Current Call for Papers 

L.M. Montgomery and the Politics of Home

The L.M. Montgomery Institute’s 16th Biennial International Conference
University of Prince Edward Island, 19-23 June 2024

“Oh, I’ve got such a lovely home,” breathed Pat, clasping her hands. “It’s such a nice, friendly house.”
—L.M. Montgomery, Pat of Silver Bush (1933)

It’s the home of my heart, this little room—the spot I love, for here I am happiest.
—L.M. Montgomery, 30 April 1903

When confronting the timeless questions “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?”, we must reckon with two inarguable forces: politics and home. These forces inform who we are and how we are in the world. L.M. Montgomery was no exception—she was formed by the cultural and domestic politics of her time and place, and she engaged those politics in her work, alongside the ubiquitous motif of home. The year 2024 marks the 150^th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth, and we especially wish to engage the specificity of the homes that shaped her as author, diarist, and public and private citizen.

We understand both home and politics in myriad ways. Home can be the place where we live--a domicile, a city, a country—and is inevitably shaped by economic, social, and governmental political forces. Home is potentially a native land, bound by kinship and past or current traditions, unified by cultural memory and driven by political impulses. Home might be a safe place, where we can be ourselves and where politics function to empower all members. Home can be a family of birth or of choice, or a community of acceptance—or rejection. Home can be a place lost through political displacement. Likewise, politics can be international, national, or local; secular or religious; household and domestic. Politics shape nations, villages, churches, and individuals. Politics and home are fundamental to public and private identity.

The 2024 conference invites proposals for research that considers the complex intersections of home and politics in L.M. Montgomery’s works and world. Submissions should engage one or both of these formative forces in Montgomery’s life, creative work, and life-writing. Possibilities include but are in no way limited to:

• Montgomery’s childhood home as literary landmark, tourist site, contested property, or sacred space;
• The political roots and history of Montgomery’s family;
• Montgomery as homemaker, including the aesthetics and relational dynamics she sought in her own homes;
• Montgomery’s engagement with the overtly political—her stances on matters such as war and suffrage;
• Depictions of home in Montgomery’s fiction, life-writing, and poetry: home-seeking as quest, home as refuge, home as contested space;
• Depictions of displacement in Montgomery’s fiction, life-writing, and poetry, such as displacement due to lack of economic status or social capital or through lack of political power;
• Representations of domestic violence and abuse and/or familial conflict;
• Land as contested space in Montgomery’s work, and her literary treatment of (or failure to acknowledge) the Indigenous peoples on whose land she made her own homes, including the ways in which Acadian and Mi’kmaw people and cultures continue to thrive;
• The conflicting sense of private and public selves Montgomery balanced in her life as minister’s wife and well-known author;
• Treatment of home—or politics—in adaptations and translations of Montgomery’s works;
• Treatment of cultures marginalized by Montgomery in her works or in adaptations of those works.

Montgomery’s complex relationships with homes, communities, and natural places enrich the possibilities for discussion, as does our own increasing awareness of and need to grapple with the marginalization, displacement, and continuing presence of Indigenous and Acadian peoples in and from the lands that Montgomery loved best.

Please submit 250–300-word proposals (individual paper and panel) and 100–150-word biographical statements to the submission form on the L.M. Montgomery Institute’s website (lmmontgomery.ca) by 15 August 2023.

Proposals should articulate a strong argument and situate that argument in the context of existing Montgomery scholarship. Individual paper and panel proposals are double-blind reviewed. We also welcome proposals for workshops, special exhibits, films, performances, or other visual displays engaging these ideas.  Proposals that view Montgomery’s life and art from different cultural and theoretical perspectives are particularly encouraged. For more information, please contact Caroline Jones and Laura Robinson, co-chairs of the 2024 conference, lmmiconf@upei.ca.

“L.M. Montgomery and the Politics of Home” is to be a hybrid conference. It will be held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, on 19–23 June 2024; all sessions will be livestreamed, allowing for virtual presentation, attendance, and participation.

Carleton University’s 2023 CGC Conference: Through the Margins, which will be held March 2-3, 2023

Please see the full CFP here.

