Submissions

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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 appear below.

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.).

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 of 300 words or less

Submission Preparation Checklist

All submissions must meet the following requirements.

  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it currently before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The article manuscript is fully anonymized: the author's name and other identifying information have been redacted.
  • The text is double-spaced and uses a 12-point font.
  • If your article is accepted for publication, you must be willing to obtain formal permission from the copyright holder(s) to reprint any of the following material within your work, if it was not created by you personally: song lyrics, poetry, visual materials (photos, charts, graphs, maps, etc.), unpublished writings, lengthy excerpts, and anything else that does not clearly fall under the scope of fair use. We recommend that you make preliminary inquiries with any copyright holder(s) now in order to ensure that such permission would be forthcoming.
  • The submission file is in Microsoft Word or PDF format.
  • If the article contains images, each image must meet or exceed a minimum resolution of 1,500 x 2,100 and be submitted as a separate file in .jpg, .tiff, or .pdf format. Captions and placement information should be provided within the text of the article itself.
  • A short author bio (2–3 sentences) is provided as a separate file.

General Submissions

Select "General Submissions" to submit your work without assigning it to a specific section of the journal. If it is accepted, the editors will determine its placement within the issue.

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.

Reviews

Reviews of books or films.

Testing Section

Here is the section policy for the Testing Section.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.