Call for Submissions: Sustainable Publishing Special Issue

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Call for Submissions/Appel à propositions: Sustainable Publishing Special Issue

Deadline: 15 October 2024

Guest Edited by Rachel Webb Jekanowski (The Goose: Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada); Abigail Fields (The Goose: Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada); Brent Ryan Bellamy (Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies); Markus Reisenleitner (Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies); Margot Mellet (Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies), and Lori Bradford (Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning)

Amidst the climate crisis, the concept of “sustainability” is increasingly debated as societies, institutions, and governments seek to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to extreme environmental conditions. The energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables will impact all segments of society, including the arts, higher education—and scholarly publishing.

This journal issue seeks to explore concepts and models of sustainable publishing within and beyond Canadian academia. Braiding theory and practice, this issue asks how has, and how, will academic and creative publishing respond to the climate crisis, the increasing precariousness of higher education, and calls for racial, anticolonial, and migrant justice.

How can scholarly and arts-based publishing effectively communicate the climate crisis and issues of energy transition? How might models of sustainable publishing reciprocally engage publics with eco-cultural knowledges, especially historically marginalized communities? How can publishing work to support sustaining, rather than extracting from, academic workers, students, readers, and communities? How can publishers, scholars, and creative practitioners reduce energy inputs (human labour, carbon, data, etc.) to develop alternative publishing models that align sustainability discourses with journals’ material practices?

This issue responds to ongoing work in communications studies and environmental media studies to develop less extractive and less carbon-intensive forms of scholarly research (Sterne 2011; Starosielski and Walker 2016; Valencia 2019; Pasek 2020; Pasek, Wellum, and Roehl 2020; Conti 2021; Jekanowski, Pasek, and Elliott 2022). The call also builds upon work from the Low-Carbon Research Methods Group housed at Trent University, which seeks to explore how the energy transition offers opportunities to re-examine assumptions about unpaid work in the academy, scholarly norms, and artistic practice (Low-Carbon Research Methods website, accessed Aug. 30, 2022). Drawing on these insights, this issue seeks to develop models of sustainable scholarship that unite low-carbon and ecological practices, labour equity, and racial and social justice in research dissemination and publishing practices.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • “Green” editorial practices and/or greenwashing academic research;
  • Digital infrastructures, data, and servers powering digital publishing;
  • Social sustainability within academic publishing;
  • Low-carbon publishing and research dissemination;
  • Labour movements within academia and research methods;
  • Accessibility in publishing and disability studies;
  • Indigenous editorial practices, decolonization, and “land back” as part of environmental justice;
  • Models of justice within energy transition;
  • Material, historical, and conceptual studies publishing as environmental media;
  • Studies of extractivism and alternatives (sustaining, reciprocity, thriving, etc.);
  • Roles of arts-based and digital publishing in the post-oil energy transition;
  • Place-based publishing and climate communication;
  • Data sovereignty, language, and cultural reclamation as part of social sustainability;
  • Policy analyses and recommendations for funding academic publishing;
  • Best practices and other editorial reflections on other journals’ in-house practices.

Contributions may include: previously unpublished research articles (5,000-6,000 words), video essays, multimedia research creation pieces, creative nonfiction (1,500-3,000 words), poetry, and book reviews (approx. 1,500 words). Creative nonfiction and poetry manuscripts must be submitted to The Goose for consideration in this issue.

The editors are particularly interested in collecting best practices from other scholarly and creative journals to develop toolkits to implement concrete changes in the publishing sector. This special issue is shepherded by the editors of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada, Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, and Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning. Contributions to the issue will be published across the three open-access journals as part of this experiment with publishing practice and form.

Submission Instructions:

Submissions are welcomed in French and English. When preparing your manuscript, please follow Imaginations formatting guidelines.

Research articles, research creation/multimedia pieces, and book reviews can be submitted by email to the editors Rachel Jekanowski (rjekanowski@mun.ca) and Brent Ryan Bellamy (brent.ryan.bellamy@gmail.com). Poems and creative nonfiction pieces should be submitted to The Goose directly via the journal website. You can also submit your work by clicking here.

Authors are encouraged to specify which journal they wish to be evaluated by in their submission: The Goose, Imaginations, or Engaged Scholar Journal. All research-oriented manuscripts, regardless of submission avenue, will be peer-reviewed (with the exception of poetry submissions and book reviews). The issue’s final table of contents will be published across all three platforms.

Manuscripts must be submitted by October 15, 2024 for consideration. This issue is slated for publication in summer 2025.

Contact Us:

Questions and publishing inquiries can be directed to Rachel Jekanowski (rjekanowski@mun.ca), Margot Mellet (margot.mellet@umontreal.ca), and Brent Ryan Bellamy (brent.ryan.bellamy@gmail.com). Poetry inquiries can be directed to The Goose’s Poetry Editor Ariel Gordon (janeday@mymts.net).

About the Hosting Journals:

The Goose is the journal of ALECC (Association for Literature, Environment, and Culture in Canada / Association pour la littérature, l’environnement et la culture au Canada). As an open-access journal, The Goose encourages the production and study of environmental literature, art, and culture in those parts of Turtle Island claimed as Canada. We are committed to publishing Indigenous writers, writers-of-colour, women and queer authors, disabled authors, and those working on the socio-cultural margins. We welcome work that is experimental and genre-bending at the fringe of the critical/creative nexus of scholarly publishing. The Goose is published biannually in French and English.

Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies / revue d’études interculturelles de l’image is a multilingual, open-access journal of international visual cultural studies. It is published twice yearly and is double-blind peer-reviewed. As a knowledge democracy project, Imaginations is free to submit to and free to read. Founded at the University of Alberta in 2010, the journal is funded by the federal granting agency of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Engaged Scholar Journal: Community-Engaged Research, Teaching, and Learning is Canada’s online, peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary journal committed to profiling best practices in “engaged scholarship” informed by community-academic partnerships in research, teaching and learning. ESJ was founded by the University of Saskatchewan in 2014. It is supported by the University of Saskatchewan and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Feature Image: “Towards Open Sustainability Education” by giulia.forsythe is marked with CC0 1.0.
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Jessica DeWitt

is an environmental historian of Canada and the United States, editor, project manager, and digital communications strategist. She earned her PhD in History from the University of Saskatchewan in 2019. She is an executive member, editor-in-chief, and social media editor for the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). She is the Managing Editor for the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. She is also President of the Saskatchewan History and Folklore Society, a Girls Rock Saskatoon board member, and a Coordinating Team member of Showing Up for Racial Justice Saskatoon-Treaty Six. A passionate social justice advocate, she focuses on developing digital techniques and communications that bridge the divide between academia and the general public in order to democratize knowledge access. You can find out more about her and her freelance services at jessicamdewitt.com.

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