[Air-L] New journal announcement & call for submissions

[Phil Bratta]

All,


The announcement below may be of interest to many of you. We look forward
to seeing your work.


Phil



*Spark: A 4C4Equality Journal*

Published by Working & Writing for Change
<https://www.parlorpress.com/workingandwritingforchange>/New City Community
Press <http://newcitycommunitypress.com/>

Spark is an online-only, open-access, peer-reviewed journal published
annually. It provides a forum for activist students, teachers, and
researchers in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies to articulate the
public and disciplinary value of their social justice pursuits. Such
justice work may be localized within a school, neighborhood, or campus, or
as far-reaching as regional, national, and international efforts. It may
intersect with movements such as Black Lives Matter, or campaigns such as
Defend DACA or Families Belong Together & Free. Ultimately, the work
published in Spark speaks to the power of intersectional and collaborative
efforts working for political change.

Unlike academic journals that focus on narrow disciplinary arguments, Spark
provides readers with an inside view of activism and community organizing
being done by those in writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies. Spark’s
goals are to amplify contributors’ work, to help contributors build
coalitions with one another, and to inspire readers to get involved in this
work or to develop their own.

2019 Call for Submissions

On 6 April 2018, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero
tolerance policy” on illegal immigration. Acting on Sessions’ decree and
the Trump administration’s policies, the US Department of Homeland Security
deemed that any adult making illegal entry into the U.S. had committed a
misdemeanor and thus fit the criteria for deportation. Under this policy,
if these adults were accompanied by their children, then border agents
separated the families. The Department of Justice deported the parents, and
the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement
(ORR) put the children into detention centers around the U.S. The
Department of Homeland Security reported that border agents separated 2,342
children from parents between May 5 and June 9.

Shocking images from these detention centers emerged in June 2018,
including photos of children corralled into cages, sleeping on floors, and
living in tents in the 100+ degree Texas heat. These images were
accompanied by details of cruelty and abuse, such as the story of a nursing
child being dragged from her mother’s breast and the stories of children in
these detention centers being forcibly drugged by ORR employees.

These images and stories have galvanized long-time activists as well as
many people who don’t regularly take action related to immigrants’ rights,
as many people took to social media to direct this outrage at family
separation and child abuse. Their online interventions ask people to take
individual action by educating oneself and donating money to organizations
like Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES)
and Annunciation House. They also called on people to work collectively by
participating in mobilizations, such as the Families Belong Together
protests that took place on June 30th in Washington, DC and cities around
the U.S., as well as protests outside detention centers around the country.
Finally, these calls ask people to help build existing organizations and
become part of the movement to stop the Trump administration’s policies and
institute a humane system for immigrants and asylum seekers in the U.S.

The 2019 edition of Spark reflects on the ways that individual, collective,
and organizational action are integral to this fight and more broadly to
all struggles for justice, equity, and liberation. Furthermore, the edition
asks contributors to explore how the foci of writing, rhetoric, and
literacy studies--reading, writing, speaking, and listening--undergird
individual, collection, and organizational actions. Contributions may
examine a variety of topics, including but not limited to the following
questions:

Individual Action

   -

   What can an individual do to protest national policies?
   -

   What does it mean to educate oneself on an issue, such as the history of
   U.S. immigration policy?
   -

   How do individual actions fit into a larger context (e.g., for policy or
   social change)?
   -

   How does one make individual action sustainable?

Collective Action

   -

   What strategies/tactics did you use in participating in or organizing a
   collective action (e.g., a protest, teach in, rally, etc.)?
   -

   How have certain strategies/tactics of collective action informed your
   pedagogy or institutional service work?
   -

   What did you learn from participating in or organizing a collective
   action?
   -

   How does one make collective action sustainable?

Organizational Action

   -

   How does one create or get involved in an organization that addresses a
   complex and far reaching social, political, cultural, or economic issue?
   -

   What role does mentoring play in building and sustaining an organization?
   -

   How does one make activism organizationally sustainable?
   -

   What do issues of self- and communal-care look like in ongoing activist
   work?

