Coalition as Commonplace: Centering Feminist Scholarship, Pedagogies, and Leadership Practices
Coalition as Commonplace: Centering Feminist Scholarship, Pedagogies, and Leadership Practices
This open invitation calls for authors to submit 500-750 word abstracts for Peitho’s Volume 25 Issue 4 (Summer 2023) Special Issue Coalition as Commonplace: Centering Feminist Scholarship, Pedagogies, and Leadership Practices.
For decades, Chandra Mohanty has continued to challenge feminists to form solidarities across geographical, political, and intellectual borders. When informed by the feminist values of decentered leadership and plural perspectives, coalitions can accommodate difference through a shared sense of purpose. Defining coalition as “strategic, often temporary and shifting, valuing ‘togetherness in difference’ (to use Lu Ming Mao’s powerful phrase), and devoted to action” (Glenn & Lunsford, 2015), we ask: how do we coalesce with other groups working toward social justice? How can we work with each other and with other scholars in rhetoric and across disciplines to create coalitions situated in lived experiences and feminist praxis, as we teach, learn, write, and research across different places and positions.
Through the special issue, we aim to problematize our engagement with difference while highlighting the complexities and challenges of building coalitions across difference, especially in feminist circles. As Karma Chávez (2021) observes, “because coalescing cannot be taken for granted, it requires constant work if it is to endure” (8). To supplement existing literature on coalition building, feminist activism, scholarship, and teaching practices, this special issue will offer space to capture and extend how coalitions function as a means for inclusion/exclusion– enabling/disabling fictions that can either challenge or perpetuate oppressive systems with a focus on how, as teachers, administrators, researchers, scholars, and community members, our organizations and institutions limit or expand our attempts to build, sustain, or dismantle coalitions. While examining coalition building, the texts will also bring forward scholarship, pedagogies, and practices that center how experiences of trauma may influence communities’ abilities to provide “welcoming spaces for inclusion” (Perryman-Clark, 2021).
Contributors will be asked to rethink strategies for coalition building that sustain and continue to be a viable means for social change. Much like the work of Sara Ahmed and others, we look to invite contributions to a kind of collective accountability. Following the work of disability-justice scholars and activists including Akemi Nishida, Aimi Hamraie, and others, we call for collective accountability to be practiced in academic life in order to work towards the achievement of that ideal of “inclusion” that constantly eludes us.
Possible questions and directions for inquiry may include:
- What theories might be considered to help untangle coalitions and coalition building that remain resistant to positive change?
- What happens when campus/community collaborators and stakeholders are not invested/interested in coalition building?
- In what ways do coalitions support or deny emotion and affect, as they exist in opposition or support of hegemonic spaces?
- As racialized violence continues, how have coalitions emerged in ways that adequately center the traumatizing lived experiences of our students, our colleagues, and ourselves?
- How do the dynamics of educational systems support or impede coalition building toward inclusive change?
- How have coalitions, and the ways we engage coalition building, impede or support hegemonic practices at local, regional, national, and international levels?
- How do we coalesce with other groups working toward social justice?
- How can we work with each other to create coalitions situated in intersectional lived experiences and feminist praxis?
- How might we understand coalitions as relational?
Participants, speakers, respondents, and interested non-participants from the CCCC feminist workshops are invited to submit texts, responses in a cluster conversation, vignettes, and/or reflections that build or depart from dialogues and presentations from the community of scholars gathered in synchronous remote spaces during 2021 and 2022. Beyond the community of CCCC feminist workshop goers, we call to the feminist communities who desire to contribute about coalitions and commonplaces. Further, book reviews on texts published since 2020 on topics related to the special issue are welcomed; please submit a query related to the cluster conversation and/or book review.
Texts will be accepted based on reviewer guidelines for Peitho, including evidence of feminist and rhetorical scholarly foundation, readiness for publication, and commitment to feminist practices and methods. Abstract reviews will begin November 7, 2022 and continue through April 1, 2023. Responses of acceptance will be issued on a rolling basis and will be provided no later than April 15, 2023. Full manuscripts are due on May 31, 2023 with anticipated publication in September 2023.
We welcome various genres associated favorably with the special issue’s theme, such as scholarly articles, reports, policies, position statements, essays, organizing/advocacy toolkits, etc. Multimodal works are desired and welcomed. Please submit queries and abstracts to Angela Clark-Oates, Louis M. Maraj, Aurora Matzke, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson at PeithoSummer2023@gmail.com with the subject line [Last Name, First Name] Abstract. Queries are welcomed.
Timeline
- Abstracts with Working Bibliography due Monday, November 7, 2022 (Abstracts will be evaluated on a rolling basis until April 1, 2023)
- Acceptance notifications occur on a rolling basis, beginning Monday, December 5, 2022
- Full manuscripts due May 31, 2023
- Estimated date of publication September 2023
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