Dissident Feminisms: Inaugural bell hooks center Symposium

Sponsored by the bell hooks center and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Berea College

June 16th-18th, 2023 Berea College Berea, KY

bell hooks’s life and works engage in feminist thought and action that disrupts hegemonic systems of domination, including the cultural norms that hold these systems in place. She calls this dissident feminism a “talking back,” a “moving from silence into speech,” a “stand[ing] and struggl[ing] side by side [as] a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible” (Talking Back 9). Her writings envision feminist theory and praxis as transformational politic and movement–one that demands the provocation and audacity that hooks also represented in her person. Beverly Guy-Sheftall describes the oppositional voice of bell hooks as “loud and unrelenting” in her keynote address for the bell hooks center launch in September 2021. Indeed, hooks’s radical thought and action reimagine feminism as a sociopolitical movement that is “fundamentally anti-racist,” which “has no gender,” and which “is for everybody.”

hooks’s naming of “imperialist white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy,” which she later, in conversation with Laverne Cox, revised as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero patriarchy,” pointedly critiques the politics of domination that govern this world. hooks’s ordinary upbringing as a young Black girl in Appalachia, specifically, in the “Kentucky backwoods,” grounds her critique in space and place. It animates her radical interventions and deep commitment to liberatory world-making. While maintaining the connection between a love ethic and critical consciousness, hooks calls on us to cultivate visionary spaces, beloved communities, outlaw cultures, and radical undercommons in which oppositional worldviews are rooted in the experiential.

In honor and celebration of her life, works, and legacy, the Inaugural bell hooks Symposium at the bell hooks center at Berea College holds collective space for continued engagement with dissident feminisms. This symposium encourages theory, praxis, poetics, and aesthetics that move hooks’s interventions into the present moment while challenging the co-optation and de-politicization of her work.

Read the full CFP here.

Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice

Feminist Strike 

Submission Deadline for Articles (by invitation): December 15, 2022

Editors: Judith Naeff, Leiden University; Senka Neuman Stanivuković; University of Groningen; Ksenia Robbe, University of Groningen; and Kylie Thomas, NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

We invite submissions interdisciplinary and discipline-based feminist interventions that may take the form of original research papers, position papers, book reviews, and original creative works, including short essay analyses of your own visual, aural, or spoken creative work. Research articles will be double-blind peer reviewed and are not to exceed 7,000 words including references. All other submissions will be reviewed by the issue editors in collaboration with the Atlantis Editorial Board. Book reviews should be no more than 1000 words and other forms of writing (excluding articles) should be no more than 3000 words.

Paper submissions will be invited after review of abstract submissions of maximum 300 words. Please send this by the 30th June, along with a brief bio-note to: feministstrike2022@gmail.com

"Open"/Unthemed Papers

Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice 

Atlantis is currently open for non-themed research papers, book reviews, and literary work (i.e. work that fits our mandate but is outside the scope of the Call for Papers). For all submissions, please read our submission guidelines and about page before sending work. For questions, please contact Katherine Barrett (Managing Editor), atlantis.journal@msvu.ca

Past Call for Papers

Transformative Justice as Praxis

Submission Deadline: August 26, 2022

Co-Editors: Rachel B. Zellars, Reakash Walters, and Rania El Mugammar

Contact: rachel.zellars@smu.ca.

This special issue on “Transformative Justice as Praxis” is devoted to uncovering and archiving these local histories and organizing practices. While a politics of abolition entails a long-term commitment to building a world without our current prison, policing, and surveillance systems, transformative justice is often sidestepped as the foundation of a politics of abolition. Yet, as Ruthie Gilmore and others have noted, transformative justice is the anchor, the root, and the very location from which any serious study of or commitment to a politics of abolition must begin. It is also the part of abolition that has been least explored, exemplified, and detailed in writings—old and new—about abolition. In short, transformative justice is simultaneously the most urgent and least understood subject matter within the context of abolition. It is urgent because without transformative justice, there can be no abolition.

