Current Issue

“Depending on who you speak to, decolonisation is about interrogating, resisting, dismantling, reforming or transforming the university. It is about critically engaging with how the university has historically produced, sustained and justified violence and domination across the world… As we witness the co-option of decolonisation as a term, we see its potential to fit neatly with the agenda of Management to discredit old forms of organising the university. It can be harnessed to promote marketisation of Universities as companies competing for ‘clients’ (read: students)... In other words, humanities and social science degrees are cheap to run but fees are high – and Black Studies could attract a new ‘market’ of students”. (Bhambra, Nişancıoğlu & Gebrial 2020, 513-514) 

For the 10th anniversary issue of Junctions, we invite graduate students and recent graduates in the Humanities to submit position papers reflecting on the above quote from the point of view of their own discipline. As an interdisciplinary journal in the Humanities, we are interested in how different disciplines have or have not taken up the theme of decolonizing in recent scholarship and educational practices. We therefore ask authors to reflect and offer their personal stance on questions such as: What steps do you, as a student, take to engage with your discipline or within the larger space of the university through the lens of decoloniality? How is decolonizing approached in your discipline? In what way does your discipline (in)visibilise the (re)production of (de)coloniality? 

Position papers should be between 1000-1500 words in length, and should take the form of a personal reflection preferably, but not necessarily, rooted in a specific discipline. Manuscripts should be in Chicago author-date referencing style, following the official Junctions Word template and the prescribed author guidelines. Please submit a digital copy of your manuscript (as a Word document) via the submission system on our website by March 23. Your submission will be handled through open peer review by our managing editors, and notifications of acceptance will be sent on March 30. Accepted submissions may require revisions. Junctions does not accept manuscripts previously published by or simultaneously submitted to other publications.

For more information and questions regarding the publication process, please contact the managing editors at: editor@junctionsjournal.org. For more informal questions, you can reach out to Junctions on social media at: @junctionsuu on Instagram and Twitter, or find us on Facebook and LinkedIn.

To download this call for papers click here!

In 2017, Achille Mbembe wrote: ‘[t]oday, the decolonizing project is back on the agenda worldwide’ (36). He was writing in reference to the Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of West Cape Town, South Africa, where in 2015 protests against a statue of Cecil Rhodes received global attention and saw ‘decolonizing’ institutions of higher education propelled back into mainstream discourse. Calls for decolonizing classrooms and curricula have abounded across the world since, with especially open letters directed at university boards gaining public momentum. Arguably, the call for decolonizing institutions has become even more urgent and overt in 2020, after the Black Lives Matter movement catapulted global anti-racism to the forefront of public consciousness following the murder of George Floyd. Indeed, local calls for decolonizing Utrecht University can be read as a direct result of ‘institutionalized racism’ as a concept being taken up by Dutch politics. 

Decoloniality, and decolonizing institutions, has consistently been a topic of debate within the academy, which has more recently taken issue with the multiplicity of defining decoloniality as a concept and a praxis – as well as the ethical considerations underlying such endeavors. The ‘metaphorization of decolonization’ has, for instance, been critiqued as a means to ‘recenter whiteness’ and ‘resettle theory’, regardless of how anti-racist, or social-justice-oriented critical engagements might be. Mbembe, amongst others, highlights the need for decoloniality as praxis from within: a critical reflection amongst disciplines themselves is crucial to enable the decolonizing of both knowledge and the university as an institution. This entails that decoloniality exists in the realm of multiplicities and pluralities, encompassing both form and format. In that vein, this celebratory issue of Junctions is also turning inwards; we want to reflect on the university and the practices of the journal, as well as the call to ‘decolonizing’ itself, open up the dialogue between the stakeholders concerned, and contextualize the university within a larger framework of decolonizing institutions. 

We therefore invite graduate and postgraduate students of the Humanities to contribute to the 10th anniversary issue of Junctions, titled: ‘Decolonizing the University’. We welcome submissions from all fields of the Humanities, and encourage authors to engage with (interdisciplinary) issues.

Check out the full call for papers here! (Deadline 2 February 2021)

For the upcoming issue of Junctions, we are looking for graduate and recent postgraduate students to submit book reviews, especially related to this issue’s theme ‘Bodies in Disarray.’ As Utrecht University’s Graduate Journal of the Humanities, Junctions provides students the opportunity to gain valuable publishing, editing, and reviewing experience. Some excellent student research unfortunately never reaches outside of a particular class. We aim to help you get this out into the world. Academic book reviews, especially, provide an excellent way for (post)graduate students to display their active engagement with current scholarship in their field, and to enrich their CV with a journal publication. 

Our journal aims to connect the different disciplines of the Humanities by collecting disciplinary and interdisciplinary texts that are accessible to readers from across the Humanities. We thus offer a space for worldwide graduate scholarship from all fields in the Humanities, and welcome reviews of recent academic publications on any topic in the Humanities. We especially welcome submissions related to the theme of the upcoming issue, ‘Bodies in Disarray.’ This subject encompasses such issues as: precarious bodies, vulnerability, and grief; individuality, privacy, and the collective; acceleration and deceleration in times of crisis; and histories and discourses of public health and political economy. There are many more potential topics of interest, and we encourage you to look at the way your discipline relates to the theme.

Submissions should be 750-1500 words in length, and the reviewed book should be published within the last 24 months. Please send a digital copy (as a Word document) of the complete manuscript in Chicago author-date referencing style, following the prescribed author guidelines which are provided at https://junctionsjournal.org/about/submissions/, to editor@junctionsjournal.org by November 1st, 2020. 

Check out the full Call for Book Reviews here!