Call for Papers
Updated Aug 13, 2025
Atlantis has TWO current calls for papers: "The Indigenous New Wave Movement" and "Generation: A Critical Femininities Issue."
***WE ARE NOT CURRENTLY OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS OUTSIDE THESE TWO ISSUES.***
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
EXTENDED DEADLINE for abstracts: September 15, 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 September 15, 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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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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Call for Abstracts
Generation: A Critical Femininities Issue
Editors: Hannah Maitland, Andi Schwartz and Laura Brightwell
Deadline: October 31, 2025
To generate is to cause, create, or bring about. A generation may refer to a relation in time or the creation of art, scholarship, solidarity, or power. This special issue of Atlantis aims to explore what is generative about femininities as well as the multifaceted dimensions of and attitudes toward femininities across different generations.
We ask these questions at a critical moment when notions of generation are being deployed in the service of a “return” to colonial, white, and middle- to upper-class definitions of femininity as essentialist, maternal, domestic, and subservient. This is evident through the rise of white supremacist “pronatalist” and “tradwife” movements, restrictive and intentionally transphobic legal definitions of womanhood, and the clawing back of reproductive rights. A classist, colonial, white, heterosexual, cis, able-bodied ideal of femininity is reinforced through the ongoing rise of the Far Right, Trump 2.0, rising wealth inequality, and violently enforced colonial borders, from Turtle Island to Palestine. In the current genocide in Gaza, hierarchies of femininities are on display: the non-normative, militant femininities of Israeli soldiers are presented as empowered, while Muslim femininities are depicted as weak and subjected to a voyeuristic, Orientalist gaze (Pratt et al. 2025). In this moment, critical analysis of femininities—and the racialized and classed hierarchies between them—is vital.
Critical femininities frameworks offer a useful alternative to these normative narratives and oppressive mobilizations of femininity. As a discipline and praxis, critical femininities challenges the essentialist collapse between femininity and womanhood, opening up possibilities of a range of non- and anti-normative femininities. Critical femininities scholars consider femininity beyond its simplistic framing as a patriarchal tool of oppression to explore its potential as a radical site of political, theoretical, and cultural engagement and production (Brightwell and Taylor 2021; Dahl 2012; Hoskin and Blair 2022; McCann 2018; Nash 2018; Schwartz 2020; Spurgas 2021; Stardust 2015; Streeter 2021; Taylor and Hoskin 2023).
Black, Indigenous, queer, trans, disabled and femme theorists have critiqued colonial, patriarchal, and white supremacist definitions of lineage, and envisioned alternative generational kinship structures that resist the limitations placed on femmes and feminine subjects (Eguchi and Long 2018; Hill Collins 2000; Weston 1991). French poststructuralist feminism from the 1970s on theorized écriture féminine, a feminist, non-patriarchal language (Cixous 1976; Irigaray 1985). Feminist and femme scholars have also presented femininity as a site that can generate affective connections (Dahl 2017; Kokka et al. 2024; Schwartz 2020), critical theoretical perspectives (Hoskin 2017; McFarland and Taylor 2021; Schwartz 2018; Shelton 2018), political movements and interventions (Brightwell 2025; Deliovsky 2008; Tinsley 2022), and expansive and reparative understandings of gender (Ellison 2019; Nnawulezi et al. 2015). As we witness the (re)generation of destructive norms of femininity and the attempted destruction of resistant cultures of femininity, we invite submissions that draw on these lineages to offer critical and intersectional contemplations about what past generations of femmes and feminine figures have left for us, and what we might leave for future generations.
This special issue of Atlantis seeks to expand upon the conversations initiated at Generation: The Fourth Annual Critical Femininities Conference, hosted by the Centre for Feminist Research at York University from August 16-18, 2024. We invite proposals developed from presentations delivered at this conference and new proposals that interrogate how various social, cultural, political, and technological factors intersect with and shape the generative and generational experiences and discourses of femininity. Possible themes may include, but are not limited to:
• Femme perspectives and meditations on generations, kinship, lineage, and structural disruptions in intergenerational relationships (e.g. the AIDS epidemic; the occupation and genocide in Palestine, residential schools; the Sixties Scoop; transnational adoption)
• Femininity and matricentric and/or maternal feminisms, particularly as they intersect with race, class, transness, queerness, or disability
• Transnational, decolonial, queer and trans BIPOC perspectives on femininity, generation, and kinship
• Indigenous, Indigiqueer, and Two-Spirit perspectives on femininity, generation, and kinship
• Generations of trans and nonbinary perspectives on femininities, femme communities, and femme-inist futures
• Fat studies perspectives on femininities, femme communities, and fat femme-inist futures
• Critical femininities perspectives on history and history-making
• The role of racialized femininities in war, colonization, and nation-building
• (Inter)generational work building on the provocations and limitations of proto-femme theories in literature, cultural production, and art, such as the work and legacy of Sojourner Truth, Judy Chicago, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Patricia Hill Collins, and others
• Femme and feminine-generated subjugated knowledges, low theory (including popular culture and cultural production), and forms of creative resistance
• Critical perspectives on pronatalism, “tradwives” and other regressive approaches to reproductive justice, families, reproduction, and reproductive labour
• Queer, trans, crip, BIPOC, femme, and feminist environmental and anti-capitalist critiques of the generation of wealth, electricity, generative AI, and extractive attitudes towards ecosystems; and alternative orientations (decolonial, feminine, holistic, nurturing, and other) towards these crises and desires
• Posthumanism and the Dishuman as a turn to “generation” and creative notions of the body
Submissions can be single-authored or co-authored academic papers, autotheoretical and artistic narrative, visual art (static images that can be published in PDF format only), poetry, and analyses of art, music, and film. We welcome submissions from graduate students, emerging, independent, and established scholars, and artists/writers working beyond the university.
Submission Process
**Please read Atlantis Journal’s scope and submission guidelines at atlantisjournal.ca before submitting work for follow the guidelines below carefully.**
• Submit an abstract of 250-300 words by October 31, 2025.
• Abstracts must be submitted through Atlantis’ OJS platform. Clearly state in the “Comments to Editor” that your submission is for the “Generation” issue.
• Submit your abstract as an “article text.” Note that OJS has no provisions for submitting an abstract alone.
Requests for full papers will be sent by December 15, 2025.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full article by May 30, 2026. Invitation to submit a full paper does not indicate or guarantee publication. All research papers will be sent for anonymous external peer review.
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 the guest editors Hannah Maitland, Andi Schwartz, and Laura Brightwell at generationspecialissue [at] gmail [dot] com.
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Forthcoming Issues (submissions now closed)
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
DISABILITY, DIVERGENCE AND CREATIVE EXPRESSION
co-edited by Jordana Greenblatt and Drew Danielle Belsky
