Category: Call for Papers

CFP: Seeking Material Culture Scholars for Bloombury’s Trans Studies Book Series

Seeking material culture scholars to write and edit books for Trans Studies, a book series published by Bloomsbury Academic. We welcome books on transgender and nonbinary lives and experiences as reflected in material culture. 

Bloomsbury Academic is a leading international publisher of books on material culture, and its Gender & Sexuality Studies list pioneers scholarship about marginalized gender identities and sexualities, as seen in the press’s commitment to LGBTQIA+ topics. 

High priorities for the Trans Studies series include books that provide intersectional perspectives, as well as works that examine transgender and nonbinary topics with reference to particular linguistic, national, and regional groups. We encourage authors from around the world to contribute to the series, incorporating culture-specific insights as feasible.

Contemporary and historical works are equally appropriate. Books in this series include monographs and edited volumes that target academic audiences. We value books that explore socially relevant issues and that both clarify and question the premises of trans studies.

To propose a book for Trans Studies, please complete this form and submit it to General Editor Douglas Vakoch (dvakoch@meti.org) and Senior Acquisitions Editor Courtney Morales (Courtney.Morales@bloomsbury.com). Please include your CV, a list of five to seven potential reviewers you do not know personally, and a sample chapter. If you do not have a sample chapter for the book, please include a previous writing sample written in the same style that you envision for the book.

On the form, list the highest degree for each author, editor, and chapter author. For edited volumes, all chapters should have at least one author who has already completed their PhD. 

All books in the Trans Studies series—whether they are grounded in the humanities, social sciences, or biological sciences—reflect on the assumptions that guide the book’s specific version of trans scholarship. We especially seek works that provide innovative reformulations of the scope and practice of trans studies, including novel methodologies and theoretical concepts that challenge the status quo. We welcome books from disciplines that are underrepresented in trans studies.

All books follow the most recent guidelines for best practices in using accurate and respectful language when discussing transgender and nonbinary people and topics. Key resources to these best practices include GLAAD’s overviews of Transgender People and Nonbinary People, as well as this Glossary of Terms.

Contributors to this series come from disciplines including but not limited to affect studies, anthropology, architecture, area studies, art, biology, cinema studies, classics, communication studies, cultural studies, disability studies, ecology, economics, education, emotion studies, environmental studies, ethics, ethnic studies, gender studies, geography, history, law, literary studies, masculinity studies, media studies, medicine, medieval studies, philosophy, political science, psychology, public policy, queer studies, religious studies, rhetoric, science and technology studies, science fiction studies, sociology, theology, trans studies, and women’s studies. Proposals grounded in other disciplines are equally welcome.

Contact Email

dvakoch@meti.org

Call for Articles: Disabilities in Libraries & Information Studies

DisLIS Open for Article Submissions

Disabilities in Libraries & Information Studies (DisLIS) is now accepting articles for peer-reviewed, open access publication. This includes original research articles, review articles, case studies, theory articles, and notes from the field. We recommend authors use this template to structure their articles. We will review submissions using this rubric. Academic articles are peer reviewed using an open, collaborative review process. Articles will be published on a rolling basis.

Article Submission Link

About DisLIS

DisLIS is an open access, multimedia journal run by information professionals who work in various types of information-oriented jobs. All members of the Editorial Board either have disabilities or have extensive experience with disability-centered work.

Our publishing focus is to center the experience of disability within information work in a variety of settings including but not limited to K-12 schools; LIS programs; public, academic, special, or other types of libraries or archives; focusing on the experiences of library or archive workers or users, or people who work with libraries in other ways. Works published may take a variety of forms, including book reviews, peer-reviewed scholarly articles or case studies, poetry, and recorded interviews.

Contact the Editorial Board if you have questions: DisLisJournal@googlegroups.com

DisLIS website is available at https://cornerstone.lib.mnsu.edu/dislis/

Call for Contributions to Notes from the Field: Fall 2025

Notes from the Field, a publication of the TPS Collective, is accepting submissions about teaching and working with primary sources for three series of peer-reviewed blog posts: “Art and Creative Making in Primary Source Instruction,” “Primary Source Kits,” and an Open Call.