The Girl in the Hijab, a special issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Signing the Scarborough Chapter: Dialogue, Processes, and Actions

Half-Day Virtual Seminar

Date of Symposium: September 29, 2022

Submission Deadline: August 8, 2022

Editors: Dr. Christiana Abraham and Dr. Rohini Bannerjee

The Scarborough Charter on anti-Black racism and Black inclusion has been signed by more than fifty post-secondary institutions across Canada. This historic development signals a significant commitment to taking concrete actions to address anti-Black racism and Black inclusion in Canadian higher education.
With the signing of the Scarborough Charter, universities across Canada are responding to the chorus of calls for concrete and urgent action, and are taking this initial step to address systemic racism and gaps in representation and to acknowledge historical and present barriers facing Black inclusion in the academy.
How does/can the Charter prioritize the processes and tangible actions of change? How does/should the Charter influence ways the academy frames and considers Black inclusion and excellence?

Remapping the Feminist Global: A Multi-vocal, Multi-located Conversation

 July 21(Thu) - 23(Sat), 2022

Feminism(s) - like other academic knowledge and global movements - bear the effects of historic and new permutations of Eurocentrism, colonialism and imperialism that continue to shape not only feminism but the global world we inhabit and seek to change. This year, the conference turns to Asia as a geographic location and imaginary that offers an important anchoring for global feminist conversations to move beyond the current hegemonic hold of the West and the (imperial) nation-state system that has pre-determined how feminism becomes a salient political and academic discourse.

In co-convening a conference on the theme of ‘Remapping the Feminist Global: A Multi-vocal, Multi-located Conversation’, we at the Asian Center for Women’s Studies (ACWS) at Ewha Womans University and International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFJP) call for urgently needed collective reflections on emerging hierarchies not only between West and non-West, but also for critical reflections on the hierarchies and relations in and between ‘the non-West’. To consider feminism from Asia is then an effort to cultivate more satisfactory redress and connections in and through knowledge production.

The conference begins with an Opening Keynote (Professor Lisa Yoneyama, University of Toronto) and 2 plenary roundtables sponsored by ACWS. This is followed by 2 days of 3 hub plenaries convened by Oceania and Southeast Asia Hubs, and 35 Hybrid Stream panels and 19 Virtual Stream panels convened through an open call for submissions. The conference ends with a closing conversation roundtable.

‘Hybrid Conference’: This year’s conference will be held via two-track of Virtual and Hybrid Streams. The panels on the Virtual Stream will be convened as Zoom Webinars and panels on the Hybrid Stream will be convened on-site (Ewha Womans University, ECC) with in person and virtual participation. All sessions will be live-streamed.

Conference website: https://www.ifjpglobal.org/conferences

Program Link

Please register to participate.

Online Registration Link

Closing Date: July 14, 23:59 (KST) / 14:59 (GMT)

On-Site registration on the days of the conference

is also possible for in person participants.

Registration Fee: 30,000won (Student 15,000won)

Participatory Data Analysis in/as Feminist Research

Editors: Claudia Mitchell, Kaylan Schwarz, and Rebekah Hutten

This volume will bring together scholarship that explores the multidimensional intersections between participatory data analysis and feminist research. Participatory data analysis refers to a range of collaborative methodologies wherein study participants engage in the data analysis process to varying degrees. It can also refer to research teams engaging in non-hierarchical and/or collective approaches to working with data. We are specifically interested in research that employs participatory data analysis within a feminist-themed study and/or research that positions participatory data analysis as a feminist method, and encourage submissions that address these topics conceptually and/or empirically. We invite single-author and multi-author proposals from researchers across disciplines.

Read the full CFP here.

Mis/classification: Identity-based Inequities in the Canadian and Global Postsecondary Context

Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture, and Social Justice 

Submission Deadline: April 29, 2022
Editor: KelleyAnne Malinen, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, Mount Saint Vincent University

This issue of Atlantis will explore how elements of postsecondary institutions produce, maintain, or resist equitable or inequitable outcomes for equity-seeking groups. We welcome submissions that address postsecondary contexts around the world, or here in Canada. We seek critical scholarship in the broad sense of the term, which invokes an overriding concern with one or more forms of human emancipation. For example, authors may draw upon branches of critical feminism, critical sociology, critical disability studies, or critical race theory.

Read the full call here.