Colleagues are invited to submit chapters for an edited collection of Dangerous Writings.
In October 2025, the Dangerous Writings symposium on the Ethics and Practicalities of Working with Risky Texts brought together scholars, archivists, practitioners, and creatives at the University of Manchester to consider the multiple forms of danger embedded in writing, curating, and reading. “Dangerous writings”, for example, include incendiary political texts or memoirs that reveal classified or confidential information, letters from prison and exile, have long served as catalysts for transformation. Yet they are also laden with numerous ethical, emotional, and sometimes legal implications for those who collect them, handle them, and/or encounter them.
This edited collection seeks to develop the conversations initiated at the symposium. At the heart of this endeavour lies a set of questions about power and responsibility. What does it mean to work with writing that unsettles or resists? How do archives, institutions, and researchers navigate the demands of care and risk? And what forms of knowledge or possibility open when we approach these materials with an ethical sensibility?
Contributors are invited to explore dangerous writings in all their complexity, whether through historical, sociological, literary, archival, or practice-based approaches. We are interested in chapters that illuminate how such texts are produced under conditions of constraint; how they challenge authority or institutional narratives; how they demonstrate forms of solidarity and resistance; and how readers, researchers, and custodians negotiate the emotional and professional labour involved in engaging with them.
Works across the social sciences that reflects these tensions are especially welcome. By thinking across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, we hope to advance understanding of what risky writing does and what responsibilities it generates for those who work with it.
Schedule
- First full chapter drafts (approx. 8,000 words): September 2026
- Editorial comments returned: November 2026
- Revised final drafts due: February 2027
- Proof-ready manuscript submitted to publisher: April 2027
- Anticipated publication: Summer 2027
Expressions of Interest
Please signal your interest in contributing by emailing Jon Shute (with Emily Turner and Marion Vannier in cc) by Friday, 16 January 2026. At this stage, a brief provisional title and 250 word abstract will suffice.
Publishing in the Archives Profession 