These topics are drawn from subjects discussed at the 2025 TPS Fest and Conversations on the TPS Listserv. Grounded in issues your colleagues in the field are exploring, this call is intended to highlight a broad range of voices from all sectors of the TPS community. Please see the calls below for more information.

Art and Creative Making in Primary Source Instruction

Following up on a spectacular session at TPS fest, we want to hear about your experience with integrating art creative making in primary source instruction. Are your students making zines? Are they remixing or crafting creative, visual, or otherwise less conventional outputs than a written worksheet or assignment? For this series, we want to hear about it all. What works, what doesn’t work, or what you hope to explore in the future.

Primary Source Kits

For this series, we want to hear about your experiences with primary source kits, physical, digital, or hybrid. What were the logistics of making such a primary kit (e.g., audience, content, creator, etc.)? What have been the challenges and/or the successes? What are your hopes for the future of these kits? We look forward to hearing your answers to these questions and more to better understand the work being done by our colleagues with this tool for instruction and outreach.

An Open Call!

We are also accepting submissions on topics related to teaching and working with primary sources to be featured in peer-reviewed blog posts. While we ask that contributions fall into either our “Reflective Practice” or “Practical How-To” categories, this fall we are open to reviewing submissions from a range of contexts. Our hope is that this call for miscellaneous submissions will create opportunities for practitioners to submit work that may fall outside our recent thematic calls.

Contributions should be 1000-1200 words and are subject to Notes from the Field’s peer review process.

Posts will be published on a rolling basis beginning in October 2025. Full submission information is available in the Notes from the Field author and peer review guidelines.

Any questions, expressions of interest, or submissions can be sent to the Notes from the Field Lead Editor, Joe Lueck at lueckj@union.edu.

CFP: Digitalisation and (Un)Sustainability: Assessing Digital Waste and Material Pollution in the City

CFP from Urban Planning, open access journal

About the Issue
Recent developments in AI technologies have exacerbated existing concerns about the (un)sustainability of digitalisation and datafication. These concerns are related to the limitations of resources both natural and infrastructure-wise (Dekeyser & Lynch, 2025), to the exhaustion of the latter provoked by the excessive AI-use (Wang & Yorke-Smith, 2025), digital archiving, and mundane data consumption (Vale et al., 2024). This is related to the glut of digital footprints and waste in cities, which has been a problem for both cities and the media for centuries, albeit supercharged in the contemporary moment. What is new is the excessive use and normalisation of an (un)sustainable relationship with digital technology, including the everyday use of tools such as Chat GPT (Hogan, 2024). These tools have severe carbon footprint impacts, using as much water as an average family uses in almost two years for server cooling and electricity generation. For every hundred words generated by the service, an average of three bottles of water are consumed (DeGeurin, 2023).

The smart city and the new digital twins’ tropes—along with prescriptive and acritical perspectives that technologies will be the panacea for any complex issue—are part of the problem (Chiappini, 2020). Discourses around the effectiveness of these types of initiatives and projects often create, semantically and semiotically (Babushkina & Votsis, 2022), a distorted view of digital solutions for fictitious issues, including distortions of key human traits such as knowledge, meaning, and embeddedness into reality. On a smaller scale, the everyday life consumption on search engines, direct messaging, social media addiction, multimedia file exchange, and purchases on big tech logistic platforms pollute not only the environment but the collective consciousness, producing confusion, exhaustion, and fatigue. This constant generation of an amount of information that pollutes the brain becomes what Lovink (2019) defined as “brain-junk.” The number of apps keeps increasing, and so does the data they collect, but users are not always aware and digitally literate about these risks. Hence, both co-dependency on media technologies and a lack of a high degree of digital literacy can be considered societal and spatial issues that might create unevenness. It is unfortunately not possible to control-click emptying the trash from digital waste and material pollution: much of it goes beyond the current understanding and technical capability to take care of. Therefore, there is an urge to overcome the rapid accelerationism of techno-determinism and solutionism and identify tactics and strategies aimed at reducing digital waste.

