Submission Guidelines

As an interdisciplinary formation with anti-disciplinary investments, CES publishes a range of manuscripts, some of which employ methods from academic fields whereas others emerge out of political movement work. Some might be creative, experimental, or provocative in nature. While we plan to have one special issue and open general issue each year, periodically we publish an additional special issue in place of an open general issue in order to address issues of unfolding urgency.

Peer-Reviewed Essays: Essays (between 6,000 and 10,000 words) should be prepared according to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style using endnotes and submitted electronically. Please submit manuscripts in Microsoft Word. Author’s names should not appear on manuscripts. Instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, email, work address, the title of the article, and abstract (250 words) with your electronic submission. Authors should eliminate any self-identifying information (such as notes or credits). References to the author’s work should be in third person.

Forum: Departing from the traditional book review format, each CES issue features a forum on a recently published book--or cultural work--that marks new directions in critical ethnic studies. Four to five scholars in ethnic studies or affiliated fields are invited to comment, in 1-2,000 words, on the work in question from various perspectives. The forum engages the main arguments and theoretical contributions of the featured work, while posing additional questions and signaling new lines of inquiry opened by the work. The author(s) or creator(s) are then invited to respond to the short commentaries. The forum features single-author monographs, co-authored books, and anthologies, as well as cultural works in a variety of media.

Interviews: Each issue features an interview with an activist or activist collective organizing around racial justice. The interview enables the journal to highlight critical ethnic studies work beyond the academy and to illuminate organizing approaches toward and perspectives around politically pressing, contemporary issues.

Work-in-translation or Work from/about the Global South: CES is actively working to feature non-English-language scholarship, as well as research produced within or about the Global South. To this end, each issue features one work-in-translation or one piece from or about geopolitical locations not typically studied within the field of critical ethnic studies. By bringing attention to this scholarship, we hope not only to move the field not just in more robustly transnational directions but also to galvanize its internationalist possibilities.

Political-education Document: Each issue features a curated political-education document--a manifesto, pamphlet, archival document, website, etc.—that is framed by a short introduction (500 words or less) by someone steeped in that particular political educational trajectory. This element of each issue reflects our mission to honor the radical liberatory roots and to highlight the insurgent pedagogical possibilities of ethnic studies as a field.

Syllabus: CES hosts a syllabus--either collectively drafted or individually authored--in each issue as part of the journal’s commitment to political public education. The syllabus should speak to areas of pressing concern, emergent significance, or undertheorization in the field of critical ethnic studies. Syllabi authors are invited to write an introduction curating the syllabus for our readership, as well as to provide hyperlinks--in the interest of access--to materials in the syllabus. By treating syllabi as publications in their own right and vital tools in liberatory education, CES recognizes them as products of considerable intellectual labor whose political significance extends beyond traditional academic spaces.


Call for Papers (Volume 10)

Critical Ethnic Studies Volume 10: Open Call for Submissions

For this volume of Critical Ethnic Studies, we seek submissions of articles and special documents (syllabi, political education documents, translations, and discussion forums; see below) on any topic related to the field of Critical Ethnic Studies. We especially welcome submissions that address topics, contexts, and locations that are understudied in the field.

Critical Ethnic Studies is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal published by the University of Minnesota Press. Each issue includes traditional peer-reviewed articles as well as several unique types of special documents that offer timely resources for anti-racist teaching, research, and activism: syllabi that outline an emerging field or urgent theme; political education documents that introduce a key historical or contemporary racial justice campaign or movement; translations or other important perspectives essays from the Global South; and forums discussing books, media, events, or key questions in the field. Please see our most recent issues of the journal for examples of these special documents.

Graduate students, independent scholars, and early career scholars are especially encouraged to submit abstracts. Please email 350-500 word abstracts for articles or special documents to justice@criticalethnicstudies.org by February 1st, 2025. Authors whose abstracts are selected for the issue will be asked to submit 5000-7000 word articles by April 15th, 2025.

 

CALL FOR PAPERS (Closed)

Critical Ethnic Studies Issue 9.2: Palestine After Analogy

Iyko Day, Mount Holyoke College and Nasser Abourahme, Bowdoin College

Analogies to South African apartheid, Jim Crow, and the Trail of Tears have served as important entry points for understanding the Palestinian experience and for developing a sense of shared struggle with other colonized and racialized populations. In 2014, as Israeli forces engaged in air strikes over the occupied territories, Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson wore Palestinian kaffiyehs, proclaiming “From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime.” During the 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Palestinian activists expressed solidarity with Native Americans, citing commonality as dispossessed Indigenous people who have “suffered the same fate as your people.”

