Multiple Calls for Submissions!

Explore our current publishing opportunities below.

"The State of Women of Color in New York Higher Education" - Open to NYS symposium attendees only - Final work and abstract due June 8, 2025
"Abandoned at the Gate: An Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Feminist Analysis of Gatekeeping in Academia" - 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio due June 15, 2025

CALL #1

"The State of Women of Color in New York Higher Education"

Special Issue of Gatherings
Roberta Hurtado, Guest Editor

Submission Deadline: June 8, 2025
Publication: December 2025

On March 8, 2025, SUNY Oswego will host “The State of Women of Color in New York Higher Education.” A one-day symposium, this event will gather together faculty, staff, administrators, students, and community members from across the state to explore topics pertinent to how women of color survive and can thrive in New York Higher Education. Drawing from insights provided by seminal texts such as Presumed Incompetent, Telling to Live, Degrees of Difference, Baila Conmigo and Baila Conmigo 2, this symposium seeks to consider what are the very human costs of being in academia, and how decentering pressures to enter into the “normative” script of requirements for success can lead to personal and professional tensions. This symposium also offered an opportunity for celebration, considering the ways that women of color across the state forge their own paths, create networks of support and offering care and compassion to others, encourage one another professionally, and manifest spaces of thoughtful critique and resistance.

This call for submissions (CFS) is open to attendees of the symposium and asks them to reflect on the topics addressed at the symposium in order to help expand the impact to peers both in New York State and in the broader field of higher education. Genre is open to formal scholarly essays as well as creative writing and visual formats that can be digitally reproduced (e.g. graphic art, photography, scanned paintings, etc.). Below, please find prompting questions to which contributors might respond.

What possibilities come from intentional space-making in New York higher education for historically/currently excluded communities?
What do you believe needs to be done to encourage the successful hiring and retention of women of color in New York higher education?
What do you consider to be the importance of femtoring (feminist/mujerista/womanist mentoring) in New York higher education?
What does it mean to be leaders for ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and our communities?
How do we bring our authentic selves and cultural ways of knowing with us into New York higher education?
What do you see as the role of allyship in creating New York higher education as a safe space for women of color?
What is your vision for the future of New York higher education?

These questions are not exhaustive and can be interpreted in a variety of ways. We seek contributions that attend to your own experiences and understandings even as they participate in a scholarly conversation. Final works and a 150-word abstract are due by June 08, 2025. Potential submissions include:

Formal scholarly essays: maximum 5,000 words
Creative Non-Fiction/Testimonios: maximum 2,500 words
Poetry: maximum 200 words
Images (must be digital for reproduction purposes): minimum 300 DPI

Please submit contributions through our online portal.

*Please format all writings and bibliographies using MLA format.

CALL #2

"Abandoned at the Gate: An Interdisciplinary and Intersectional Feminist Analysis of Gatekeeping in Academia"

This issue of Gatherings: an interdisciplinary, intersectional feminist journal invites scholars, artists, and activists to reflect on gatekeeping in academia. We welcome submissions in the form of traditional academic papers, as well as essays, memoir, interviews, video or audio pieces, artwork that can be reproduced digitally, and other formats that can be published digitally.

Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental tenets of academia. It is simultaneously active and passive. Academic gatekeeping determines who gets accepted into which colleges and universities. Academic gatekeeping determines who is canonized and who is not. It privileges legacy admissions while affirmative action measures have been reversed.

Academic literature and writing can create innumerable barriers. For example, most academic journals are off-limits to those outside of academia because access can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars (Torok, 2024). Even if one has unlimited access to academic articles, these articles are becoming increasingly difficult to read (The Economist, 2024). Furthermore, there is bias regarding the type of scholar who is more likely to be published at all by academic presses (Loui and Fiala, 2024).

