity as a crucial value of education for 21th century
Education has visible and hidden anti-stigma potentials that can enhance the life chances of low-status individuals and groups. Why is it worth focusing on these potentials? Why is education an area of social life important from the point of view of anti-stigma potentials? How to discover, explore, strengthen and apply them in practice? How can referring to the concept of anti-stigma potentials deepen the knowledge about the individual and social functions of education? How education can create the conditions to understand the value of human dignity?
60 years ago, Erving Goffman’s book Stigma was published – a work of groundbreaking importance for the social sciences (Goffman 1963). His greatest contribution was to raise the importance of relationships between people exposed to stigma and other participants of social life (the so-called ‘normals’) from the point of view of strengthening or weakening the life chances of the latter. Since then, new, extended approaches to the issue of stigma have appeared, taking into account different contexts and mechanisms of its production and showing its harmful consequences (Lamont et. alt. 2016; Tyler 2020, Nordstorm, Goodfriend ed. 2022).
Even though Goffman’s pioneering book addressed the issue of strategies for dealing with stigma and that over the following decades the concepts of interventions, methods, programs and practices to prevent, reduce and overcome stigma were developed, it is difficult to talk about satisfactory results. Even the most promising of the proposed ones – the contact theory – needs development and specification. There is a gap between the awareness of the threats posed by stigma as a threat to individuals, groups or entire societies, and the offer of complementary, convincing, well-operationalized concepts for counteracting this phenomenon.
We intend to take a step towards filling this gap by looking at the process of formal, non-formal and informal education at all levels from the perspective of its anti-stigma potentials. As contributors of the book Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education (2023), we assume that an important part of education is the involvement of participants in the educational process outside the school or university walls, on the move, using participatory and inclusive methods, with the active participation of external stakeholders (Roy et. alt. 2023: 15). We prefer a positive approach (Pocinho, Garces 2023: 77-90), emphasizing that ‘any meaningful education must be a dynamic reality’ (Strouhal, Swoboda, Komarkova 2023: 39), giving the opportunity to ‘transcend the boundaries of one’s group, social class and nationality’ (Kwiatkowski 2023: 57). We also assume that education can and should be treated as a laboratory of social life. Social processes are clearly revealed here, including the process of stigmatization, but also the process of overcoming it. The use of the term ‘anti-stigma potentials’ results from the assumption that it is worth looking for factors to counteract and overcome stigma both in consciously and purposefully constructed strategies and interventions that appear within education, as well as in those that result from the general framework of its functioning. What we mean here is, among others, the ideological, normative, spatial, programmatic, content, methodological and interpersonal potentials that lie in various forms of education at all its levels.
We are happy to receive submissions on the issues of preventing, opposing and overcoming stigmatization in the field of broadly understood education. We particularly welcome articles that addresses one or more of the following areas:
- Ideas, values and norms inspiring anti-stigma practices in education;
- Anti-stigma potentials of space for education;
- Anti-stigma potentials of curricula;
- Anti-stigma potentials of mobile methods;
- Anti-stigma potentials of youthwork;
- Anti-stigma potentials of intercultural education;
- Anti-stigma potentials of intergenerational education;
- Anti-stigma potentials of educational international exchange;
We are waiting for proposals of articles based on extensive quantitative and qualitative research, comparative analyses, case studies, as well as for works of a conceptual or review nature.
Co-editors
Mariusz Kwiatkowski
pedagogue and sociologist, Poland, University of Zielona Góra, visiting scholar at the Charles University in 2023 
Margarida Pocinho
psychologist, Portugal, University of Madeira
Alastair Roy
sociologist, United Kingdom, University of Central Lancashire
Martin Strouhal
pedagogue, philosopher, Czech Republic, Charles University 
Literature
GOFFMAN, Erving, 1963, Stigma: Notes on the management of spiled identity, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
GOODFRIEND, Wind, 2022, Preface. An Introduction to Stigma Intervention, in.: NORDSTROOM, Alicia H., GOODFRIEND, Wind (ed.), 2022, Innovative Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Programs across the World, New York and London: Routledge, pp. xii-xxiii.
KWIATKOWSKI, Mariusz, 2023, Mobile Social Education and Bridging Solidarity, in.: ROY, Alastair, GUHLAN, Sinan Tankut, BAZUŃ, Dorota, KWIATKOWSKI Mariusz, 2023, Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education, Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education, Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, p. 57-76.
LAMONT, Michele et. alt., 2016, Getting Respect: Responding to Stigma and Discrimination in the United States, Brazil, and Israel, Michèle Lamont, Graziella Moraes Silva, Jessica S. Welburn, Joshua Guetzkow, Nissim Mizrachi, Hanna Herzog, and Elisa Reis, Princeton University Press: Princeton and Oxford.
NORDSTROOM, Alicia H., GOODFRIEND, Wind (ed.), 2022, Innovative Stigma and Discrimination Reduction Programs across the World, New York and London: Routledge.
POCINHO, Margarida, GARCES, Soraia, 2023, The Educational Process Outside the University Walls: the Positive Psychology Perspective; in.: ROY, Alastair, GUHLAN, Sinan Tankut, BAZUŃ, Dorota, KWIATKOWSKI Mariusz, 2023, Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education, Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education, Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa, p. 77-90.
TYLER, Imogen, 2020, Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality, Zed Books, Kindle Edition.
ROY, Alastair, GUHLAN, Sinan Tankut, BAZUŃ, Dorota, KWIATKOWSKI Mariusz, 2023, Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education, Knowledge on the Move: Studies on Mobile Social Education, Warszawa: Oficyna Naukowa.