This special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies responds to the urgency of transnational solidarity movements in support of Palestinian liberation by exploring the possibilities and limits of frameworks grounded in comparison and analogy. Despite the potential for coalitions based around a shared identification of common experiences, Noura Erakat and Marc Lamont Hill warn that “while indispensable, such frameworks are insufficient for developing a critical and nuanced analysis of contemporary Black-Palestinian [and other] solidarity politics.” Extending this point, Karim Kattan has raised issues around the increasing popularity of the phrase “Palestinian Lives Matter,” cautioning that the slogan can function as “a way to dismiss the uniqueness of the threat and violence faced by Black people in the United States.” Despite these warnings, there is no question that analogy has been vital for imagining transnational solidarity in our historical moment. Thus, the “after” in the issue’s title is less a call to move past analogy than an inquiry into the outcomes and impact of analogy.

Leaning into a politics of indeterminacy, this issue builds a critical conversation around transnational solidarity movements related to Palestinian struggle for self-determination, historically and in the contemporary moment. While the issue seeks to decenter the United States, it recognizes that the global visibility of Palestine’s struggle has also relied on US grammars of struggle. It similarly understands that global invocations of “solidarity with Palestine'' may empty out the specificity and meaning of “solidarity.” The issue seeks to imagine frameworks for transnational movement building that account for specificity of Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, antiblackness, and Indigenous dispossession that animate the ongoing Nakba (catastrophe) in occupied Palestine. We take stock of how Palestine can inform the interdisciplinary field of critical ethnic studies and its commitment to coalitional politics.

Possible essay topics:

  • Race, Indigeneity, antiblackness in Occupied Palestine

  • Forging solidarities through performance, art, and dance (Dabkeh)

  • Ongoing Nakba and ongoing return in relation to questions of Indigeneity

  • “Palestinian Lives Matter” and comparative approaches to antiblackness

  • Queer Palestine and global queer politics

  • Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity

  • Palestine within the field of settler colonialism

  • Palestine and comparative partition studies/solidarity politics

  • Internationalism, transnational solidarity movements

  • United Nations, US Imperialism, and Israeli militarism

  • Palestine and the transnational politics of prison abolition

  • Solidarity movements based on resource extraction and infrastructure

  • Palestine and theories of racial capitalism

For full consideration, please send 200-300 word abstracts and a condensed CV by July 1, 2023 to iday@mtholyoke.edu (please cc: justice@criticalethnicstudies.org). Full manuscripts will be due for peer review by September 1, 2023, for those invited to submit.



Archived Call for Papers

CLOSED - CALL FOR PAPERS

Critical Ethnic Studies Issue 8.2: Critiques of Militarization and Ethnic Studies

Anjali Nath, UC Davis
Crystal Mun-hye Baik, UC Riverside

For this special issue, we seek contributions that emerge from within ethnic studies but speak broadly to and exceed what might be recognized as the interdisciplinary formation of critical militarization studies. Prominent political scientists, political economists, security studies scholars, sociologists, and geographers are inclined to describe militarization as a technological infrastructure that targets or disproportionately impacts vulnerable groups. As ethnic studies and feminist scholars, we draw on a more nuanced internationalist analysis that recognizes militarization as an always already raced, gendered, and sexualized formation anchored in racial capitalism. Moreover, we recognize the victims of war and the subjects of militarization to be overwhelmingly poor people and the working class worldwide. Mobilized by the historical juncture we find ourselves in while also understanding that this moment is an extension of prolonged crisis, our special issue challenges an approach to militarization that is both presentist and technofetishist. Drawing from existing traditions in ethnic studies and gender studies, this special issue examines how the structuring logics of war, militarism, and militarization are central to, rather than separate from, the making - and unmaking - of everyday life.

Critical ethnic and gender studies can speak not only to the particular or provincial, but rather to the broad apparatuses and mundane conditions of militarization. Militarization we understand as a changing set of macro and micro processes, social relations, state and non-state infrastructures, epistemes, and ideologies that reproduce and protect forms of accumulation under racial capitalism. In situating militarization within the discourse of racial capitalism — and, necessarily by extension, imperialism — this special issue emphasizes the enduring significance of race, gender, sexuality, and class to questions of surveillance and security. Such positioning refuses the false binary between domestic policing and international entanglements of the military and intelligence agencies. Racialized, gendered, and sexualized bodies are not merely hypervulnerable destinations of militarized might. Rather, the development and emergent practices of militarization are inextricable from racial capitalist logics, even in their most mundane forms.

