For the upcoming issue of Junctions, we are looking for graduate and recent postgraduate students to submit book reviews, especially related to our upcoming celebratory issue’s theme ‘Decolonizing the University.’ As Utrecht University’s Graduate Journal of the Humanities, Junctions provides students the opportunity to gain valuable publishing, editing, and reviewing experience, and helps students increase the reach of their research beyond classroom walls. Academic book reviews in particular serve as an excellent way for (post)graduate students to showcase and display their engagement with current scholarship in their field, as well as to enrich their resume 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 across the humanities. We thus offer a space for global graduate scholarship from all fields in the humanities and also welcome reviews of recent academic publications thereof. For this 10th anniversary issue of Junctions, we are both influenced by past and present calls for the decolonialization of institutions, and of the university in particular, and by multiple ongoing debates that seek to define the many facets of decoloniality as both concept and praxis, as well as the ethical considerations underlying such endeavors. We specifically welcome reviews of recent academic works that engage with intersecting questions of anti-racism and social justice, the decolonialization of knowledge and institutions, and of what Achille Mbembe has importantly referred to as “decoloniality as praxis from within.” Moreover, this subject includes such issues as: decolonizing the university as a movement, decolonizing the classroom, decoloniality across disciplines, the urgency of decolonizing the university, and the loci of decoloniality. There are many potential topics of interest, and we encourage you to look critically at the ways in which your discipline relates to the theme.  

Submissions of book reviews should be 750–1500 words in length, and the reviewed book has to have been 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 March 2nd, 2021. Your submission will be handled through open peer review by our book review editors, and notifications of acceptance will be sent on March 16th, 2021. Accepted submissions may require revisions, for which the deadline will be March 30th, 2021. Junctions does not accept manuscripts previously published by or simultaneously submitted to other publications. If you have any questions, for example for recommendations of books to review or if you want to make sure the book you have chosen is suitable for Junctions, please contact us at editor@junctionsjournal.org and we would be happy to think along with you.

For general guidance on how to approach writing a good book review, you can turn to https://tinyurl.com/ycwzx9wk or https://tinyurl.com/ya4kuqkd. For an example of a review published in a previous issue of Junctions, see Solange Vivienne Manche’s review of The Neganthropocene by Bernard Stiegler: http://doi.org/10.33391/jgjh.67, or the one of the other reviews in our Issue Archive.

To download this call click here.