Call for Papers
Updated May 20, 2025
Atlantis has TWO current calls for papers: "Disability, Divergence, and Creative Expression" and "The Indigenous New Wave Movement."
SEE DETAILS BELOW
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The Indigenous New Wave Movement:
Gender and Sexuality in Cultural Production
Co-edited by Dr. Margaret Robinson and Dr. Krista Collier-Jarvis
Deadline for abstracts: July 31, 2025
Atlantis invites submissions for a special issue dedicated to exploring the Indigenous New Wave Movement.
The Indigenous New Wave is a global artistic movement in multiple fields, including film, music, art, and literature of the “Visions and Revisions” period. Jesse Wente (Anishnabe) coined the term “the Indigenous New Wave” to describe Indigenous art that responds to Western media by reclaiming Indigenous images. It tends to authentic stories that challenge historical stereotypes and colonial narratives. For example, the rise of Two-Spirit stories in Indigenous New Wave media disrupts Western binary conceptions of gender and identity. Indigenous New Wave artists decolonize Western works, champion Indigenous sovereignty, and drive reconciliation. These artists challenge traditional narratives, reclaim Indigenous voices, and forge new paths in artistic expression, ultimately reshaping the cultural landscape. Their creations often tackle contemporary themes, use innovative storytelling, and promote cultural resurgence(s).
The Indigenous New Wave is distinguished by a focus on diverse Indigenous experiences, histories, and cultures, and by challenging the stereotypes of Indigenous people. Also central to the movement is what Tuscarora scholar-artist Jolene Rickard, describes as “visual sovereignty,” which refers to Indigenous artists’ efforts to craft their own image and media representation(s). Visual sovereignty is a means of cultural healing where contemporary media can dialogue with the past, enabling Indigenous artists to assert place-based distinctiveness.
In Canada, the Indigenous New Wave takes up national issues, such as residential schools, medical experimentation, MMIWG2S, and gender identity, at the same time as foregrounding themes of cultural pride, community belonging, jouissance, and joyful survival. In an interview on CBC Radio, Wente challenged listeners “to broaden the way we think about reconciliation by framing stories about Indigenous people in joy.” This call bespeaks the rise of “jouissance” and joyful survival in film and media studies and thus seeks to dismantle Westernized forms of trauma mining.
This special issue will examine how Indigenous artists are reshaping cultural narratives, identities, and histories to center decolonization, gender, and social justice.
Topics for Submission:
We welcome submissions that critically engage gender and sexuality in the cultural production of contemporary works in the Indigenous New Wave, including:
• literature, cinema, television, and digital media (e.g., web series, online content)
• music, performance art, and sound
• futurism, speculative fiction, and history reimagining
• art activism and land sovereignty
• self-representation in global media
• creative practices for social justice and cultural resistance
• transnational, diasporic, or suppressed voices in Indigenous art movements
• Indigenous nation(s)-centered New Wave media
Authors are invited to include works in Indigenous languages; however, Atlantis does not have the capacity for translation, so please reach out to the editors to discuss this option.
We welcome:
• original research
• reviews of Indigenous New Wave media (literature, art, etc.)
• commentaries, reflections, and perspectives
• interviews
• original creative work (poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, art)
While we welcome the focus on media and visual art, our capacity to publish files other than images is limited. For images, we require permission from the artist to publish or the images need to be in the public domain. We do not have funds to pay for reproducing visual art.
Submission Guidelines:
**Please read Atlantis’ scope and submission guidelines at atlantisjournal.ca before submitting work.**
Please submit an abstract of 500 words by July 31, 2025, to atlantis.journal@msvu.ca. Clearly label your submission as “for the Indigenous New Wave Movement special issue.”
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full manuscript by January 15, 2026. Invitation to submit a manuscript does not guarantee publication. All research manuscripts will be sent for anonymous external peer review. Reflections, commentaries, interviews, and creative works will be reviewed by the special issue editors.
For questions about the submission process, please contact Dr. Katherine Barrett, Managing Editor: atlantis.journal@msvu.ca. For questions about submission scope and content, please contact Dr. Krista Collier-Jarvis at Krista.Collier-Jarvis@msvu.ca.
For more information, please visit the Atlantis website: atlantisjournal.ca
Special Issue Editors:
Dr. Margaret Robinson (Lennox Island Mi’kmaw Nation) works as an Associate Professor at Dalhousie University. She holds the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Reconciliation, Gender, and Identity, with a focus on the Indigenous New Wave.
Dr. Krista Collier-Jarvis (Pictou Landing Mi’kmaw Nation) is an Assistant Professor at Mount Saint Vincent University. She specializes in Indigenous horror and zombie narratives, exploring themes of identity, trauma, and cultural resilience with a focus on Indigenous New Wave.
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Call for Abstracts
Disability, Divergence, and Creative Expression
co-edited by Jordana Greenblatt and Drew Danielle Belsky
EXTENDED DEADLINE: June 30, 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
"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
