This is an invitation for full submissions for an edited volume, Absurdities of Academia

Edited by Saba Fatima, Department of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville 

Contact for inquiries (not for submissions): sfatima@siue.edu. For submissions, please follow the submission guidelines below.

Contributors: 

This is a solicitation for contributions from women of color in academia and/or other peripherally situated folks in academia.

Content: 

Academia functions in absurd ways. It requires legitimacy and labor from the most vulnerable faculty, graduate students, and administrators; exploits that labor without fair compensation or support;  alienates academics from their labor, and ensures that vulnerable faculty are pushed out to the periphery of academia. This push is to the detriment of all things higher education and effortlessly sustains ‘white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ in academic spaces via rules, operating papers, and bylaws. But it is in the peripheries of academia that we gather our strength and devise our strategies to resist. This book is situated in these liminal spaces.

This book seeks creative submissions around academic experiences of women of color and/or other peripherally situated folks in academia. If you have felt alone due to your vulnerable status in your department, in your university, in various committees and DEI meetings, please send in your experiences. If you had a hard time communicating what happened to you was indeed at the intersections of racism, sexism, xenophobia, etc., and only after processing the absurdities of academia, you were able to reflect on your experience of oppression, write up your reflections and send them over. This book seeks your short first-person accounts, vignettes, testimonies, and/or narrative experiences.

Seeking first-person, experiential accounts of 

• Absurdities of academia
• Contradictions in ever-changing rules of meritocracy
• Microaggressions
• Anti-Black racism
• Sexism
• Fatphobia
• Homophobia, Transphobia
• Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism
• Anti-immigrant discrimination/sentiment 
• Anti-Latinx discrimination/sentiment 
• Anti-Native American discrimination/sentiment 
• Ableism 
• Socio-economic/class discrimination
• Discrimination in Tenure and Promotion
• Discriminatory classroom interactions with students

This is a non-exhaustive list of topics. The book welcomes non-jargonistic, unconventional, creative styles of writing. 

Chapter on Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET): 

The book may also feature a chapter containing snippets of biased, discriminatory, absurd student evaluations of our teaching. You can submit both a SET and/or a complete chapter. You can submit yours SET here: https://forms.gle/PAKs5ZkoCdP71qk27

Submission Deadline:

15th February 2024

Format:

Please submit your papers as Microsoft Word documents, double-spaced, using 12-point Times New Roman font. The writing contributions should be about 700 words (shorter than 700 words contributions are very welcome). Contributions can be

• Personal narratives and reflections 
• Diary entries; letters 
• Poems
• Original images & artworks (digital only), including cartoons, political posters, photographs, drawings, diagrams, and paintings.
• “zine”-style  content

Submission Instructions:

• Submit by email to:  absurdacademia@gmail.com by Feb 15th, 2024.  
• Include:
  • (1)  the completed contribution with title
  • (2)  on a separate document, your contribution title, an abstract of 100-200 words that is written in the 3rd-person (e.g., “this chapter discusses…”), your contact information, and contributor’s bio (100-200 words). 
• Decisions will be conveyed by March 15th  2024.  
• The volume will use the APA 7th citation style. Authors can submit using this style, or change it if their contribution is accepted. 
• Abstracts and bios will be utilized in the book prospectus.