Call for Papers, special issue: “Futures and Futurities,” Spring 2022
What would happen if we offered academics an intellectual playground and charged them with crafting visions of futures? What would it look like? How far could you push your mind?
For this special issue of the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, we aim to celebrate the work that has been done and that has propelled us forward, while stretching the imagination further. In 2020, we lost both Representative John Lewis, immortalized forever in comic form (the March trilogy), and actor Chadwick Boseman, who brought an iconic comic hero to life (Black Panther). The form of Lewis’ graphic autobiography introduced his hero’s journey to a new generation, who likely also looked to both the film Black Panther (2018) as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther comics to imagine what possibilities could look like.
The way that comics as a form is able to connect and bend temporality is but one example of the way multimodal rhetorics can be used as a tool to both understand the long history of freedom struggles and build upward and onward from there. This special issue seeks brave investigations and inquiries that use multimodal rhetorics to show us your vision of new futures. We are open to considering various forms for final products but are particularly interested in comics, short films, and digital projects, as well as more traditional scholarly article length/style manuscripts. It is important to us that your project takes the form that best suits the vision you have and in the way that best articulates it.
Questions to consider (but if you have a different question you’d like to answer, still submit):
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What are the conditions necessary to craft a postcolonial/decolonial education?
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What does it mean for history to be revisionist?
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What might queering the future look like in practice?
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How might education look different if we could completely reimagine the structure of the Academy?
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How do popular notions of Afrofuturism push us closer towards understandings of a freer future? What are the limitations? Where are the areas that still need work?
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What does it mean to bring the idea of “play” into your practice as a scholar?
For those projects selected, we will be forming a cohort. As the co-editors of the upcoming special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on Black Digital Humanities have modeled, we will be guiding these projects through revisions and the review process, as well as planning and encouraging group work sessions, for peer to peer review. The hope is that we will be able to build together, rather than imagining separate futures.
Tentative deadline to submit full projects: February 1, 2021
For questions and submissions, please contact both co-editors:
Ravynn K. Stringfield | Alicia Hatcher |
rkstringfield@email.wm.edu | hatchera17@students.ecu.edu |