In foregrounding the changing conditions of militarization, we are committed to dynamic scholarship that shifts the focus from the seemingly insurmountable force and singular logic of imperial aggression to the lifeworlds, embodied positionalities, and fugitive perspectives of those most impacted by militarization (and does so without upholding singular or romanticized notions of unmediated “voice,” authenticity, and agency). We seek essays, articles, and other contributions that speak directly to the imperial nature of militarization and its long histories. In some ways, the questions may simply be distilled into a simple inquiry: what might critical militarization studies and ethnic studies learn from each other? Or what might critical militarization studies look like when it centers analytics within ethnic studies? It is our contention that ethnic studies is — and has been — a key site for studies of state violence and it is our intention to draw focus back to ethnic studies as a critical location for theorizing militarization. As part of this special issue, we are also interested in how interdisciplinary scholars, out of urgency and necessity, craft improvised methodologies that attend to militarized violence and address the situatedness of militarization while underscoring the linkages between the local and global. We are open to all regional specializations and welcome work that is transnational and global in scope. Areas of focus may include:

  • Racialization in the context of American imperial/colonial aggression

  • Histories of Black internationalism and the politics of solidarity

  • The labor and class politics of warfare, war making, and war mongering

  • Immigration, policing, detention, and border studies

  • Studies of Anti-imperialism, Marxism, and Third Worldism in relation to critical militarization studies

  • Histories of sexual labor and violence

  • Fugitive methodologies conditioned by militarization

  • Ethnographies of militarized infrastructures and the social life of military violence (exs: ethnographies of teargas or policing, US Aid, etc.)

  • Race, gender, sexuality in the life of infrastructures and logistics

  • Technological and logistic histories of racialized and sexual violence

  • Racialized visualities and militarized ways of seeing

  • Militarization and the mundane/ordinary

  • Environmental justice and the movements against militarized waste and toxicity

  • Specific case studies of military aggression, covert actions, coups, and the activist histories that challenge them.

Critical Ethnic Studies welcomes submissions in numerous forms, including peer-reviewed essays, interviews, political education documents, syllabi, and works-in-translation. You may find guidelines for these varying formats on the CES submissions page: http://www.criticalethnicstudiesjournal.org/submissions

For full consideration, please send 200-300 word abstracts and a condensed CV by February 1st, 2022 to Critical.Militarization.Studies@gmail.com, (please cc: justice@criticalethnicstudies.org). Full manuscripts will be due for peer review by April 1st, 2022, for those invited to submit.

CLOSED - Call for Papers, Fall 2021

Interventions in Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies

Guest edited by Jinah Kim (Cal State, Northridge) and Nitasha Sharma (Northwestern)

Proposals Due for all Sections: October 15, 2020. Please send a 500 word proposal and CV to: Nitasha Sharma and Jinah Kim (n-sharma[at]northwestern.edu, jinah.kim[at]csun.edu)

In this special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies we seek contributions that link the cultural, political, and social realities of the Pacific Islands with ongoing struggles against militarism, White supremacy, antiBlackness, gender based violence, environmental destruction, colonialism, and related phenomena across the US, Oceania, and Asia. This issue explores the conditions for and possibilities of solidarities and networks necessary to break the impasse that has emerged in Ethnic Studies when it comes to Pacific Islanders specifically, and Indigeneity more broadly. Why does scholarship employing the term “Trans-Pacific” tend to fly over Oceania, erasing Pacific Islanders while invoking the Pacific? As with other geographical formulations, like the Pacific Rim, “Trans-Pacific” institutionalizes yet obfuscates uneven relations between Asian Studies, Asian American Studies, and Pacific Islands Studies. In this issue, we hope to unblock the unwillingness to think through solidarity with regard to Indigeneity in Ethnic Studies. This presents a specific dilemma for Ethnic Studies as Trans-Pacific has become a dominant formulation for articulating diaspora in Asian/American Studies. We also aim to feature work on Asians in the Pacific that includes but also expands beyond the native/settler paradigm by considering, for instance, sites like Okinawa. Alongside critique, we look for articles that illustrate solidarities and networks with an oceanic orientation to the ellipsis between Trans-Pacific and Pacific Islands studies.

