Limitations and possibilities of justice in education and the implications for sustainable futures

by education in promoting justice and changing young people's attitudes and behaviours.The articles in this special collection jointly demonstrate the challenges, as well as messages of hope, for the ambitious and transformative vision of education that is being increasingly promoted in academic and policy debates (United Nations, 2015;Tikly et al, 2020; Kwauk and Casey, 2021; UNESCO, 2022; Mbembe, 2023;Sobe, 2023).The articles have been organised into three sections and include empirical and theoretical contributions.Articles in Section 1 illuminate how unjust experiences of schooling disrupt expectations about the universally positive contribution that education is making to global development; while those in Section 2 reflect on alternative and innovative approaches to education that are grounded in the place where young people live and connect with their everyday experiences to enable critical thinking.Section 3 closes the special collection with two theoretical contributions that consider how education could be reimagined to enable more socially and environmentally just futures for young people.The articles have been developed from two large-scale international comparative projects that were funded through the ambitious and sadly discontinued Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).The fund sought to enable equitable research partnerships between researchers in the Global North and South -see Nwako et al ( 2023) for a discussion of the fund and the impact of UK aid cuts on its