Academic gatekeeping also creates faculty hierarchies that go beyond distinctions between professorship types. Some faculty are held in academic limbo through relegation to contingent positions while others are swiftly ushered along the tenure track. Women—especially BIPOC women—faculty members experience higher demands for emotional labor than their male and White counterparts, and face limitations to career advancement if they do not perform this supplemental emotional labor (Berheide et al., 2022).

Efforts at inclusion can also become forms of academic gatekeeping. Retention efforts aimed at queer, trans, and gender nonconforming students that ignore multiple minoritized identities create another form of gatekeeping (Duran et al., 2019). Furthermore, some argue that disability accommodations privilege whiteness (Taylor, et al, 2020), illustrating the sometimes tenuous relationship of inclusion practices and/as gatekeeping (Ahmed, 2012).

One of the first and last gates academics face is the “letter of recommendation” gate. These letters are typically required for undergraduate programs, graduate programs, and employment, yet there is bias regarding who is more likely to receive excellent recommendation letters (Jaschik, 2018).

There are myriad methods of academic gatekeeping that go beyond those mentioned above. Gatherings invites academics, students, activists, artists, and community members to enter the conversation of academic gatekeeping through various modes of discourse, including submissions of academic papers, personal reflections, video projects, poetry, interviews, digital art, and more. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

Socio-economic class gatekeeping and college preparation
Gatekeeping in admissions (undergraduate and graduate)
Economic gatekeeping regarding scholarships, fellowships, and internships
Geographies of gatekeeping (geo-political locations, campus architecture, etc.)
Gender, race, and class-based gatekeeping regarding faculty positions and career advancement
Gatekeeping and disability
Gatekeeping and citizenship
Gatekeeping regarding recognized scholarship vs. real-world activism
Forms of gatekeeping at academic journals and presses
Methods and practices of dismantling academic gates

SUBMISSION FORMATS & DEADLINES

We welcome submissions in the form of traditional research articles, as well as essays, memoirs, interviews, video or audio pieces, artwork, and other formats that can be published digitally. We encourage submissions that employ an intersectional feminist lens rather than work that has a single issue focus. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio via the online submission form by June 15, 2025 through our online submission form. Accepted abstracts will be notified by August 15, 2025, and full submissions will be due by October 15, 2025. Following peer review, accepted pieces will be targeted for publication in April 2026.

INCLUSIVE AUTHORSHIP

We welcome submissions from students (both undergraduate and graduate), faculty, staff, independent scholars, artists, community members, alumni, and allies. We especially encourage submissions from marginalized students, faculty, and activists. We also encourage submissions that challenge the individualism of academic publishing through co-authored/co-created pieces. We acknowledge and work to undo the hierarchies within academic institutions in the Global North as well as the structural and historical inequities around publishing related to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and social locations.

QUESTIONS OR INQUIRIES

If you have questions or inquiries about this CFS or Gatherings, please email gatheringsjournal@gmail.com and a member of our editorial board will respond.

ISSUE EDITOR

This issue of Gatherings is edited by Jaynelle D. Nixon.

CITATIONS

Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.

Berheide, C.W., Carpenter, M.A., & Cotter, D. A. (2022, March 30). “Teaching college in the time of Covid-19: Gender and race differences in faculty emotional labor.” Sex Roles, 86, (441-455).

The Economist. (2024, December 8). “Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humanities most of all.”

Duran, A., Pope, R.L., & Jones, S.R. (2019, December 18). “The necessity of intersectionality as a framework to explore queer and trans student retention.” Journal of College Student Retention: Research, Theory, & Practice. 21(4).

Jaschik, S. (2018, October 21). “Recommendation letters and bias in admissions.” Inside Higher Education.

Loui, M. & Fiala, S. (2024, March 13). “Inequities in academic publishing: Where is the evidence and what can be done?” American Journal of Public Health.

Taylor, A., Smith, M.D., & Shallish, L. (2020, July 30). “(Re)Producing White privilege through disability accommodations.” Medium.

Torok. E. (2024, March 27). “Who loses when scientific research is locked behind paywalls?” Gates Foundation.