This intervention is urgent. The ongoing violence of US and Asian military expansion clashes with rising anti-colonial and de-occupation movements across a vast and heterogenous Pacific. We ask, what would emerge from a Critical Ethnic Studies lens that sincerely addresses the tensions and erasures as well as the development of solidarities and networks necessary to understand the interlinkages between Asia, the US, and the Pacific Islands in new ways? What would it mean to provide an analysis of White supremacy, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism to address Pacific Islander Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies? Similarly, how can studies of settler colonialism and Indigenous concerns in Oceania engage Trans-Pacific studies beyond the paradigm of Asian settler colonialism? We propose a collection of articles and additional materials produced by scholars, artists, and activists who address this lacuna, engaging this terrain through expansively imagined questions.

We are accepting proposals for all sections (see details below for details). The submission deadline for proposals for this Fall 2021 special issue is October 15, 2020. Please send a 500 word proposal and CV to: Nitasha Sharma and Jinah Kim (n-sharma[at]northwestern.edu, jinah.kim[at]csun.edu)

If accepted, authors will be notified in mid-October. Full manuscripts for all sections will be due December 1, 2020. Please submit manuscripts in Microsoft Word. Author’s names should not appear on manuscripts. Instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, email, work address, the title of the article, and abstract (250 words) with your electronic submission. Authors should eliminate any self-identifying information (such as notes or credits). References to the author’s work should be in third person.

For submission guidelines, see below. Note that CES journal is open-access, digital only. There is no print edition.

We are accepting proposals for the following:

  • Peer-reviewed Essays

  • Book Forums

  • Interviews

  • Political Education Documents

  • Work-in-translation or Work from/about the Global South

  • Syllabus

Please email inquiries about the Special Issue: Interventions in Pacific Islands Studies and Trans-Pacific Studies to Nitasha Sharma and Jinah Kim (n-sharma[at]northwestern.edu, jinah.kim[at]csun.edu)

CLOSED - Call for Papers, Spring 2021

Fascisms

Guest edited by Alyosha Goldstein (UNM) and Simón Ventura Trujillo (NYU)

Authoritarian political leaders and violent racist nationalist movements are a resurgent feature of the present historical conjuncture. The list is long and threatens to grow: Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, to name a few. Responding to the urgency of the current political crisis, this special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies explores what the analytic of fascism offers for understanding this authoritarian convergence by centering the material and speculative labor of antifascist and antiracist social movement coalitions. Essays will build a critical conversation across multiple world contexts and explore a variety of ways of theorizing what fascism and antifascist movements might mean during the current moment (or historically with relevance for the current moment).

By emphasizing fascisms plural, this special issue seeks to address two problematics in particular. First, it reckons with the global proliferation of fascist formations within and beyond the US and Europe over the course of the Cold War and into our contemporary political conjuncture. Yet in many respects fascism remains elusive as a political and cultural phenomenon. This special issue examines fascism as a geopolitically diverse series of entanglements with (neo)liberalism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and settler colonialism. Second, the special issue seeks to center the historical, political, and epistemological variety of antifascist collective organizing undertaken by Black, Indigenous, and other racialized subjects across the planet in ways that challenge the usual Eurocentrism through which studies of fascism often proceed. Racialized and colonized peoples have always been at the forefront of theorizing and dismantling fascism, and we intend for this issue to be a venue to explore, theorize, and activate this work.


CLOSED - Call for Papers, Winter 2021

Borderland Regimes and Resistance in Global Perspective

Guest edited by Camilla Hawthorne (UC Santa Cruz) and Jennifer Lynn Kelly (UC Santa Cruz)

This special issue on comparative border studies will invite contributors to theorize connections between border regimes around the world. Moving past superficial comparisons, we will centralize circulations of technologies, expertise, policing, and surveillance alongside transnational social movements. This special issue will build from research on the U.S./Mexico border while decentering its spectacularization, showing how these technologies, and resistance to them, are shared across borders. By bridging conversations that are typically kept in separate academic silos—for example, Asian-American studies, Black studies, Native studies, Middle East studies, European critical migration studies, critical refugee studies, postcolonial studies—we hope to produce theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of borders, beyond that which is typically understood as belonging to the field of border studies. After all, the urgent challenges of our current moment as they relate to borders, migration, and displacement require interdisciplinary approaches that actively trouble analytical silos.


