Deadline: Feb. 28, 2025 (Pacific Time)
Submission length: 5,000-8,000 words (including works cited and notes)
Guest Editors: Z. N. Dylan Jackson, amanda wan, Emma Gilroy (University of British Columbia)
In “Mistaken Identity: ‘Asian Indigenous Relation’ and the Afterlives of Feminist Critique” (2023), Rusaba Alam observes that close textual analysis has “fallen out of favour in a contemporary scholarly field conditioned by precarity and by the ever-diminishing time and space available for sustained attention to language” (79). Even as analytical methods—in Alam’s example, deconstruction—have facilitated feminist, queer, and other liberatory critiques, those of us who would practice them find ourselves stymied by the demands of the very institutions that would enable us. To be an emerging scholar in Canada or Canadian literature would seem to be exciting: an honour, an opportunity, an affective praxis of intellectual home- and community-making. To work as an emerging scholar, however, is an increasingly difficult proposition.
We gesture here to the so-called crisis in the humanities, or the vocational stress that has been steadily increasing in academia over decades. Literary study in its own right often attends to crises of content, form, or milieu. Yet the impossibility of containing scholarly crises within conventional scholarly contexts grows more obvious, and more pressing, every day. The three of us—Z. N. Dylan Jackson, amanda wan, and Emma Gilroy—are ourselves emerging scholars, currently studying in or having recently graduated from the English department at UBC and working as members of CanLit’s editorial collective. Working at CanLit and in CanLit has driven us to reconsider how to join ongoing conversations within, and in response to, the academic institution. For example, the 2024 Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities at McGill University saw dozens of Canada’s scholarly organizations gather for an event whose host stood at odds with its own students and faculty. This controversy signalled the material dimensions of making and finding home and community on already politicized ground, illuminating tensions among the university and genocide, carcerality, colonialism, protest, mutual aid, and solidarity.
Here, then, is a crisis: our knowledge production mediates the colonial and debilitating institutions of the university and, as the writers and editors of Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (2018) have shown, CanLit itself. Some of us have long negotiated or worked to mitigate these hostilities, while others among us may see the vocational ideal of knowledge production newly demystified amid the COVID-19 pandemic or the escalation of genocide in Palestine. In both cases, recent and ongoing crises have crystallized and lent urgency to the tensions of knowledge production in or about Canada as an embodied, emplaced, and affiliated practice.
In this special issue, we invite emerging scholars—graduate and postdoctoral students, early-career scholars, and anyone else who might consider themself an emerging scholar—to reflect on the scholarly crises into and out of which we emerge. How might we navigate the tangle of literary study, knowledge production, and the moral and ethical imperatives of our current cultural moment?
We welcome reflections on the field, praxis-oriented proposals, and other engagements with the matter outlined above. Literary or textual analysis as a mode of engagement is particularly encouraged. We offer the following possible starting points:
- The home institution: Amid anticolonial encampments for Palestine, graduate worker strikes, an ongoing pandemic, and other events, how does the university as an ambivalent site of knowledge production affect our work and understanding of ourselves as scholars? How might such ambivalence generate possibilities for reshaping both harmful and life-giving practices of home-making within institutions?
- Poetics and, of, against production: How might we read poetry as a mode of knowledge production? How does poetry produce knowledge differently, produce different knowledges, or speak to more conventional sites of knowledge production?
- Assimilation and resistance: What happens to alternative ways of knowing when we introduce them into the university? How can we honour these epistemologies by, or rather than, institutionalizing them? What works help you grapple with these questions?
- Knowledge in, of, and out of place: How are you incorporating land-based pedagogies and methodologies into your knowledge production? How do such modalities attune us to the possibilities of knowledge out of place? How do we reckon with CanLit as a field conditioned by encounters with Indigenous knowledges, in addition to conceptions of Indigeneity that vary throughout the many iterations of settler colonialism and empire?
- Scholarship beyond the academy: How have you encountered scholarship in, or brought scholarly work into, nonacademic contexts? What texts guide your own visions for non- or new academic models of scholarly home, labour, or community?
- Undisciplining: How does interdisciplinarity and the undisciplining of literary and textual studies inform your work? What media artefacts help you think through a practice among or beyond disciplines? How might we think about undisciplining as the refusal of discipline?
Submission Guidelines
We hope to help alleviate the pressures of scholarly knowledge production in two ways. First, we are happy to consider shorter (~5000-word) and collaboratively authored articles. Second, we will offer workshop support to authors whose articles are accepted for publication.
Submissions should be sent online through our Open Journal Systems (OJS) portal.
Articles should follow current MLA style and formatting (MLA Handbook, 9th ed.).
Please limit images accompanying submissions to those receiving substantial attention in the article. Contributors will be required to obtain permission to reproduce images in their article and pay for any permission costs. The journal will provide a template for permission requests; such requests must be completed before publication. Please send high-quality images as separate attachments along with your article file.
For full submission guidelines, please visit canlit.ca/submissions.
Contact Us
If you have questions or wish to discuss ideas ahead of time, please feel free to reach out to us:
Guest Editors / General Inquiries: Z. N. Dylan Jackson, amanda wan, Emma Gilroy (can.lit@ubc.ca)
Editor-in-Chief: Christine Kim (cl.editor@ubc.ca)