Proposals to Contribute to the "Critical Geography Conversations: ACME’s 20+ Year Anniversary CFP"

The ACME Collective’s recent “Unpause-ish Statement: An Editorial” affirms how we will edit, review, and publish critical geographic scholarship in and since the pandemic, as envisioned in our new mission statement, author guidelines, publication formats, and peer review guidelines. In these documents, we continue to dedicate ourselves to the publication of academic research papers, among other traditional formats. We clarify our desire for more publicly accessible scholarship with a faster time to publication while still supporting rigorous conversations and knowledge-making. At the same time, we are witnessing many first and second generation critical geographers retire or begin to talk of retirement, even as the vast quality and quantity of their work beyond their formal publications has gone unrecorded. We also recognize increasing differentiation in the racial, ethnic, heritage, gender, and sexual identities of those researching and writing critical geography. 

At the intersection of these desires, concerns, and adorations, we issue this call for cross-generational interviews and roundtables with critical geographers whose wisdom needs to be heard as part of what we are calling "The Critical Geography Conversations: ACME’s 20+ Year Anniversary CFP." We mean here, for example, the decades of feminist geographies debates at conferences, the online Black, Indigenous, and Latinx geographies connections over email and now on video calls, and the queer and trans geographies phone trees that have afforded connection and support over the years alongside and through our research. In this context, the ACME Collective wishes to celebrate our 20+ year anniversary by making a public record of the labour and complicated, multiple, and sometimes conflicting emergent visions of what critical geography is and might yet still become. 

Specifically, we seek 6,000-12,000 word versions of edited interviews and roundtables in text form for publication in ACME. We encourage submission of the full or near full interview recording and transcript to a repository for possible future study under a CC-NC-BY 4.0 International License, whereby interviewer(s) and interviewee(s) retain equal and mutual copyright. The process for how to submit a team interview grouping and format notes are below, and all submission proposals must be made via this form. We especially welcome interviews with and by underrepresented scholars in any of the languages we support: English, French, Spanish, Italian, and, in a more limited capacity, German and Portuguese.

 

How to Submit to the ACME CFP

To submit an interview proposal:

• Identify who you would like to interview (or have interviewed) on your own or with others, and reach out to the person you would like to interview to confirm their participation.
• Reach out to the ACME Collective with your team proposal via this form, and include the topics you wish to cover, as well as how you will record the interview. 
• An example of previously published interviews can be found here.
• To be considered, interview proposals must be submitted by December 31, 2023.

To submit a roundtable proposal:

• Identify those you would like to be in conversation with and provide brief thoughts on what you would like to discuss.
• Reach out to the ACME Collective with your team proposal via this form, and include the topics you wish to cover, as well as how you will record the roundtable discussion. 
• While a roundtable is presently an accepted format at ACME, we do not have a published version to share. We point you to this roundtable as an example.
• To be considered, roundtable proposals must be submitted by December 31, 2023.

Formatting notes for interview & roundtable formats:

• Interviews must include at least one emerging scholar and one senior scholar, but can comprise any number of individuals. For example, within a group of four people, a senior scholar may discuss three or four research interests with a different emerging scholar covering one interest each. We recognize and respect that “emerging” and “senior” identities are self and relationally defined. 
• We recognize and respect that “critical geography” is broadly defined. To allow for consistency between and across interviews, we ask that each interview include the following three questions: 1) What does “critical” mean in reference to scholarship? 2) What is “geography”? 3) How has critical geography evolved over the course of your career, and what remains aspirational? In all other ways we leave the interview process to the participants.
• Interviews/roundtables can take place in person or online.
• All edited transcripts must include clarifying footnotes, as needed, and citations to work discussed or referenced. 
• The submitted interviews must run from 6,000 to 12,000 words. This does not include front matter (including a 250 word abstract), but does include citations and footnotes.
• If you and your co-interview participants would like to archive the full interview, ACME has created a partnership to store full transcript, video, and audio of the interview. As we are now hosted on the University of British Columbia (UBC) servers, we have teamed up with cIRcle to host these larger files. cIRcle is UBC's open access digital repository for published and unpublished, freely available, intellectual output created by the UBC community and its partners (see here for more on cIRcle’s licensing). Once the edited interview is accepted, you and your editor can discuss whether to submit these original files and in what format.

For details about formats, see the ACME homepage, or please don't hesitate to email acmegeography@gmail.com with questions.

Thank you for supporting critical, open access geographic scholarship with ACME. 

In solidarity, The ACME Collective