This thematic issue is concerned with the timely and vital problem of digitalisation and its (un)sustainability, fostering a discussion on the waste and pollution, digital and material, caused by massive datafication and urban platformisation (Cristofari, 2023). The relationship between the geographical scale, socio-political goals, and the technological design of digital infrastructures is of crucial importance to the understanding of the issue of digital waste and its possible reduction (Chiappini & Ferrari, 2024). For instance, data centres account for about two percent of all global energy use, and the raw amount of energy consumed by data centres doubles roughly every four to eight years (International Energy Agency, 2022). Hence, in terms of urban planning, the localisation of data centres has key implications, with direct consequences over the surrounding environment with regard to air pollution and climate change. The thematic issue encompasses inter- and trans-disciplinary perspectives from urban studies and planning, including digital geography, sociology, semiotics, environmental studies, and legal approaches. It aims to engage critically with the normative and prescriptive discourses which favour a techno-determinist view where smart city projects are celebrated. We invite papers that deal with concepts such as waste, noise, and excess in terms of data, materials, time, labour, cultural surplus, chatbots, and AI-powered services, also, but not exclusively, in relation to the uselessness and ineffectiveness of smart city projects and digital twins’ experiments.

References:

Instructions for Authors
Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal’s instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Urban Planning is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Open Access
Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 90 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal’s open access charges can be found here.

CFP: Printing History – Seditious Printing

Call for Papers for Printing History Themed Issue: Seditious Printing

In respect of the 250th anniversary of the printing of the Declaration of Independence, Printing History 38 will examine print as a means of provocation, agitation, and rebellion. We invite author submissions that interrogate print-as-protest across borders and cultural contexts, with a focus on printing’s particular power to foment political and social change. We particularly welcome submissions highlighting the print production of underresearched and/or marginalized groups and individuals. 

We invite interested researchers, professionals, and practitioners to share work engaged with the following topics:

  • Print production as a means of political provocation and rebellion
  • Print and the shaping of American (or other cultural/political) imaginaries
  • Print as a catalyst for social change
  • Activist print cultures: posters, broadsides, zines, ephemera
  • Printed matter as an organizing tool
  • Secret presses; underground printing 
  • Interrogations of print and power

In general, Printing History follows the Chicago Manual of Style. An APHA style guide and further information for contributors can be downloaded here.

Submissions should be emailed to editor@printinghistory.org. If you have questions about this issue, the process, or the journal in general, do not hesitate to write. We do not solicit proposals for articles, but we are happy to discuss ideas and abstracts via email.

Submission deadline: October 31, 2025

Call for Submissions: Public Services Quarterly

Call for Submissions 

The “Special Libraries, Special Challenges” column in Public Services Quarterly is currently seeking submissions for issues that explore all aspects of working in a special library. Articles generally are approximately 2,000 words and focus on practical ideas rather than theory. Case studies are always welcomed.   

Column Description 

“Special Libraries, Special Challenges” is a column dedicated to exploring the unique public services challenges that arise in libraries that specialize in a particular subject, such as law, medicine, business, special collections, university archives, governmental settings, and so forth. In each column, authors discuss innovative projects, public service issues, and creative solutions that arise specifically in special libraries.

Potential Article Topics

  • Plans to commemorate anniversaries and historic dates
  • Profile of libraries/archives at professional organizations
  • Case studies of operations and scope of work in corporate libraries
  • Profile of libraries supporting the work in various branches of government  
  • Rebuilding library services and facilities after a building disaster (fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane, etc.)
  • Innovative pilot projects 
  • Developing new programs for students and/or faculty
  • Professional and continuing development for library staff
  • AI and library services
  • Emerging trends, such as empirical research, data analytics and alt-metrics 
  • Teaching various literacies (information, media, technology, etc.) 
  • Other ideas welcomed!  

Contact  Special or subject-matter librarians interested in authoring a piece for this column are invited to contact the co-editors, Patti Gibbons (pgibbons@uchicago.edu) or Deborah Schander (deborah.schander@ct.gov).

