Please note that we have extended the deadline for submissions for this special issue due to the unforeseen circumstances brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Thank you to those who have already submitted and those who plan to submit for your interest in the project.
Critical Refugee Studies
Guest Editors: Yen Le Espiritu (University of California, San Diego) and Lila Sharif (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)
Publication Date: Planned for Spring 2021
Submission Requirements: 5,000-6,000 words (not including endnotes), due August 15, 2020.
The interdisciplinary field of Critical Refugee Studies re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites, but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement. Slated for publication in Spring 2021, this special issue of Amerasia Journal seeks innovative and provocative papers that center the concerns, perspectives, knowledge production, and global imaginings of refugees. We encourage submissions that integrate theoretical rigor and policy concerns with refugees’ rich and complex lived worlds—that fuse the critical and the creative, the local and the global, the cultural and the material, and new and innovative ways of thinking about refugees and refuge. We are especially interested in concise and accessibly written papers that can reach a wide readership, including undergraduate students, artists, community organizers, and teachers.
Topics to be addressed can include:
• Indigenous/immigrant/refugee intersections
• Legal and historical construction of the “refugee”
• Refugees as a subject of humanitarianism
• Refugees in the post 9/11 era
• Refugees and conceptualizations of “race”
• Cultural representations of and by refugees
• War and militarization
• Refugees and the environment
• Refugees and food studies
• Refugees and non-binary identities
• Refugees and queer of color critique
• Refugees and decolonization
• Refugee activism
Submission Guidelines and Review Process
Please submit your paper at: https://www.editorialmanager.com/ramj/default.aspx. There, you can find author instructions for uploading your submission, which requires a user account.
The guest editors, in consultation with the Amerasia Journal editorial staff and peer reviewers, make decisions on the final essays:
• Initial review of submitted papers by guest editors and Amerasia Journal editorial staff
• Papers approved by editors will undergo blind peer review
• Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission
Please contact Arnold Pan, Associate Editor, with any questions regarding your submission: arnoldpan@ucla.edu.
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