Fwd: SOULS CFP - Black Women's Labor: Economics, Culture and Politics
Moya Bailey
From: Marco Durce Roc <mr...@uic.edu>
Date: Tue, May 12, 2015 at 5:35 PM
Subject: SOULS CFP - Black Women's Labor: Economics, Culture and Politics
To: so...@uic.edu
CALL FOR PAPERS
Black Women's Labor: Economics, Culture and Politics
With the publication of Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom in 1997, a new era of scholarship in African American women’s labor and working class history was born. Historians working to recover and reimagine the narratives of black women as they negotiated public housing, joined labor movements and encountered the carceral state have enriched and complicate the fields of labor, gender and cultural studies as well as scholarly approaches to studying economic justice, social movements and labor in the U.S. Such scholarship centering African American women has also profoundly altered our understanding of a range of practices, institutions, and sectors such welfare, migration, sex work, policing, war industries and protest.
This special issue builds upon these foundations to consider how black women’s historical and contemporary experiences critically inform questions of class, gender, labor, sexuality, and racial capital. Many of the questions that are central to scholarship and activism around economic justice such as low-wage service work, affective labor, the proliferation of temporary work, housing struggles, domestic labor and housework, have disproportionately impacted black women, or to put it differently, black female bodies have long performed such labor. Therefore, interrogating these broader cultural, economic, and political developments and predicaments requires greater critical analysis of and attention to the significance of black women’s economic positions and lived experiences. Thus, we seek to place scholars across disciplines and from interdisciplinary fields in conversation to consider how concepts of work, struggle, freedom, justice, and even joy are complicated or transformed by analyses of black women’s labor, strategies of survival and demands for economic justice.
For this special issue, the guest editors seek submissions that examine class and economics in black women’s lives and think expansively about how economic inequalities and labor exploitation have historically or currently impact opportunities and access. We invite papers that examine how shifting conceptions of middle class/working class identities and cultural practices, constructions of the “underclass,” and spatialization of black poverty have been central to discourses about black female embodiment and gender/race/sexual identities. We also solicit contributions that consider the methodological possibilities and challenges of examining black working-class women, including new approaches to historical archives and other research tools that might provide the basis for the production of new knowledge and visions for the future.
The special issue will include an invited roundtable with contributions from Professor Tera Hunter, Professor Saidiya Hartman and other leading scholars in the field.
Possible Topics & Themes: labor organizing, black urban spaces and the policing of black poor communities, politics of respectability, uplift politics, working class cultures of resistance, contradictions between economic status and social status in black communities, class politics in social movements, black feminist theory, capitalist development, liberalism, and neoliberalism, migration, family, illicit economies and criminalization, state violence, cultural representation and cultural production, geographies of black female labor, and reproduction.
Final Submission Deadline is Midnight August 30, 2015
To submit to this special issue:
http://www.editorialmanager.com/souls/
For general questions please contact souls@uic.edu
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
SOULS only accepts unsolicited manuscripts by electronic submission. Manuscripts are peer-reviewed by members of our Editorial Working Group (EWG) and our Editorial Advisory Board (EAB), as well as other affiliated scholars.
All submissions must include author's full mailing address, email address, telephone and fax numbers, and professional, organizational or academic affiliation. Authors will be asked to indicate that the manuscript contains original content, has not previously been published, and is not under review by another publication. Authors are responsible for securing permission to use copyrighted tables or materials from a copyrighted work in excess of 500 words. Authors must contact original authors or copyright holders to request the use of such material in their articles. Authors are required to submit a three to five sentence bio, an abstract of their article of not more than 100 words, and a brief list of key words or significant concepts in the article.
Upload submissions here:
http://www.editorialmanager.com/souls/
CONTENT
DCP: In the pattern of the critical black intellectual tradition of W.E.B. DuBois, Souls articles should include the elements of "description," "correction," and/or "prescription": thickly, richly detailed descriptions of contemporary black life and culture; corrective and analytical engagements with theories and concepts that reproduce racial inequality in all of its forms; and/or an analysis that presents clear alternatives or possibilities for social change.
Originality: Articles should make an original contribution to the literature. We do not consider manuscripts that are under review elsewhere.
FORM OF ARTICLES:
Length: Articles published in Souls generally are a minimum of 2,500 words in length, but not longer than 8,500 words, excluding endnotes and scholarly references.
CMS and Clarity: All articles should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. Scholarly references and citations usually should not be embedded in the text of the article, but arranged as endnotes in CMS form. Souls favors clearly written articles free of excessive academic jargon and readily accessible to a broad audience.
Critical: Souls aspires to produce scholarship representing a critical black studies – analytical and theoretical works in the living tradition of scholar/activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Souls is an intellectual intervention that seeks to inform and transform black life and history.
Any additional questions, please contact:
Prudence Browne, Managing Editor
or
Professor Barbara Ransby, Editor