CFP: transfer – Journal for Provenance Research and the History of Collection

The online journal transfer is an academic publication platform in the area of provenance research and the history of collection as well as adjacent fields of investigation, like art market studies, reception history, cultural sociology, or legal history. Issues are published semi-annually and exclusively online in Diamond Open Access. Research articles and research reports, to be submitted in English or German, are subject to a double-blind peer-review. All submissions undergo an internal evaluation by the editors supported by the advisory board and receive professional copy-editing before publication. The journal is based at the Research Centre for Provenance Research, Art and Cultural Property Law at the University of Bonn and at the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts. transfer receives funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG). Webhosting is provided by our partner institution Heidelberg University Library via arthistoricum.net.

Website: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/transfer/index

Editors: Felicity Bodenstein, Ulrike Saß & Christoph Zuschlag

Managing Editor: Florian Schönfuß

Advisory Board: Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e.V., dbv-Kommission Provenienzforschung und Provenienzerschließung, Didier Houénoudé, Larissa Förster, Gilbert Lupfer, Antoinette Maget-Dominicé, Barbara K. Murovec, Gesa Vietzen

Open Call for Submissions

transfer is an interdisciplinary, cross-epoch and international journal. It primarily addresses a scholarly audience. Besides experienced researchers, transfer equally aims at early career researchers, including PhD students, offering broad impact and high accessibility for the publication of recent research. Abstaining from any author charges or other publication fees, transfer provides a Diamond Open Access platform assuring research quality as well as transparency, fostering research interconnection and the crossing of disciplinary and institutional boundaries. Authors are invited to submit papers on the following fields of interest:

– Provenance research on individual objects or object groups

– Collections, History of collection

– Translocation of art and cultural assets 

– Art and cultural property law

– Culture of remembrance, Cultural identity, Collective memory

– Art trade, Art market studies

– Art policy, Sociology of art, Cultural sociology

– Restitution, Return, Repatriation

In conjunction with the articles in transfer, corresponding research data sets can be published via the Open Research Data platform heiData. For further information on this and regarding submissions, text categories, peer-review as well as our Style Sheet, please see the journal-website or contact us under redaktion.transfer@uni-bonn.de.

The submission deadline for Volume 5 (2026), No. 1 is 15th January 2026.

Contact Information

Dr. Florian Schönfuß

transfer – Zeitschrift für Provenienzforschung und Sammlungsgeschichte / 

Journal for Provenance Research and the History of Collection

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

Forschungsstelle Provenienzforschung, 

Kunst- und Kulturgutschutzrecht

Kunsthistorisches Institut

Rabinstraße 1

53111 Bonn (Germany)

florian.schoenfuss@uni-bonn.de

Contact Email

redaktion.transfer@uni-bonn.de

URL

https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/transfer/index

CfP: Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance

Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance

Special Issue of The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies

Editors: Michelle Caswell, UCLA and Jess Melvin, University of Sydney

Records documenting human rights abuse raise a host of critical challenges for archivists, scholars, activists, survivors, and source communities. Who owns such records? Which stakeholders have the legal and/or ethical authority to make decisions about their stewardship? When should community-based collections, personal records, oral histories or artistic expressions comment on, respond to, or fill in the gaps left by official state documentation?

Dominant Western archival theories trace the provenance of records to their creators. By this narrow estimation, many records documenting human rights abuse belong to the abusers who created them or successor states. However, recent developments in critical archival studies challenge dominant Western notions of provenance, expanding it (as in community or social provenance) (Bastian 2009, Douglas 2017), retooling it for liberatory aims such as crip provenance (Brilmyer 2022), land as provenance (Ghaddar 2022), or provenancial fabulation (Lapp 2023), or abandoning it altogether (Drake 2021). A recent special issue of Archival Science edited by Jeannette Bastian, Stanley Griffin, and James Lowry addresses emerging conceptions of provenance in detail.

This renewed interest in provenance has opened up critical questions as provenance relates specifically to the ownership, stewardship, and uses of records documenting human rights abuse. This special issue of The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies will exclusively feature papers produced at the Human Rights Archives and the Problems of Provenance symposium at the University of Sydney in June 2025. The symposium was organized as part of the Indonesia Trauma Testimony Project made possible with support from the Australian Research Council.

