Literate Activity: Perspectives on Textual Practices in the World welcomes submissions for the inaugural issue to be published in Spring 2026. Literate Activity will publish innovative scholarship that reflects the complexities of how people create, use, and act-with texts across lifeworlds. We consider “scholarship” widely and envision an accessible space welcoming to both new and seasoned writers. We take, also, a wide view of texts and textual activity. We don’t privilege only “writing.” Texts and textual practices are multifarious, centering our literate activities in disciplinary spaces, specialized communities, but also, in the seemingly mundane. This issue will be the first of the exciting transdisciplinary conversations we hope to cultivate.
For our first issue, we are particularly interested in submissions which provide:
- Accounts that keep alive the richness, complexity, and dynamism of how people produce and act with texts for academic, disciplinary, workplace, and everyday purposes, particularly for such purposes which remain relatively unexplored.
- Accounts which foreground how textual action is dispersed across multiple times, places, persons, and artifacts.
- Accounts which address the ways textuality comes to entangle multiple semiotics, including talk, visual images, gesture, bodily movement, and affective intensities.
- Accounts which address the historical becoming of textual practices and persons, particularly across moments, social worlds, and lifespans.
- Perspectives of people’s situated, embodied engagements with a wide array of texts—broadly conceived as coherent complexes of signs including semiotic events and encounters—for a wide array of activities in which such texts are implicated.
- Perspectives which productively enrich and expand ways of conceptualizing, studying, and representing what people do with texts in the world.
- Perspectives that center literate activity, texts, textual practices in “ordinary” or “mundane” activities.
- Accounts which point toward pedagogical approaches that can occasion opportunities for learners and teachers alike to recognize and value the diversity of textualities that have shaped their pathways of literate development and that can resist models which would deny or sever those critical histories of writing, knowing, and becoming.
Publication Timeline for the Inaugural Issue
We will accept manuscript drafts on a rolling basis until October 31, 2025. Submissions will be reviewed as they are received, with the first round of reviews completed 8 weeks after initial submissions.
Final revised manuscripts will be due in March 2026. Copy-editing and other production activities will be completed in April 2026, and the first issue will be published in May 2026.
Editorial Process
We will use an anonymized submission peer referee process. Reviews should be multimodal. That is, reviewers will be asked to provide at least 500 words about the manuscript, describe how they see its overall controlling purpose being made and/or achieved, and outline a realistic process of revision and resubmission, but they will also be asked to engage with marginalia comments in the text-artifact. We can also imagine the possibility of reviewers recording audio or video for the scholars whose work they have reviewed to supplement written reviews. Lastly, reviewers will be invited to sign their reviews. Should authors have questions regarding reviews of their manuscripts, they will be invited to contact the editors of Literate Activity who will serve as touchpoints in the review process.
General Call for Submissions.
We welcome submissions of original research articles, pedagogical articles, and reviews of extant scholarship, but we are also excited to widen the margins of what academic journals consider publishable scholarship. To those ends, we encourage writers to submit artifacts such as:
- Original research articles. As a digital publication, we are less concerned with strict word counts and instead encourage authors to consider the scope of argument and data analysis as much more flexible. With that in mind, we encourage a variety of manuscript lengths from what is considered a “standard” length such as 6,000 to 8,000 words to much longer, such as up to 20,000 words. All research with human subjects must be conducted with approval from the relevant Institutional Review Board.
- Pedagogical articles that engage with employing literate activity approaches, especially reaching moving beyond attention to the design of assignments in K-12, undergraduate, and graduate coursework to address what pedagogical interventions grounded in literate activity can afford students and teachers alike in supporting literate development and becoming. As with original articles, scope and data may drive a flexible manuscript length.
- Reviews. We welcome reviews of extant scholarship of up to 3000 words. We are excited to include retrospective accounts of research and/or scholarship that may have been published some time ago, but that either was formative to the growth or thinking of our writers, that bears some relationship or resonance to current developments transdisciplinarily, or that in some way remains exigent to our writers.
- Scenes. Scenes might include a strip of data (an image, video clip, audio file, etc.) and a ~500-1500-word description that indexes how that scene illuminates dimensions of literate activity in some sense and in potentially less formalized genres. All research with human subjects must be conducted with approval from the relevant Institutional Review Board.
- Emergent scholarship and dialogue as an experimental corner of our journal, ES/D provides scholars with a space (texts/artifacts up to 2500 words) to submit brief but focused treatments of data excerpts with a documented narrative (Prior, 1994; Roozen & Erickson, 2017; Ware, 2022) from some emergent project grounded in theoretical work around the nature of semiotic/literate activity, textuality, etc. Should ES/D submissions move forward into the journal space, they will be matched with another scholar for a dialogue/response (not a review). We envision this journal space as a kind of ‘working space’ that functions as a kind of offshoot of the journal. We see it as a means of inviting and supporting substantial collaboration, and we can imagine longer-form projects emerging from ES/D submissions over time.
When you submit your work for consideration, please include an abstract (~250 words) and indicate what type of text-artifact you have submitted from the list above. Please contact the editors Ryan Ware, Bruce Kovanen, or Kevin Roozen with any questions.
For more information about submitting to the journal, please see the Clearinghouse invitation to contribute scholarly work and its statement on publication ethics. Submissions and peer reviews should be informed by these statements. Our peer review process is also expected to be guided by the statement on anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices, which can be found at https://tinyurl.com/reviewheuristic.
Like other publications on the Clearinghouse, articles in our journal are released under Creative Commons licenses. These licenses allow authors to retain copyright to their work. To learn more about these licenses, please view the Clearinghouse's Creative Commons Licenses page.
To make a submission, please visit the WAC Clearinghouse submissions portal.