Lifelong education research over 40 years: insights from the International Journal of Lifelong Education

With this special issue of the International Journal of Lifelong Education, we complete a two-year celebration and critical examination of the field of adult lifelong education, prompted by the journal’s fortieth anniversary. In this editorial we provide a brief account of this celebration and its rationale, but also devote attention to the origins and early years of the journal itself. This involves reporting some recollections of two of the three men who edited the journal over its first sixteen years. It also involves reflecting on some notable developments, ‘turns’ and events in the academic field of adult education during that period, and the journal’s relationship to them. We then introduce the contents of the special issue itself: five articles and two review essays that draw on and analyse aspects of the work published in the journal over four decades. Finally, we reflect briefly on the journal’s aims, and the challenges of keeping them alive. We have set out much of the background and rationale to our fortieth anniversary ‘project’ in two previous editorials (Holford et al., 2021, 2022); some of the results have been presented in our earlier special issue, Forty Years of the International Journal of Lifelong Education: Reflections on a Changing Field (Volume 41, No. 1). As we explained, the special issues emerged from discussions among the editors and editorial advisory board. These raised various issues. Some concerned readership and audience, the framing of outputs from the research, and when, amongst whom, and into what context these might ‘land’. How has ‘the field’ changed? How far is the journal Anglocentric or ‘international’? What would be the critical issues of the time when we came to publish? In what ways might adult lifelong education – and research into it over the past forty years – contribute to solutions to the human race’s systemic problems? A second area of discussion concerned how and what should be covered: there was, for example, a long discussion as to how the period since 1981 was best divided up temporally: in the end we considered it as four decades, partly faute de mieux, but also because such a division, albeit arbitrary, might draw attention to ‘absences’ as well as ‘presences’, and require us to notice things that – with today’s concerns – we might otherwise overlook. As we proceeded, we did indeed spot geographical, racial, social, absences, as well as the varying presence or absence of various ‘voices’. At the same time, we have recognised trends or ‘long lines’, extending over several decades. Further concerns included revisiting ‘past futures’: reflecting on what we (or our predecessors) had imagined, or hoped, or feared, the future might be like. What did they see, ignore or overlook? In what ways did they prove correct or mistaken, and what might we learn from this? At the same time, we wanted to recognise the (external) events and forces that had shaped the journal and the field. We anticipated that these might include – to adopt unfashionable Marxist terminology – ‘material base’ and ‘ideological superstructure’, and political or ‘natural’ events of global significance. Examples include ‘globalisation’, whether considered as theoretical perspective, ideology, or