Submission due date: September 1, 2025 (Contact jclis@litwinbooks.com to submit a paper.)

Anticipated publication date: Spring 2026

References

Bastian J (2006) Reading colonial records through an archival lens: the provenance of place, space and creation. Arch Sci 6: 267-284.

Brilmyer G (2022) Toward a crip provenance: centering disability in archives through its absence. J Contemporary Arch Stud 9:1-25

Douglas J (2017) Origins and beyond. In: MacNeil H & Eastwood T (eds.) Currents of Archival Thinking (2nd. ed) Libraries Unlimited, California. pp 25-52

Drake J (2016) RadTech Meets RadArch: Towards A New Principle for Archives and Archival Description. Medium. https://medium.com/on-archivy/radtech-meets-radarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-and-archival-description-568f133e4325

CFP: Ethical AI in GLAM: Challenges and Opportunities for Digital Stewardship

A Focus Issue of the journal Collections exploring change as well as issues in methods and practices

Guest Edited by Dr. Angela Fritz Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Science, University of Iowa

During this period of rapid AI development, galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) are facing a generational challenge that calls on practitioners to re-think their roles, re-evaluate policies and practices, and re-envision the ethical contours of their work. As AI-enabled technologies continue to surface, GLAM practitioners will confront a host of challenges relating to how AI can be leveraged to gain the much needed efficiencies necessary to steward digital collections at scale, while upholding their professional codes of ethics to ensure equitable access, mitigate harm, and safeguard the integrity of the historical record.

In the context of GLAM stewardship, the purview of “ethical AI” is expansive. For special collections librarians, archivists, and museum curators, ethical AI encompasses the responsible use of AI in collection stewardship practices as well as the development of new AI literacy frameworks for research, teaching, exhibition and training initiatives. Ethical AI also relates to re-framing the value of human-centered curation as well as the associated concerns relating to digital labor within and outside of GLAM institutions. In addition, GLAM practitioners will confront the complexities of a host of new ethical challenges relating to stewarding AI-generated content in cultural heritage collections. To address these ethical challenges, practitioners will need to balance the transformative power of AI with their professional accountabilities and restorative curatorial commitments to the diverse communities that GLAM institutions serve.

As GLAM practitioners navigate challenges in AI-integrated workspaces, archivists, museum curators, and special collections librarians will need to translate their professional codes of ethics in new contexts and apply this ethical awareness on a case-by-case basis. Recognizing the context-specific nature of these ethical dilemmas, practitioners will need to carefully balance AI innovations with an understanding of both the professional and social implications of its use. At the same time, GLAM practitioners will increasingly be expected to address the ways in which the principles of ethical curation and AI tools can work in tandem to reinforce mindful practices and transformational stewardship initiatives.

Scope of the Focus Issue

For this focus issue of the journal, we seek contributions from practitioners, scholars, and researchers who can further our understanding of the meaning of “ethical AI” in the context of GLAM collection stewardship. Our intentions are sparked by a sense of urgency in sharing experiences, understanding common challenges and concerns, contemplating possibilities and paths forward, and inspiring new ways of thinking about AI-enhanced stewardship practices. Because the meaning of ethical AI is multifaceted, complex, and ever-evolving, we see this issue as an opportunity to engage in proactive dialogue, foster interdisciplinary connections as well as advocate for an ethics of collection care—all of which will be essential for the successful implementation of enhanced AI technologies in GLAM stewardship settings.

