Call for Submissions for a Special Issue: Advancing Art-full Praxes

Intersectionalities: A Global Journal of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, and Practice

 
Call for Submissions for a Special Issue:

Advancing Art-full Praxes  

Special Issue Editors:

Sobia Shaheen Shaikh, School of Social Work, Memorial University, sshaikh@mun.ca

Julia E. Janes, School of Social Work, Memorial University, jjanes@mun.ca

Morgan Gardner, Faculty of Education, Memorial University, mgardner@mun.ca

Intersectionalities invites transdisciplinary contributions that critically engage the transformative potential of what we are calling, “art-full praxes.” Art-full praxes foreground creative, embodied, and process-oriented ways of knowing that connect artistic practice/expression with critical scholarship and social justice engagement. Art-full praxes are often engaged within a range of approaches (e.g., research-creation, performative inquiry, arts-based research, and arts-informed inquiry) and we encourage potential contributors to draw on the richness of these approaches to art-full praxes.

We understand art-full praxes to include the interweaving of: 

1. Theorizing, such as anti-racist, anti-colonial, abolitionist, feminist, anti-capitalist, and environmental justice, anti-ableist, anti-sanist and other critical theories. 
2. Practices and processes, which are relational, creative, arts-engaged, care-based, collaborative, embodied, ethical, trauma-informed, affective, transformative, multidirectional learning, and embedded in social justice principles. 
3. Transformative change, from community activism, research and engagement, global and local systemic policy change, transformative curriculum and pedagogies, to solidarity-building.

This special issue seeks to show how art-full praxes activate social justice theorizing, scholarship, activism, pedagogy, arts-engaged practice, and community engagement in ways that push their (constructed or imagined) boundaries, deepen their collective rapport and vision, and enable transformative world-building. 

In doing so, the central aim of this issue on art-full praxes is to critically explore and demonstrate the weave among theorizing, practices/process, and change-making. As such, we invite contributors to consider how the exchange-interplay-dance-dialectic among theory, process, and change-making enhance and transform our understandings of radical/root change at individual, collective and systemic levels. Underlying art-full praxes is the premise that new forms of agency need to be activated to address and sustain our commitments to local-global transformation.  

Key questions animating this special issue include:

• How do scholars’ art-full praxes activate, enhance, and transform the interplay and potency of their theoretical, practice/process, and change-making commitments?
• What possibilities and tensions emerge within the terrains of art-full praxes? For instance, how might art-full praxes reshape knowledge production, relational care, pedagogy and/or ethical engagement in ways that ignite new openings while simultaneously revealing new tensions or constraints?
• What politics, power relations, and ethical questions entangle art-full praxes, including questions of representation, institutionalization, risk, exclusion, racial capitalism, coloniality, and the domestication or feminization of creative social justice work?

We welcome submissions that contribute to Canadian and global social justice knowledge. We anticipate and appreciate multi-media formats. We invite contributors to critically reflect on the possibilities, tensions, and transformative potential of art-full praxes within their scholarly and community-engaged work. 

Possible themes might include how art-full praxes can:

• Advance social justice knowledge and ethical, solidarity-focused practice.
• Foster relational care, collective well-being, and community engagement.
• Challenge and expand social justice praxis, pedagogy, and research agendas.
• Transgress academic boundaries, and open new possibilities for education, advocacy, and practice.
• Amplify theorizing (e.g., advancing transformative, de/anti-colonial, abolitionist, anti-racist, environmental justice, feminist, anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, and other critical theory) that move between art-fullness and social justice.
• Explicate what art-full praxes looks like from the vantage of those inside and outside of the ‘A/arts’ and conversely, from the vantage of those that root inside and outside of traditions of social justice.

Submission process and deadlines:

Please submit a 250-word abstract by September 25, 2026 to jherdman@mun.ca. Selected authors will be invited by the Special Issue Editors to submit full manuscripts due January 28, 2027 via the journal’s online submission portal (here). 

We ask that you review the journal’s submission guidelines before you submit. Submissions will be reviewed by the Special Issue Editors before they are sent for peer-review. You can find more information about the journal at www.intersectionalities.mun.ca. 

If you have any questions about this process, please reach out to the Special Issue Editors. We invite authors to contact us about their anticipated format (e.g., multi-media, manuscript) and content prior to their submission. 

Accessibility

Are there specific submission processes that will make contributing to this special issue more accessible for you? Please let us know—we aim to foster an ethos of support at all stages of the co-creation of this special issue. We will happily answer any further inquiries. Please direct the inquiries to the journal’s managing editor: jherdman@mun.ca