Overarching Questions

   -

   What do these types of actions look like in a specific context or
   geographic location?
   -

   How do they intersect, complicate, or diverge from one another?
   -

   How do they afford or constrain “activism”?
   -

   How do citizenship status, race and ethnicity, gender identity and
   expression, sexuality and sexual orientation, and/or class inform
   individual, collective, or organizational action?



Submission Types

We seek submissions from writers who represent all the embodied experiences
and labor categories which inform the purposes of our field.

We invite submissions from activist-scholars in all “ranks” of rhetoric &
writing studies and adjacent areas of inquiry--from undergraduate and
graduate students to non-tenure track, tenure track, and tenured faculty.
Furthermore, we invite submissions that fit into the following loosely
defined genres:

Extended Essays & Discussions

An extended essay or discussion piece would detail a project, its tactics,
or a political moment in a 1500-2500 word piece that might take the shape
of a conversation between activists or a reflective essay about a
particular experience. These pieces are different from interviews or scene
reports in that we encourage others to connect their activism to the field,
reflect on emerging trends and new directions for their work, or offer
interventions into current scholarship and/or activist movements.

Scene Reports

A scene report should do one of two things: either it provides a broad
overview of local events (e.g., teach-ins, rallies, marches, etc.) and
addresses the different organizations involved in these events, or it
provides a detailed description of one event. In either case, you should
position yourself in relation to the event(s) by addressing how you
contributed and/or participated. These reports could include photos from
the event(s) or documents used to organize them. Note that you do not need
to submit a page design. Scene reports should be 1500-2000 words.

Interviews

We encourage interviews with activists and organizers that address
questions about local work, particularly how and why local events were
organized, issues the organizers faced and how they overcame those issues,
public response to the events, etc. Interviews may be submitted as print or
video. They should be 1500-2000 words.

Tool Reviews

We invite submissions that address different tools used in your organizing
and activist work. Such submissions might address how you use specific
writing genres, web applications, street team tactics, canvasing tactics,
etc., in your work. Tool reviews should be 1000-1500 words.

As a way to encourage continued conversations, we will also publish the
following genres on a quarterly basis:

Columns

We invite 1,000-word columns that address key terms or concepts related to
activism and organizing. Columns are an ideal space to review current
events or movements, offer “explainers” about a movement, or summarize how
activist trends shape work within writing, rhetoric, and literacy studies.

Media Reviews

Media reviews can include underground publications/zines, books, films,
records, etc. We are interested in publishing reviews of scholarly and
popular texts that address different aspects of or issues related to
activism and organizing. Reviews should be limited to 800-1000 words.

For examples of these genres, check out 4C4Equality’s Writing Networks for
Social Justice zine and webtext: http://constell8cr.com/4c4e/.


Submit Your Work

We invite submissions of alphabetic texts in Word .docx form to
4c4equality at gmail.com. We also invite submissions that are “born digital,”
that is to say work that involves multimodal composing and must be
presented online, such as podcasts, videos, photo essays, or downloadable
resources. Multimodal work can be submitted as a Google Drive link to the
above address. We welcome inquiries.


Deadline for Submission for April 2019 Issue: 1 October 2018.


Managing Editors

Liz Lane, University of Memphis

Don Unger, University of Mississippi

Editorial Collective

Phil Bratta, Oklahoma State University

Sherri Craig, West Chester University

Khirsten Echols, University of Pittsburgh

Darin Jensen, Des Moines Area Community College

Fernando Sánchez, University of St. Thomas

Jaquetta Shade-Johnson, Michigan State University

Karieann Soto Vega, University of Kentucky

Advisory Board

Jennifer Bay, Purdue University

Resa Crane Bizzaro, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Seth Kahn, West Chester University

Rhea Estelle Lathan, Florida State University

Steve Parks, Syracuse University

Tiffany Rosculp, Salt Lake Community College

Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Lori Shorr, Temple University

Patricia Sullivan, Purdue University



-- 
Assistant Professor
Rhetoric and Professional Writing
Department of English
Oklahoma State University
205 Morrill Hall, 104C
Stillwater, OK 74078