We are interested in, but not restricted to, case studies, research projects, or scholarly reflections concerned with the intersection between ethical AI and:

  • Collection management policies, principles, guidelines, and best practices
  • Description methods and practices, including reparative description initiatives
  • Accessioning, registration, and processing integrations and strategies
  • Collections development, acquisition strategies, and donor engagement
  • Implementation or enhancement of cultural protocols in digital stewardship practices
  • GLAM digital convergence, digital collection building, digitization initiatives
  • Digital repatriation
  • Exhibition development and visitor/user experience
  • Instructional frameworks and AI literacy initiatives
  • Collections or technology assessment
  • Governance and community of practice initiatives
  • Equitable access initiatives
  • Privacy guidelines and access restrictions
  • Human/AI alignment in stewardship workflows and team development
  • Digital provenance and paradata
  • Digital labor, precarity, and value of human-centered stewardship
  • Efforts to prioritize environmental sustainability
  • Digital preservation strategies, practices and challenges
  • Computational methods in appraisal and enhanced acquisition models
  • Literacy frameworks relating to “upskilling” or “reskilling” GLAM faculty and staff
  • Community building, outreach and engagement
  • Stakeholder responses to AI implementation and use
  • AI detection tools and authentication methodologies relating to GLAM collection stewardship
  • Advocacy plans, strategies or networks that extend across national and cultural boundaries
  • Other projects that address the dimensions of ethical AI in GLAM stewardship

For this issue, we are seeking case studies and research articles not to exceed 5,000 words as well as scholarly reflection essays not to exceed 2500 words. Topics should address ethical AI in the context of the topics above or a related area in GLAM digital stewardship.

Submission Process

Authors should express their interest by submitting completed articles, case studies, and scholarly reflections to the Guest Editor, Angela Fritz aifritz465@gmail.com and the Journal Editor, Juilee Decker, jdgsh@rit.edu by October 20, 2025. Notifications of acceptance will be made by November 24, 2025.

Author submission guidelines can be found here: https://journals.sagepub.com/authorinstructions/CJX.

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else while under review for this special focus issue.

Anticipated Timeline

  • October 20, 2025-Paper submission deadline
  • November 24, 2025-Notification of manuscript decision
  • January 9, 2026-Revise and resubmit articles
  • March 15, 2026-Enter production

April 15, 2026 on-Articles begin appearing online in the “Online First” portal of the Collections journal. Metrics are keyed to the appearance of the article.

Following the publication of papers online first, all of them will be gathered up into the Focus Issue of the journal in 2026 (anticipated publication date of June 2026).

Guest Editor Biography

Dr. Angela Fritz is assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Iowa. Her research explores digital stewardship in GLAM institutions through the lens of digital convergence, artificial intelligence, and an archival ethics of care. Prior to her time at the University of Iowa, she held leadership positions at the Wisconsin Historical Society, the University of Notre Dame, and the Office of Presidential Libraries and Museums at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Currently, she serves in several national service roles relating to GLAM digital stewardship advocacy and outreach. She is the author of Sustainable Enterprise Strategies for Optimizing Digital Stewardship: A Guide for Libraries, Archives, and Museums (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021). Her forthcoming book, entitled Digital Leadership and AI: Transforming Libraries, Archives, and Museums for the Future (Bloomsbury, 2025), explores the intersection between AI, leadership studies, organizational development, and digital convergence within the GLAM field.

….

Established in 2004 and published by SAGE, Collections is an international, peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal addressing all aspects of handling, preserving, researching, interpreting, and organizing collections. Scholars, archivists, curators, librarians, collection managers, preparators, registrars, educators, emerging professionals, and others encouraged to submit their work for this focused issue. See https://journals.sagepub.com/home/cjxa for more information about the journal.

Any questions about the Focus Issue may be directed to the guest editor, Angela Fritz aifritz465@gmail.com and journal editor, Juilee Decker, jdgsh@rit.edu. Questions about the journal only may be directed to the journal editor.

CFP: Academizines

Dr. Spencer D. C. Keralis and Professor Zach Frazier, editors

Call for Proposals

We invite proposals for Academizines, a special issue of Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship. Zines have evolved as a form of scholarly communication that reaches wider publics than traditional academic publishing, and allows for a greater degree of creativity and innovation than conventional forms (Vong, 2016; Weida, 2020). Zines are featured in the special collections of research libraries including Barnard, the University of Minnesota, NYU, Duke, Texas A&M, Harvard, and many others, illustrating their value as cultural artifacts and works of creative and literary art (Darms, 2013; Joseph and Sawyer, 2024), and provide accessible forms of scholarly publishing, community-building, and resource-sharing among our personal and research communities (Etengoff, 2015; Ingram, 2024; Thomas, 2018). This special issue invites contributors from across the disciplines to share their research and creative scholarship in zine form. We welcome contributions in the language, vernacular, and forms used by the scholars and communities the zines serve, and encourage international perspectives, particularly from the global South and other regions not well represented in US-based scholarly journals and archives. 

