Call for Submissions

Call for Papers: Special Anniversary Issue of Nineteen Sixty Nine: An Ethnic Studies Journal

For the past 45 years, Ethnic Studies has challenged tenets of the social sciences and humanities, while staking a claim for critical race and gender studies. Toward that end, this year's theme for NSN is "Across Difference," a motif commemorating over four decades of Ethnic Studies scholarship. "Across Difference" is a practice drawn from multiple genealogies of Women of Color Feminism that pivots upon what Audre Lorde has articulated as a vital "ability . . . to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating" within the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This theme touches upon the ways Ethnic Studies negotiates intellectual boundaries through interdisciplinarity and paystribute to how Ethnic Studies scholars continue to transgress and struggle with the limits of the academy, art, and activism. This issue calls for a variety of art and scholarship with the aim of enunciating what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has called "a multiple consciousness, one located at the juncture of contests over the meanings of racism, colonialism, sexualities, and class." It speaks to the very heart of Ethnic Studies: a spirit of defiance and coalition across genre, medium, and space. We invite submissions from scholars, activists, and community members for this important issue of NSN that addresses the established legacy, challenges, and future of Ethnic Studies as a dynamic and collaborative force. "Across Difference" will demonstrate the ways Ethnic Studies both undermines and transgresses the rigidity of disciplinary boundaries.

Types of work we invite include (but are not limited to):

• Academic Scholarship
• Creative Writing
  • Poetry
  • Personal Essay
  • Fiction
  • Etc.
• Visual Art
  • Photography
  • Film
  • Painting
  • Graphic Art
  • Etc.

This issue of NSN will include work that critically engages with a wide array of topics (i.e., gender, race, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, pedagogy, colonialism) but which specifically employs the following approaches:

• interdisciplinary
• transdisciplinary
• coalition-building
• transgressing difference
• challenging knowledge production
  

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• race, gender, class, and sexuality as simultaneous forces of marginalization
• accessing and engaging layered histories
• literature, art, and performance as knowledge production
• the limits of the social
• the politics of space
• genealogies of contestation and resistance
• decoloniality as theory and praxis (i.e. love as a mode of community building and resistance)
• radical or liberation pedagogy
• the body as a site of knowledge production and locus of power
• women of color in the academy
• religion and/or spirituality and the secular humanist state
• communal ecologies: bodies and the environment
• negotiating community and academic work
• notions of labor (i.e. labor as material relations, labor as community)
• indigenous epistemologies (i.e. ontologies, temporalities, socialities)
• interfaces of technology and the nonhuman

One way NSN hopes to address the notion of "across difference" is through an engagement with the politics of language. As part of a decolonial praxis, we encourage authors and artists to submit work created in any language. That said, because we have a predominantly English-speaking readership, we ask authors submitting texts that are bilingual or in languages other than English to provide an accompanying English translation. If an author must collaborate with a translator to do so, both author and translator will receive recognition in the publication. Co-authored and co-created submissions that demonstrate the collaborative spirit and praxis critical to this issue are also encouraged.

Finally, NSN is a blind, peer-reviewed journal following MLA citation style. We will accept pieces of no more than 30 pages in length. The journal is divided into the following sections:

1. Topic Specific (⅔ of the volume)
   The majority of the volume will address the stated theme. However, considering the potential range of the theme for this issue, the editorial staff will read submissions accordingly.
2. Open Topic (at most, 1/3 of the published volume)
   Submissions may also be on any topic that falls under the purview of NSN's mandate as described on our website.
3. Cover Art Competition
   nineteen sixty nine is seeking original artwork for the cover of this issue. Submissions should reflect the main theme of the issue: "Across Difference."
   Submissions not chosen for the cover will be considered for publication in the journal as a regular submission. Please keep in mind that this is a competition for cover art and not cover designs. Thus, submissions should not be in the form of a journal cover with title text, and so on. The deadline for this competition is April 2, 2014 at 5:00 PM, Pacific Standard Time, and must be submitted using our online submission process on our website.
   Please contact Kristen Sun (ksun@berkeley.edu) for questions and/or concerns about the Cover Art competition.
   Image submissions should be in a high-resolution digital format, preferably in PNG, but JPEGs are also acceptable. Images must be 25 MB or less. The journal is formatted to be printed at 8.5" x 11". For cover art, your image could be used to take up the entire cover or a smaller portion of it, depending on the dimensions of the image and the layout editor's discretion.
   In the Abstract section of the online submission form, contributors should include the title of the work, the year it was created, and the medium. An artist's statement of 40 words or less is optional.
   Submissions should also include a short biography of the artist, as indicated by the submission guidelines on our website.

The deadline for submissions is March 17th, 2014 at 5:00 PM Pacific Standard Time. All pieces must be submitted using escholarship (our online submission process) on our website.

All inquiries can be directed to NSN's executive editors:
Kim Tran (ktran@berkeley.edu),
Maria Faini (mfaini@berkeley.edu),
and Kristen Sun (ksun@berkeley.edu)