Call for Papers
Updated May 5, 2025
Atlantis has ONE current call for papers:
SEE DETAILS BELOW
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Call for Abstracts
Disability, Divergence, and Creative Expression
co-edited by Jordana Greenblatt and Drew Danielle Belsky
Deadline: May 31, 2025
In the ongoing wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the atomization and individualizing of collective experiences of mass death and disablement coincide with rapidly-changing technologies of access (or exclusion) in space, time, and textuality. Technoutopian and transhumanist fantasies of artificial intelligence, eternal youth, and space colonization, on the one hand, and wellness-culture fantasies of total agency over “health” and bodies through “pure” living, on the other, are perversely juxtaposed with dehumanizing attacks on bodies that exceed rigidly-defined norms of gender and sexuality, colonial hierarchies of race, and ableist constructions of productivity and health.
Faced, as we are, with fundamentally uncertain social, economic, and ecological futures, literary representations of illness and disability remain urgent fields of exploration, engagement, and activism. Moving beyond illness narratives and disability as metaphor and/or prosthesis, contemporary approaches not only interrogate the social norms that create categories of normal and pathological embodiment but also develop disability studies as “a methodological approach to studying power, privilege, and oppression of bodily and mental norms which is not dependent upon the presence of disabled people, yet is informed by social perspectives, practices, and concerns about disability” (Schalk 2017).
Drawing together queer theory and disability studies, crip theory embraces the paradoxes of identity and identification and interrogates the generative frictions through which particular bodies and embodied experiences are materialized as marginal or pathological. From Gutter and Killacky’s 2004 collection Queer Crips and McRuer and Sandahl’s interventions in 2006 and 2003 respectively (which reclaimed the intersection of disabilities and sexuality) to Kafer’s Feminist, Queer, Crip in 2018, Puar’s The Right to Maim in 2017, and Schalk’s 2022 Black Disability Politics, intersectional approaches to disability, chronic illnesses, and mental health within expressive culture stress the interconnectedness of material and social realities.
Critiques of selfhood, embodiment, and performativity have centered on the ways in which systemic oppressions and constructions of normalcy can be interrupted and resisted by unruly subjects and their imaginings of other worlds and possibilities. Hamraie and Fritch’s 2019 “Crip Technoscience Manifesto,” emphasizes this creative and generative aspect of crip knowing-making as a powerful kind of world-making, in which both friction and interdependence are crucial elements of expressive exploration and building more accessible futures. From crip temporalities to crip spacialities, crip theory fundamentally interrogates and expands norms. It “bends” clocks and brick and mortar to make possible inclusive expressivity (Samuels 2017).
Special Issue
This special issue of Atlantis focuses on exploring illness and disability in relation to gender and sexuality within expressive texts (fictional and non-) and/or other forms of cultural representation. We invite scholars, writers, and activists to submit contributions examining how expressive artists represent, challenge, and reflect the lived experiences of those with disabilities, visible and invisible, physical and mental/cognitive (including mental illness, learning disabilities, and neurodivergence, among others). We seek a variety of approaches including literary studies, disability studies, fat studies, Mad studies, trans studies, and other related fields exploring both the content of cultural representation and the conditions of its production. We particularly welcome interdisciplinary contributions reflecting the diverse experiences and narratives of marginalized groups, especially those from 2SLGBTQI+ and BIPOC communities.
Within our broader focus, areas of inquiry might include:
• intersectionality and identity politics
• ableism and embodiment studies (including fat studies)
• HIV/AIDS studies/discourse
• the effects of capitalism/neo-liberalism; global geopolitics/necropolitics and inequalities
• epi/pandemics and epidemiological policies, practices, and outcomes
• migration and global mobility
• technologies of the self
• trauma and care studies
• non-realist/speculative fiction and/or auto-fiction (including genres such as afrofuturism, the gothic, cyberpunk, apocalyptic fiction, and technoutopianism, among others).
• institutional supports and/or barriers; dis/enabling material conditions of production and/or reception
• ethical considerations of production and dissemination of work by “able-bodied” artists that address dis/ability and/or dis/abled subjects and/or involve such subjects in their process of production
Various forms of scholarship will be considered:
• Original research
• Commentaries and reflections
• Interviews
Submission Process
**Please read Atlantis’ scope and submission guidelines at atlantisjournal.ca before submitting work.**
Please submit an abstract of 500 words by May 31, 2025. Abstracts must be submitted through Atlantis’ OJS platform on our website. Requests for submission of a full paper will be based on abstracts and will be sent by July 15, 2025.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full article by October 15, 2025. Invitation to submit a full paper does not indicate or guarantee publication. All research papers will be sent for anonymous external peer review. Reflections, commentaries and interviews are reviewed by the special issue editors.
For questions about OJS and/or the submission process, please contact Katherine Barrett, Managing Editor: atlantis.journal@msvu.ca. For questions about submission scope and content, please contact Jordana Greenblatt
jordanag@yorku.ca
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Forthcoming Issues (submissions now closed)
GENDER AND CLIMATE JUSTICE
Co-Editors: Lori Lee Oates and Sritama Chatterjee
LIVEABLE FUTURES: RADICAL IMAGINATION AS METHOD // RADICAL IMAGINATION AS SURVIVAL.
Co-Editors: Ardath Whynacht and Alex Khasnabish
RUPTURES, RESISTANCE, RECLAMATION: GLOBAL FEMINISMS IN A DIGITAL AGE
Co-Editors: Iqra Shagufta Cheema, Jennifer Jill Fellows, Lisa Smith
"HEALING IS AN ACT OF COMMUNION": CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON WOMEN'S HEALTH, WELLNESS AND DISEASE
Co-Editors: Shannan Grant and Barbara Hamilton-Hinch
MIGRATION AND THE WOMEN, PEACE AND SECURITY AGENDA
Co-editors: Tatjana Takševa and Nancy Annan