PDFs or physical copies of completed zines may be submitted with the 250-word abstract. We’re interested in collaborating with contributors on how to best present their work online, but we encourage printable PDFs to help readers print and share your work.

Physical copies of zines will be placed, at the creators’ discretion, in the LaBudde Special Collections and Archives Zine Collection at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. We encourage contributors to place their zines in other zine libraries as well.

As a community, contributors will have the opportunity to celebrate the launch of the issue and their contributions in a Virtual Zine Con hosted by the UMKC ZineLab in January of 2026.

Submit your 250-word Abstract

Key Dates & Deadlines

CFP Opens: August 1, 2025
Deadline for Abstracts: September 15, 2025
Acceptance notifications: September 30, 2025
Deadline for Completed Accepted Zines: November 15, 2025
Issue Launches: January 15, 2026
Academizines Virtual Zine Con Issue Virtual Launch Party: January 31, 2026

Some Possible Formats:

  • Saddle-stitch (staple or sewn) half-letter booklets
  • One-sheet folded zines
  • Accordion books
  • Cartonera
  • Digital zines, explainer decks, and other alternative zine forms

Some Possible Topics

We welcome zines representing scholarship in any discipline, and we’re particularly enthusiastic about:

  • Accessibility in/for zines
  • Cartonera as scholarly communication
  • Design Justice and zines
  • Integrated computing and zines – Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, minimal computing, haptics
  • Perzines as narrative writing 
  • Queer(ing) and Trans(ing) zines
  • Zine libraries and archives
  • Zines against AI and accelerationism
  • Zines and/as book history
  • Zines and/as comics studies
  • Zines and/as critical making
  • Zines and/as data visualization
  • Zines and/as digital humanities
  • Zines and/as media archaeology
  • Zines and/as public humanities
  • Zines and/as social justice activism
  • Zines for public health and wellness
  • Zines in and for your discipline
  • Zine research in zine form

About the Editors

Dr. Spencer Keralis is a scholar of the past, present, and future of the book. Their work in book and media history has appeared in Book History, American Periodicals, and hyperrhiz: new media cultures. They are the co-editor with Cait Coker (Illinois) of the essay collection DH+BH: Digital Humanities and Book History (IOPN, 2025). Dr. Keralis currently serves as Head of Digital Scholarship Services and Co-Director of the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri – Kansas City.

Zach Frazier is a graphic designer, educator, and small-press publisher. Zach is the founder of Astringent Press, a low-to-no-cost, small-volume publisher that seeks to produce physical and digital texts from visual/textual narratives belonging to historically minoritized and underserved communities. Zach’s work is featured in book shops and galleries across the U.S. Along with these roles, Zach also serves as Assistant Professor of Graphic Design in UMKC’s Department of Media, Art and Design.

The editors are the co-founders of ZineLab, an interdisciplinary book arts lab in UMKC Libraries’ Digital Collaboration Studio.

Bibliography

Darms, Lisa. 2013. The Riot GRRRL Collection. Feminist Press.

Etengoff, Chana. 2015. “Teaching Note: Using Zines to Teach about Gender Minority Experiences and Mixed-Methods Research.” Feminist Teacher: A Journal of the Practices, Theories, and Scholarship of Feminist Teaching 25 (2–3): 211–18. doi:10.5406/femteacher.25.2-3.0211.

Ingram, Noël. 2024. “Using Zines to Teach Literary Analysis in a Post ChatGPT World.” Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice 13 (3): 53–64.

Joseph, Branden W. and Drew Sawyer. 2024. Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines. Phaidon.

Thomas, Susan. 2018. “Zines for Teaching: A Survey of Pedagogy and Implications for Academic Librarians.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 18 (4): 737–58. doi:10.1353/pla.2018.0043.

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