Submissions

Author Guidelines

Kalfou is a scholarly journal focused on social movements, social institutions, and social relations. We seek to build links among intellectuals, artists, and activists in shared struggles for social justice. The journal seeks to promote the development of community-based scholarship in ethnic studies among humanists and social scientists and to connect the specialized knowledge produced in academe to the situated knowledge generated in aggrieved communities.

We invite articles that address asymmetries of power, social justice, new ways of knowing, and new ways of being. We aim to illuminate the distribution of opportunities and life chances inside communities of color in the past, present, and future; to focus on the roles played by the state, capital, social structures, and social movements in promoting or suppressing social justice; to offer a platform for discussing the struggles, problems, dreams, and hopes embedded inside anti-racist work. We especially seek contributions that explore what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “fatal couplings of power and difference.”

Each issue also includes sections on social movement strategies and keywords, artists and social action, and concrete struggles for resources, rights, recognition, and dignity. Guidelines for these pieces are as follows:

Talkative Ancestors: Quotes from previous generations

Keywords: Phrases, terms, and concepts that emerge from activism

La Mesa Popular: Reports from the field about ongoing activism

Art and Social Action: Analyses of works of expressive culture that function as repositories of collective memory, sites of moral instruction, and mechanisms for calling communities into being through performance

Mobilized 4 Movement: Reflections on social movements and how their participants see themselves and their work

Teaching and Truth: First-person testimony from classroom teachers

In Memoriam: Acknowledgment of and tribute to the work of departed comrades and colleagues

Contributors’ names should appear on a separate title page so that manuscripts can be evaluated anonymously. Submissions should be five thousand to ten thousand words, including citations, and should follow The Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.).

Electronic Submissions: Submit manuscripts in Word format via e-mail.

Preferred Systems of Citation: Kalfou accepts both note style and author/date style as described in The Chicago Manual of Style.

Submissions should also include:

• A brief contributor biography (2–3 sentences)
• Separate files for artwork—not embedded in the manuscript file
• For each illustration, either a black-and-white version alone or both a black-and-white version and a color version (black and white for the print edition and color for the electronic edition); 1200-dpi-minimum resolution for line art, 300-dpi-minimum resolution for all other art
• Separate files for tables—not embedded in the manuscript file
• Captions/titles and placement instructions for all artwork and tables
• All copyright/credit/source information, including prior publication and any acknowledgments
• An abstract