Submission Deadline: Friday, December 8, 2023
The Social Justice Reporter—Vanderbilt Law School’s newest academic journal—is pleased to invite scholars, practitioners, organizers, and system-impacted individuals to submit written content to be included in our inaugural publication this May.
The theme of our May edition is “Carceral Capitalism,” a term coined by the scholar and poet Jackie Wang in her 2018 book of the same name. With this term in mind, we hope to compile a collection of articles, essays, and other written/artistic works that explore the various intersections of race, economics, and the carceral state. Examples of the topics that fit under this umbrella include criminal justice fines and fees, private-public partnerships around surveillance technology, education funding and the school-to-prison pipeline, and countless other sites of overlap between racial capitalism and prisons/policing. We encourage contributors to examine the economics of decarceration and to imagine futures built around community reinvestment.
Submission Guidelines:
As an online-only publication, the Social Justice Reporter has the ability to be flexible and innovative with the types of writing we publish. Our expectations regarding format, style, and content are flexible, and submissions will be evaluated according to SJR’s goals and capacity.
We seek intellectually creative work that articulates and/or adopts new, alternative intellectual frameworks for understanding and discussing issues related to carceral capitalism. This means different things for different types of written work. More traditional academic articles should be grounded in existing scholarship while offering additional insights into and/or perspectives on the issues being addressed. Shorter-form essays and thought pieces should encapsulate the author’s unique perspective on/attitude toward the subject matter in a stylistically interesting manner. Finally, “alternative” pieces—e.g., poetry, photo essays, interviews, etc.—should demonstrate the intellectual/artistic independence of the writer, artist, interviewer, etc.
We will prioritize the publication of written work that aligns with SJR’s values as a social-justice-oriented journal, both in content and form. We are interested in work situating individual instances of oppression within broader historical and structural frameworks. While we do not require that authors offer solutions to the issues they identify, we seek content that critiques and/or challenges existing social, political, economic, and legal systems of power—as they relate to carceral capitalism. We strongly encourage submissions from authors whose work reflects or stems from their own encounters with the systems of marginalization about which they write. Finally, we are committed to practicing citational justice and elevating voices from beyond the legal academy.
With your submission, feel free to include a brief (approx. 300 words) written statement about yourself and/or your submission with regard to the above criteria. While this is completely optional, it might allow us to better understand how your work fits within our broader publication goals.
Submissions should be uploaded via Scholastica or emailed to vls.sjr@vanderbilt.edu.
Please send any questions or concerns to vls.sjr@vanderbilt.edu.