Calls for Papers

The Kal Roundtable, organized by the KB Discursive Committee, invites researchers, art historians, art critics, educators, and scholars to revisit Pakistan’s art history through under-documented or excluded narratives.

All papers presented will be compiled in an e-publication as seminal research on inclusive histories.

Full Call available in Google Doc format here.

Submit original research on one of the following sub-themes:

- Mentor-driven art pedagogies in small towns and marginalized spaces

- Critical examination of home-grown Art Movements in Pakistan

- In-depth focus on art interventions: publications, spaces, residencies founded by individuals and collectives

Submission Guidelines:

- Abstract: 700–1000 words

- Final paper: 3000–5000 words (+ approx. 20 images)

Deadlines:

- Abstract Submission: September 30, 2026

- Notification of Acceptance: October 15, 2026

- Full Paper Submission: December 10–15, 2026

The Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research (JACLR) invites submissions for its forthcoming thematic issue, Lands of Fear: Gothic and Horror in Literature, Art, and Culture, scheduled for publication in Vol. 14.2.

From haunted architectures and spectral returns to ecological anxieties, monstrous bodies, uncanny technologies, and the terror of contemporary existence, Gothic and Horror Studies continue to provide fertile ground for exploring the cultural, political, psychological, and aesthetic fears that shape both past and present societies. The Gothic mode, in its many manifestations, remains uniquely positioned to interrogate liminality, trauma, desire, repression, otherness, memory, and the instability of the human subject in times of crisis and transformation.

This thematic issue seeks to explore the multiple forms, genealogies, and mutations of the Gothic and the Horrific across literary, artistic, audiovisual, and cultural productions. We welcome contributions engaging with canonical traditions as well as emerging perspectives and transnational approaches.

As we know, design has enormous transformative potential to contribute to the profound cultural and ecological transitions needed to effectively address the interrelated crises of climate, food, energy, poverty, and meaning (Escobar, 2018, p. x). In fact, a specific set of design activities has emerged in recent years (Dokter et al., 2021), demonstrating that design as a discipline, but especially as a set of actions combined with a systemic approach, can play a role in transforming or destabilizing existing regimes―understood as established sociotechnical configurations that tend to govern the logics of existing practices and rules (Valderrama Pineda et al., 2024)―and creating new pathways for sustainable, regenerative, and non-anthropocentric development.

From this perspective, this call seeks to emphasize actions, projects, and underlying values aimed at long-term systemic change through design practice, which are framed within a relatively narrow window of opportunity. Within these conditions, design practice moves away from both reactive emergency responses and purely desk-based planning, positioning itself instead through timely interventions intended to generate outcomes observable in everyday life. Over time, these interventions may become articulated as positive sequences toward a desirable state for sociotechnical and natural systems.

In this context, this call invites a reflection on the cultural dimension of designing for transitions: transformations in imaginaries, values, narratives, relationships, identities, and ways of living, including situated and place-based approaches that challenge dominant assumptions about development, modernity, and human-nature relations. We particularly welcome contributions that examine how design can participate in the emergence of alternative imaginaries and forms of collective life, especially from situated perspectives in the Global South (Escobar, 2014, 2018).

With particular attention to the underlying values driving methodologies, approaches, and visions within design practice, we welcome contributions that expand the discussion of the role of design in shaping sociotechnical landscapes and building new regimes (Geels, 2002). The values and visions that inform the actions and activities of design practitioners engaged in transformations across communities, organizations, companies, and policy contexts are of interest in this special issue.

We are also interested in theoretical frameworks that offer insights into how to drive transformation through design, provided they are grounded in real-world cases. Practical examples emerging from the critical examination of design methods are especially encouraged.

 Theme Breakdown

REFERENCES

Orientations for Authors: Key Requirements for Contributions to This Special Issue*

If there is one key defining concept without which the ‘cultural turns’ (Bachman-Medick's term) of the past decades cannot be fully understood, it is the notion of community. The profound social, political, cultural, and scientific transformations that mark modernity and our contemporary days have radically changed the way collective structures relate to one another and within their own formation. Consequently, the concept of community has increasingly gained popularity due to its centrality to contemporary debates on belonging, identity, relationality, and (non-)human coexistence.

Traditional readings of community define it around shared identity, territory, ethnicity, religion, or national belonging. Conversely, and moving beyond these essentialist categories, foundational works by Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Victor Turner, and J. Hillis Miller have argued in favor of community as a fragile, relational, and ethically unfinished mode of coexistence. Therefore, these challenges have resulted in the opening of new perspectives to grasp literature, culture, politics, and ethics from a renewed communitarian lens.

Miller defines ‘community’ in his foreword to the volume of Secrecy and Community in 21st-century Fiction as “a group of people who share many assumptions and experiences” (2021, xiii). This apparently simple definition complicates the whole debate because contemporary literary studies have increasingly turned to questions of relationality, hospitality, intimacy, secrecy, trust, vulnerability, trauma, ecology, and collective memory to understand community, therefore, demonstrating the centrality of the concept as a critical framework for understanding both texts and the worlds they imagine.

This special issue seeks to bring together scholars working on community from diverse angles. We welcome contributions that engage with Community Studies exploring how literary and cultural productions imagine, construct, challenge, or reconfigure forms of being-in-common. In doing so, the issue also builds on a growing body of scholarship that has examined the significance of community in twentieth- and twenty-first- century literature, including the foundational work of Martín-Salván, Rodríguez Salas, and Jiménez Heffernan (2013), as well as López and Villar-Argáiz (2021) and Pérez-de-Luque and Martín-Salván (2025). This special issue aims to extend these conversations by fostering new interdisciplinary dialogues on the multiple forms, possibilities, and limits of being together in contemporary culture.

