Call for Papers: Engaged Scholar Journal Spring 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS

SPECIAL ISSUE (Volume 8, Issue 1, Spring 2022)

ENGAGING FEMINISMS: CHALLENGING EXCEPTIONALIST IMAGINARIES

Guest Editors:

Marie Lovrod and Corinne Mason

As Dean, Johnson and Luhmann (2018) argue, although feminist social justice activists and scholars from many communities and social locations have long navigated the productive tensions that characterize academic-activist-community engagements, with universities facing increasing pressures to raise the profile of community-based research and teaching, gender justice organizers and scholars are rarely sought out to evaluate the renewed emphasis on market-oriented industry partnerships, community service, civic engagements, volunteering, philanthropy and charity models that may inform institutional initiatives. Challenging the inequities that characterize power, privilege and status-quo imperialist logics exposes complicities with increasingly aggressive exceptionalisms framed through racist, hetero and cisnormative, ablest, sexist and ageist socio-economic mainstreaming that may mobilize community engagement to mask implicit and explicit abandonment of more meaningful solidarities within and across classrooms, communities, environments and borders. None are immune to these forces.

Claims of neutrality in hardline approaches to the ‘way things are,’ can decontextualize meaningful analysis of what is actually going on; depoliticization through “feel good” approaches to engagement can be used to avoid inconvenient nuances, subvert substantive shifts toward alternative vocabularies of the possible (see Kaul 2009), and reinforce methodological nationalisms (Amelina, Nergiz, Faist & Schiller 2012) when engaging marginalized people and places. Vendramin (2012) emphasizes the asymmetric forms of ignorance and recurring bias that characterize prevailing claims on the terms of public intelligibility and, therefore, demands critical attention to dominant modes of scholarly reproduction (see Wöhrer 2016) and acknowledgement of those who may or may not be recognized as informed knowers in engaged educational research. As Ermine (2007) argues, shared ethical spaces must be created to support sound theoretical and practical frameworks that welcome diversely positioned people and the places that matter to them in equitable, meaningful dialogue which takes seriously what cannot be compared or shared, as a starting point for cultivating a learning spirit (Battiste 2016), together.

For our Spring 2022 special issue on Feminisms Challenging Exceptionalist Imaginaries, we seek submissions from community- and university-based researchers and scholars who actively engage with communities (of all kinds) in practicing intersectional feminist research, teaching and learning. Emphasizing the integration of deep collaboration-building practices into teaching, learning and research, we invite previously unpublished research articles, reports from the field, multimedia contributions and book reviews for our special issue that challenges exceptionalist imaginaries through active positioning of critical feminist community engagements, building on research and teaching that explores topics including, but not limited to:

• Indigenous sovereignty, land-based learning and community engagement practice
• Materialist approaches to decolonization in community
• Anti-racist, anti-phobic community engagements
• Transformational justice and anti-carceral community engagements
• Queering community engagement
• Moving toward an intersectional feminist economics of community engagement
• Creativity, resistance and solidarity in the lived realities of manufactured crises
• Challenging speciesism through community engagement
• Imagining non-exceptionalist communities in the context of climate change
• Border imperialisms
• Transnational institutional collaborations – what is and is not working
• Whiteness, mainstreaming and knowledge regimes
• The temporalities of community-based labour: pasts, presence, futurities
• Navigating affect in deep collaborative practice
• Embodiment, witnessing and social suffering
• Respecting community research fatigue: lessons learned
• Collective co-biography: telling stories about resisting exceptionalisms, together
• Lengths and limits of digital/media collaborative projects
• Community-engaged ways of practicing and interrogating memorialization
• Struggles for belonging among Indigenous, international and/or first generation students, staff and faculty
• Interrogating notions of “risk” associated with academic community engagements
• Assessing accountability and sustainability of community-university coalitions
• Engagement and attention: time, space, materiality and emerging horizons of possibility

Please submit your expressions of interest in the form of a 250-350-word abstract (including citation trail) by January 15th, 2020. Your abstract can be inserted in the text of your email or as an attachment.

·  Full Manuscript Submission Deadline      :  June 15, 2021

·  Projected Date of publication                      :  Spring 2022

• Final Submissions to be submitted via      :  http://esj.usask.ca