CLOSED - Call for Papers, Fall 2020

General Issue

CLOSED - Call for Papers, March 15, 2018

Solidarities of Nonalignment: Abolition, Decolonization and Anti-Capitalism

Guest edited by Iyko Day (Mount Holyoke College), Juliana Hu Pegues (University of Minnesota), Dean Saranillio (New York University), & Michael Viola (Saint Mary’s College of California)

  • The submission deadline for this Spring 2019 special issue is March 15, 2018

  • For submission guidelines, see here and below

  • For a pdf of this call for papers, click here

  • Please email inquiries to justice@criticalethnicstudies.org

In times of crises, radical solidarities have emerged uniting disparate struggles against racial capitalist and colonial relations of domination.  This is the history of ethnic studies with more recent articulations in academic associations (including the Critical Ethnic Studies Association) passing resolutions on Palestinian solidarity; Black feminists immersing themselves with Indigenous activists to challenge resource extraction and dispossession; and the forging of linkages between gay liberation and prison abolition movements (Stanley, Spade, et al. 2011).  Within such significant movements the concept of solidarity is often suggested and assumed.  Yet, a concerted analysis of the very term within CES has not yet been fully interrogated, resulting in its very conceptualization being synchronously a powerful objective, a romanticized ideal, an active struggle, and an inchoate concept (Davis 2016; Lipman & Bender 2015; Mohanty 2003; Morgensen 2015).  It remains unclear, for example, how objectives of solidarity account for--or complicate--the ontological exceptionalism of antiblackness (Wilderson 2003; Sexton 2008). Alternatively, given the controversies over the colonial framing of the “Occupy” movement (Barker 2012), anti-capitalist struggle is often prioritized and rendered discrete from the politics of decolonization or abolition. Identifying how the racial, gendered, and sexualized inclusions and exclusions involved in practicing relational thinking--via solidarity, logics of affinity, kinship, intersectionality, assemblage, articulation, or making accomplices--often evoke a sense of non-alignment, this special issue builds upon important insights about the difficult yet necessary project of “making solidarity uneasy” (Roediger 2016).  

In this special issue, authors will explore and trouble the ways relational thinking have been formed as well as point to new directions as to how solidarities can be further theorized in disrupting racial, capital, and colonial relations. Contributors will investigate questions of enduring and ephemeral solidarities across different political and intergenerational projects as well as geographical regions. We encourage historical examples as well as analyses of contemporary struggles. Of particular interest are the possibilities, particulars, and contradictory formulations of solidarity in challenging settler colonial land and resource dispossession, racialized labor exploitation, anti-Blackness, and gendered ecocide.

Editors are interested in theoretical, reflective, and methodological explorations related “solidarities of non-alignment.”  Possible topics might include, yet are not limited to:

  • What is Critical Ethnic Studies theorization of solidarity and how is this conceptualization (de)linked to/from the praxis of allyship, coalition-building, intersectionality?

  • How are relations of affinity realized across movements of non-alignment? In what ways have decolonial, abolitionist, and/or anti-capitalist conditions nurtured linkages across movements of disparate geographical locations and/or political projects?

  • What are the (im)possibilities of solidarity between scholar-activists in the academy and grassroots community-based activism?

  • Intergenerational movements. In what ways are social movement formations understanding the connections and contradictions across past, present, and future movements?

  • What are the opportunities and limitations of solidarity across contemporary justice movements (e.g. Black Lives Matter, No DAPL, Justice for Palestine) in a period of neofascism in the White House.

  • Methodologies of non-aligned solidarity. In what ways can women of color feminism and/or queer of color critique offer relational methodologies?

  • Theorizations of misapprehension. How do fundamental concepts such as “land,” “labor,” and “dispossession” hold distinct meaning for different communities and movements, even as they are used in common?

  • Traveling theories. What happens when theorizations specific to historically-based oppressions (e.g. “social death,” “decolonization,” “racial capital,” “grounded normativity”) are deployed for different histories and/or social locations?

Essay Submission Guidelines

Essays (between 6,000 and 10,000 words) should be prepared according to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style using endnotes and submitted electronically to justice@criticalethnicstudies.org.

Please submit manuscripts in Microsoft Word. Author’s names should not appear on manuscripts. Instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, email, work address, the title of the article, and abstract (250 words) with your electronic submission. Authors should eliminate any self-identifying information (such as notes or credits). References to the author’s work should be in third person.

