Call for Papers: Kalfou special issue on "Ethnic Studies and Student Activism Now"
Kalfou invites activists, scholars, artists, students, and educators to contribute to a special issue on ethnic studies and student activism now.
Submission deadline: Sunday, December 14, 2025
Themes
“Teaching and learning take place today in a time of crisis and chaos.”
—Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, “Insubordinate Spaces for Intemperate Times” (2013)
Protests in the streets and across high school and college campuses have expressed frustrations over the lack of progress on educational inequalities, and staged opposition to new policies that criminalize bodies and minds. Students occupy the bottom of the neoliberal educational hierarchy, yet their self-organized activities and collective demands are the targets of overwhelming repression. New immigration policies target international student activists for punishment and deportation while the withholding of public education funds becomes a tool of political repression. As the system of education turns on itself under the conditions of neoliberal disaster, “common sense” now dictates the amputation of certain areas of research in favor of increasingly more authoritarian, colorblind, and extractive approaches to study as the valued objective of knowledge production.
The special issue will consider how students shape and are shaped by ongoing struggles over ethnic studies and public education more broadly. For example:
- How do the student debt burden, epistemicide and scholasticide, political repression, housing shortages, and structural exclusions affect the definition of “the student” and impact the conception of “student activism” today?
- What visions for solidarity and alternative social relations are emerging from student-led struggles for liberation?
- What are the continuities and ruptures with previous student movements and the circumstances that prompted them?
- What lessons can we learn from past and present sites of contestation?
As always, we remain committed to expanding frameworks for ethnic studies scholarship and communal engagement.
Submission Guidelines
- Submissions should be 5-10k words, including citations, and should follow The Chicago Manual of Style (17th ed.).
- Submit articles no later than Sunday, December 14, 2025
- View full author guidelines and submit manuscripts at: https://tupjournals.temple.edu/index.php/kalfou/about/submissions
- Consider applying to our Article Workshop, scheduled for October 11, to receive feedback from the editorial boards before you submit the work to us. Participation in the workshop is not mandatory for the special issue but is highly encouraged!
About the Journal
Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies welcomes your ongoing submissions and engagement. 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.
Each issue includes sections on social movement strategies and keywords, artists and social action, and concrete struggles for resources, rights, recognition, and dignity.
Questions? Email us!
