Inclusive community, work and family: imagining global futures through local contexts

This special issue draws on a selection of papers from the 9th International Community, Work & Family (CWF) Conference, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, from 15–17 June 2023 — the first CWF conference hosted in Latin America. The conference's location extended the field's geographical scope and gave us an opportunity to examine more critically what inclusion means within CWF scholarship and academia more broadly.

Community, work and family are interconnected domains central to most people's lives, but experience within and across them varies considerably across social, cultural, economic and geopolitical contexts, shaped by material conditions, institutional arrangements, and structural inequality. Knowledge presented as "global" within the field is, in practice, unevenly produced: some perspectives travel easily through academic spaces while others stay marginal or locally bound (Alatas, 2003; Connell, 2007; Santos, B. de S., 2014). How, then, can the field become more inclusive — of different contexts, and of different ways of knowing?