Works Cited

  • Barker, Adam. “Already Occupied: Indigenous Peoples, Settler Colonialism and the Occupy Movements in North America. Social Movement Studies. Vol. 11(2012) 327-334.

  • Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

  • Davis, Angela. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement. (Chicago, Haymarket, 2016).

  • Johnson, Walter & Kelly, Robin D.G. Race, Capitalism Justice. Boston Book Review 2017.

  • Lipman, Jana and Bender, Daniel (eds). Making Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism. (New York, New York University Press, 2015).

  • Mohanty, Chandra. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. (Durham, Duke University Press, 2003).

  • Morgensen, Scott. “A Politics Not Yet Known: Imagining Relationality within Solidarity.” American Quarterly. Vol. 67, no.2 (2015) 309-315.

  • Robinson, Cedric J. The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

  • Roediger, David. “Making Solidarity Uneasy: Cautions on a Keyword from Black Lives Matter to the Past.” American Quarterly, Vol. 68, no.2 (2016) 223-248.

  • Sexton, Jared. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

  • Stanley, Eric and Spade, Dean (with Queer InJustice). “Queering Prison Abolition, Now?” American Quarterly, Vol. 64, no.1 (2012) 115-127.

  • Wilderson, Frank. “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” Social Identities, Vol. 9, no. 2 (2003) 225-240.


 CLOSED - General Call for Papers, August 1, 2017

Editors: Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang

Critical Ethnic Studies provides a space for insurgent critique among academic and activist intellectuals. The journal invites interdisciplinary works that reposition the guiding assumptions of ethnic studies and other fields; that foment an open dialogue between Indigenous sovereignty, critiques of anti-blackness, intersectional feminist and queer analyses, disability studies, border and migration studies, critical refugee studies, and more.

  • The submission deadline for this Fall 2018 issue is August 1, 2017.

  • For submission guidelines, see here and below

  • For a pdf of this call for papers, click here

  • Please email inquiries to justice@criticalethnicstudies.org

Submitted manuscripts should enact one or more of the following related lines of inquiry:

First, we seek projects that will help to untether ethnic studies from its neoliberal multicultural institutionalization within the academy, which often relies on a politics of identity representation that is diluted and domesticated by nation-state and capitalist imperatives. We welcome essays that question the nation-state model, that advance relational and global frameworks for analyzing racism and colonialism, that pay attention to the present manifestations of colonialism, and that attend to ways of life that actively defy the impulses of white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, as well as militarism, occupation, Indigenous erasure, neocolonialism, anti-immigration, anti-Islam, anti-blackness, and other structured harms.

Second, we seek manuscripts that engage the productive tensions between fields that have institutionalized together under the umbrella of ethnic studies. Particularly, Native/Indigenous studies has attended to ongoing settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance to occupation and erasure, whereas ethnic studies has often been vexed by the ways in which discussions of race, civil rights, immigration, labor exploitation, and inclusion may ignore settler colonialism. We seek to publish essays that unsettle discussions of race, rights, migration, labor, and the discourses of inclusion and exclusion that otherwise presume settler colonialism as a taken-for-granted, un-interrogated ground for social formations.

Third, we invite writings that critically theorize race beyond understandings of "race" as a descriptive (sociological) category. By explicitly foregrounding white supremacy, antiblackness, and settler colonialism as logics and social formations intimately abetted by race and racism, pertinent essays should provide trenchant critiques of how and why race, racism, and antiblackness persist and not merely state or describe their persistence.

Fourth, we welcome critical works that reflect intersectional, feminist, queer, and trans analyses that treat categories such as race, class, gender, and sexuality not as additive modes of identity, oppression, or discrimination—but rather as constitutive, as robust analytics for critically apprehending and theorizing alternatives.

Essay Submission Guidelines

The journal is peer-reviewed and published bi-annually by the University of Minnesota Press.

Essays (between 6,000 and 10,000 words) should be prepared according to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style using endnotes and submitted electronically to justice@criticalethnicstudies.org.

Please submit manuscripts in Microsoft Word. Author’s names should not appear on manuscripts. Instead, please include a separate document with the author’s name, email, work address, the title of the article, and abstract (250 words) with your electronic submission. Authors should eliminate any self-identifying information (such as notes or credits). References to the author’s work should be in third person.