Topics of Interest

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Community, alterity, and vulnerability: studies of how communities negotiate difference, otherness, and exclusion.

• Community and the politics of transparency, opacity and secrecy: approaches that examine secrecy, unknowability, and the limits of mutual understanding and/or its counterpart: visibility, disclosure, surveillance, and the demand for openness within communal life.

• Poetics of affects, intimacy, and community: investigations of personal relationships as sites of communal formation and negotiation and analyses of emotions, attachment, and shared feelings in the construction of communities.

• Representations of violence in community: investigations of how communities are sustained, challenged, or fractured through violence.

• Ecological and multispecies communities: examinations of relationships between human and non-human forms of life.

• Indigenous communities and decolonial perspectives: studies of Indigenous forms of belonging and decolonial critiques of dominant community models.

• Community and Genres: explorations of literary and sociopolitical genres from the lens of communitarian theory.

• Community in Western and frontier narratives: examinations of settlement, mobility, violence, and belonging in frontier spaces.

• Community and migration: studies of displacement, mobility, and the formation of new communal bonds.

• Community and diaspora: explorations of transnational identities, memory, and dispersed forms of belonging.

• Community, trauma and memory: investigations of shared suffering, postmemory, and communal recovery.

• Comparative approaches to community across cultures: cross-cultural and transnational analyses of communal practices, representations, and theories.

• Submissions may focus on any literary period, genre, national tradition, or cultural medium.

Authors can reach the guest editors with any question at adrian.arana@ehu.eus and patricia.garcia@uco.es.

Submission Guidelines

• Be written in English.

• Follow MLA 9th edition style.

• Be between 4,000 and 8,000 words, including notes and works cited.

• Present original and unpublished research.

• Undergo double-blind peer review.

Our digital journal, Folding Chair, is a space for conversations, perspectives, and storytelling on gender equality, intersectional feminism, violence against women and girls, and social justice.

For 2026, we're seeking writing, photography and film submissions from diverse voices that spark conversation and move us closer to equity. 

Submissions are open globally. Any work published by Folding Chair will be paid commensurate with experience.

Since its first publication in 2007, Artifact has focused on practice-based, constructive, and artistic design research of the highest international level aimed at strengthening knowledge production and sharing in the international design research community. Artifact promotes discourse and ideas in support of the creation of new knowledge related to contextual, foundational, conceptual, empirical as well as methodological issues and advancements that contribute to the proliferation of rigorous practices of artistic, practice-based, and constructive design research – see below for aims and scope of the journal.  

The journal only welcomes submissions that answer to posted calls for papers. All original research papers are subject to double-blind peer-review, but the journal also welcomes research commentaries and essays (not subject to double-blind peer-review) – please inquire with the editorial team to learn more about these (non-peer reviewed formats).

Submissions

To submit an article, please follow the 'Submit' button on the left of this page.

Download the Notes for Contributors above for information on format and style of submissions. If you need this document in a more accessible format, please contact info@intellectbooks.com. Find more information on Intellect's Accessibility page.

• All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.

• Journal contributors will receive a free PDF copy of their final work upon publication. 

AIMS & SCOPE

• Call for Papers

• Editorial board

ABSTRACTING & INDEXING

• CONTENT

• Open Access licence agreement

Artifact: Journal of Design Practice is a Diamond Open Access journal. It does not charge APCs or submission fees, and is funded by The Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design and Conservation.

Artifact aims to publish high-quality academic papers that strives to reach beyond disciplinary and topical boundaries to support exchange and cross-fertilization of insights and methodologies pertaining to multiple issues of advancing design research practice within the domains of practice-based, constructive and artistic design research.

The journal welcomes contributions that answer to active calls for papers only. The editors welcome both conceptual and empirical papers.

All articles and research notes are subject to double-blind peer-review.

All submission must include a signed Open Access publishing agreement giving us your permission to publish your paper should it be accepted by our peer review panel. Authors can choose from a CC BY or CC BY NC licence. Please see the publishing agreement for more information on the licence terms. 

Submissions should engage transnational, historical, or genealogical approaches

to art education, broadly conceived. Genealogies are widely viewed as forms of

historical mapping that display how ideas, practices and frameworks evolve through complex, multisided pathways (Sutters 2023). This can include the intellectual histories of pedagogical concepts as they circulate globally; the movement of materials and techniques across educational systems and cultural traditions; or the adaptation and resistance of curriculum frameworks within new political and cultural contexts. Such approaches challenge assumptions of single origins and instead reveal layered, contested and relational histories of art education practice.

This issue also emphasizes reflexive historiography. Authors are encouraged to

consider how histories are constructed, whose voices are included or excluded and

how methodological choices shape interpretation (Staikidis, 2025; Wexler 2025).

This includes attention to archival gaps, positionality and ethical engagement with

communities. In dialogue with decolonial, Indigenous and relational approaches

(Tuhiwai Smith 2021; Ballengee Morris and Willis 2025), the issue seeks work that

not only expands historical narratives but also critically examines the conditions

under which knowledge is produced and validated.

Potential topics include:

• Art, craft and design education

• Formal and informal education contexts

• Meaning making, image and identity in art education

• Public, community and environmental art

• Pedagogy and emerging technologies Policy and practice

• Trans-cultural issues

• Visual communication and culture

Submissions may be either:

• Articles (3000–5000 words, 1–6 images)

• Research Projects / Project Reports (3000 words, 1–4 images)

• Visual Essays (1000 words or fewer, 10–15 images)

Timeline:

Abstract (300 words) deadline: 28 February 2027

Full article submission deadline: 1 August 2027

Publication date: Spring 2029