Call for abstracts: Special Issue on Decolonisation

2024-05-27

Submit a manuscript to the Journal Women, Gender & Research – For a Special Issue on Decolonisation. Abstract deadline: 15 July 2024.

‘One may also inhabit the limen, the place in between realities, a gap 'between and betwixt' universes of sense that construe social life and persons differently, an interstice from where one can most clearly stand critically toward different structures.’ (Lugones, 2003: 59)

We hereby invite you to submit a paper for possible inclusion in the Special Issue on ‘Decolonisation’ for Women, Gender & Research (2025/1). With this issue, we aim to bring decolonial, postcolonial, and Indigenous studies in conversation with gender studies. We welcome contributions from all disciplines and encourage intersectional, interdisciplinary, as well as collaborative work.

While often hailed for their Nordic exceptionalism the Nordic countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland have prolonged colonial histories that stretch into the present and manifest in different ways. This includes imposed national borders on Sápmi and constructions such as the Danish Realm (Rigsfælleskabet), the continuous colonization of Indigenous people in the Nordic countries and the Arctic, as well as colonial practices outside the Nordic that are embedded in structures of coloniality and as such underline the importance of highlighting relations of colonial complicity (Quijano 2000; Vuorela 2009; Suarez-Krabbe and Gropolo 2023).

In this special issue, we invite you to think within a frame of decoloniality. We encourage you to scrutinize how colonial power relations within different contexts, practices, and fields of knowledge have been distributed across the globe based on a Eurocentric rationality – and how Eurocentrism continues to dominate knowledge production, subjectivities, and sexual, racial, and gender identities (Tlostenova 2023). Decoloniality entails paving the way for many ways of knowing and being. It is a practice of humanity and can be recognised as an academic, artistic as well as activist project that aims towards “... restor[ing] or creat[ing] a reality where racialized subjects could give and receive freely in societies founded on the principle of receptive generosity” (Maldonado-Torres, 2007: 260).

Undertaking decolonial work also means employing an ethic which refuses to serve stories of pain and humiliation thereby inflicting more harm onto colonized, ghettoized, and orientalized peoples (Tuck and Yang 2014). We therefore urge colleagues to undertake reflexive, reciprocal, and sustainable ways of engaging with their fields and studies.

We are seeking contributions that explore current as well as historical explorations of decolonisation in a Nordic colonial context, for instance asking: What attempts have been made to subvert the colonial archive of knowledge? How are gender and sexuality of racialized, Indigenous, orientalized, ghettorized, and Black subjects controlled differently? How can the cultural archive be decolonised? How are postcolonial identities formed in different spaces? How do endorsement, investment, and complicity in the Palestinian genocide and Israeli settler colonialism tie into Nordic colonial histories? How may we understand colonial practises surrounding (trans)national adoption?

In order to subvert some of the colonial structures of knowledge, we also encourage artistic contributions in the form of visual or textual productions to this issue. We are offering editorial support for the submission process for emerging scholars and aspiring academics. Women, Gender & Research accepts submissions in form of research articles, essays, artworks, opinion pieces and book reviews, in accordance with the editorial policy (see Submissions).

We welcome submissions in Indigenous languages such as Kalaallisut and Sámi, as well as contributions in English and the Scandinavian languages.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to: 

  • Abolition/social justice studies
  • Black studies
  • Colonial archive
  • Colonial gender and sexuality regimes
  • Color-blindness
  • Corporeality within decolonial / postcolonial practices
  • Critical adoption studies
  • Decolonial affects
  • Decolonial and /or postcolonial temporalities
  • Decolonial education
  • Decolonial and Indigenous feminism
  • Decolonizing law
  • Decolonizing methodologies
  • Diasporic decolonial work
  • Environmental studies
  • Genocide
  • Green / environmental colonialism, ecocide and Indigenous land relations
  • Indigeneity and Indigenization
  • Inuit, Sámi and Arctic Indigenous ontology/epistemology
  • Othering
  • Palestine
  • Postcolonial identities
  • Postcolonial affects
  • Reproductive rights and health care
  • Resistance
  • White supremacy

 

Practicalities

Deadline for abstracts (max 500 words + author bio of ca. 100 words): 15th of July 2024

Notifications on abstract acceptance: 15th of August 2024

Deadline for full articles: 30th of November 2024

Envisaged publication date: 1st September 2025

Abstracts should be submitted via tidsskrift.dk. You can submit both author bio and your abstract here. We are excited to receiving your submissions.

For questions, please contact either Naja Dyrendom Graugaard (najadg@cc.au.dk) or Rieke Schröder (risc@dps.aau.dk).

 

Special Issue Editors

Annika Isfeldt, Aarhus University

Èva Cossette-Laneville, The Arctic University of Norway

Josefine Lee Stage, DPU, Aarhus University

Julia Suárez Krabbe, Roskilde University

Julie Edel Hardenberg, Kunstakademiet

Kristín Lofsdóttir, University of Iceland

Lars Jensen, Roskilde University

Naja Dyrendom Graugaard, Aarhus University

Rieke Schröder, Aalborg University

Turið Nolsøe, University of Copenhagen