Month: October 2024

CFP Comm & Democracy: Critical Race Theory

“Publication

Call for submissions to a special issue of Communication and Democracy on Critical Race Theory. Deadline for full papers: 15 January 2025.

Guest Editors: Danielle Hodge (University of Colorado) and Karma Chávez (University of Texas).

In 1995, critical race scholar Derrick Bell asked a pointed question of the legal critics of the time: “Who’s afraid of critical race theory?” Interrogating the ways critical race theory (CRT) was reduced to a discipline of “deficiencies,” Bell articulated CRT as an epistemology concerned with the racialization of law, power, and policy that demanded a process of radical assessment. Rearticulated as the “perfect villain” (Wallace-Wells, 2021) and a “divisive concept” (Vought, 2020) twenty-five years later, CRT has since been subject to an onslaught of nationwide assaults that seek to ban its teaching and discussion in both K-12 and higher education contexts. These bans have detrimental implications for free speech, academic freedom, and the possibility for a healthy democracy as they limit what can be taught, learned, and discussed about US history, race and racism, and the contemporary political sphere. Understanding and intervening in these attacks is thus of vital importance for scholars of communication and democracy.

Consequently, in this special issue, the editors ask: Who’s STILL afraid of critical race theory? They seek a venue to respond to the persistent attacks against non-white, but specifically, African American and Black thought, bodies, and lives. Importantly, we are concerned with how these intellectual ambushes are inextricable from broader attacks on democracy that CRT helps to explain. In other words, how do we understand CRT as a sociocultural and political lightning rod that has exposed a democratic and communicative crisis?

Bell (1995) reminds us that “at a time of crisis, critics serve as reminders that we are being heard, if not always appreciated” (p. 908). Yet, in the face of so many attacks, the lack of being heard, let alone appreciated, is palpable. This special issue seeks to bring scholars together to be heard and to lay out an agenda for the relevance of CRT in the field of Communication.

CFP Journal of Family Communication: Global Families

“PublicationCall for submissions for a special issue of the Journal of Family Communication on Communication in Global Families Deadline for abstract: 15 October 2024; deadline for full manuscripts: 1 January 2025.

Special issue editors: Haley Kranstuber Horstman (University of Missouri) and Meng Li (Loyola Marymount University)

The purpose of this special issue is to spotlight scholarship on communication in global families. The editors seek research on family communication that 1) demonstrates global diversities in communication within and about the family and/or 2) reveals the impact of globalization (i.e., the movement of people, ideas, images, capital, goods, and risks on a global scale) on family communication. They call for research that would continue the efforts of the Journal of Family Communication to increase the diversity and inclusivity of family communication scholarship, which has primarily focused on families in the United States.

This special issue will celebrate and encourage current momentum in research on communication in global families. Diverse methodological approaches and innovative theoretical perspectives that reflect the complexities and diversities of communication in global families will be included. The editors encourage researchers from a wide range of fields (e.g., communication studies, ethnic studies, family studies, health fields, psychology, sociology, and women’s and gender studies) to submit. They seek two types of papers: data-based and critical reflections.