From the Publisher: Following the resignation of the JAE Editorial Board in March 2025, the ACSA Board of Directors has engaged interim editorial teams to lead the publication of JAE 79:2, 80:1-2, and 81:1. In summer 2025, ACSA commissioned an external assessment of JAE policies and decision making, and the organization is continuing to work through a committee to revise the policies that govern our scholarly programs. Following this process, the organization will work to appoint a new Executive Editor and Editorial Board.
Considered across an extended historical horizon, journals such as the JAE may be understood both as active producers of discourse operating through multiple and often overlapping conceptual frames, and as neutral archival surfaces upon which the discipline inscribes its evolving concerns. From this perspective, the journal becomes a repository of shifting pedagogical models, methodological transformations, ideological tensions, and epistemic formations that together constitute an alternative historiography of architectural education. What emerges is not a singular or linear narrative, but rather a layered and heterogeneous accumulation of positions, debates, and disciplinary imaginaries.
At certain historical junctures, however, such accumulations invite renewed critical reflection. Moments of disciplinary transition demand opportunities to reassess inherited assumptions, reconsider current trajectories, and speculate on future directions for architectural education and research. This issue proposes an OPEN and non-thematic call framed through the temporal triad RW / PAUSE / FFW. These terms should not be understood as fixed categories or prescriptive themes, but rather as conceptual lenses through which contributors may engage processes of retrospective inquiry, critical pause, and forward projection.
In reaffirming JAE’s founding mission, established in 1947 as a venue for the dissemination of research on architectural education, this OPEN call welcomes submissions that engage architecture pedagogy in its broadest sense, addressing any area of the architectural curriculum and its related disciplinary fields. We invite contributions that examine pivotal historical moments in architectural education, critically interrogate contemporary pedagogical models and institutional transformations, or speculate on emerging educational practices and forms of learning that may reshape the future of the discipline.
Submissions will be accepted for the JAE’s existing manuscript categories: Essay, Design, Narrative, Image. The submission deadline for all manuscripts for this theme issue is Monday, August 3, 2026. Accepted articles will be published in issue 81:1 (Spring 2027). For author instructions, please consult the author guide.
