Announcements

Call for Papers: (Un)Disturbed: A Journal of Feminist Voices, Issue 2

Special Issue on Feminist Futurities

 

The editorial team is excited to announce our new call for the next issue of (Un)Disturbed: A
Journal of Feminist Voices that seeks to creatively explore and imagine feminist futurities.
In her 2016 work Freedom is a Constant Struggle, feminist political activist and author
Angela Davis wrote, “[o]ur histories never unfold in isolation. We cannot truly tell what we
consider to be our own histories without knowing the other stories. And often we discover
that those other stories are actually our own stories” (pp. 135). And, indeed, in considering
the past and present as told through shared feminist voices and stories, we may be able to
imagine feminist futurities together. From this context, we imagine feminist futurities as the
speculative and theoretical frameworks that imagine and work towards our preferred future
worlds where feminist ideals—such as abolition, freedom from patriarchal and white
supremacist structures, disability justice, and gender equity—are realized. Intersecting with
ideas of queer futurity, racial justice, environmental sustainability, decolonial thought, and
disabled futures, feminist futurities do more than merely focusing on the present struggles.
Feminist futurities challenge existing power structures by envisioning radical, inclusive
futures that empower marginalized voices, especially women, non-binary people, and those
affected by intersecting oppressions, which includes reflecting on, and interrogating, the
entanglements of the past, the present, and the future.


Feminist futurities encourage not just imagining what feminist futures could look like, but
also strategizing and mobilizing actions today that work towards those visions. Imagining
feminist futurities necessitates the conception of a world where the past and the present
cannot be disentangled from striving for the possibility of futures that do not perpetuate the
“structural and legally sanctioned misogyny, transphobia, and white supremacy (among other
forms of violence) of the present” (Silverbloom 2024). In learning from each other through
our shared feminist stories, we can engage in conversations where we retell our stories to
revise them and relaunch them for unique (and potentially hopeful) feminist futurities. In this
issue we hope to generate discussions that open up a dialogue about how we, as feminists, are
thinking about the entanglements of the past, the present, and the future.


We welcome contributions that examine, but are not limited to, the following areas:


● Digital feminist futurities
● Ecofeminism and environmental feminist futurities
● Indigenous futurities
● Afrofuturism
● Queer futurities
● Crip feminism and disabled futures
● Bodies and feminist futurities
● Specific topics related to feminist stories and/or feminist futurities on campus (for
example, navigating feminist futurities in tandem with misogyny and rape culture on
campus)

 

Submission Information 

(Un)Disturbed encourages engagement with any of the following forms:

  • Reports on campus and/or community ongoings (800-1500 words) 
  • Original research (3000-6000 words) 
  • Essays (2500-4,000 words)
  • Activist/advocate notes (6,000 words) 
  • Commentary and Criticism (2000-2500) 
  • Book reviews (2,000 words) 
  • Interviews and roundtables (4,000 words) 
  • Community voices (4,000 words)  
  • Poetry (variable) 
  • Reflections (variable) 
  • Research creation (variable) 
  • Other arts-based analyses, outputs, and commentary (variable)  

 

For more information, please review the About the Journal page for the journal's section  policies, as well as the Author Guidelines. Authors need to register with the journal prior to  submitting or, if already registered, simply log in and begin the process. 

To submit a proposal for consideration in this special issue, please send a 250-word abstract
to amcwebb@uwaterloo.ca by December 10th, 2024. Any questions can also be directed to this
email address.

Contributors will be notified of the status of their abstracts by January 15, 2025. Full papers
or projects will be due March 30, 2025. Completed manuscripts should be submitted via the
(Un)Disturbed submission portal and adhere to the journal’s formatting guidelines.

 

Works Cited 

Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom Is a Constant Struggle Ferguson, Palestine, and the  Foundations of a Movement (F. Barat, Ed.). Haymarket Books. 

Silverbloom, R. (2024). Hope as Refusal: Queer, Feminist Futurity. Signs: Journal of Women  in Culture and Society, 49(4), 807–830. https://doi.org/10.1086/729910