2024/09/11 by J. Nalubega Ross · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Intellectual Property Law
paper · pdf · doi:10.3998/jep.5942
openalex publication_date 2024/09/11 · openalex created_date 2024/09/12 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Taking the ubiquitous call for papers in academia, this essay invites an imagined audience to create a long-form postcard digital project for submission to a fictional journal. Rooted in Black Feminist scholarship, Queer studies, and Indigenous studies and with a focus on slow scholarship, A Call for Papers (A Call) invites scholars to submit a series of collaborative postcards to a fictional journal. Using Christina Sharpe’s (2023) definition of beauty as method, A Call offers an opportunity for scholars to actively engage in beauty as a method. Asking those interested in submitting to this fictional journal to think about postcards they would send to potential colleagues, the essay asks the question: What beautiful words and images would scholars send to each other? Inspired by the Dear Data project between Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec (2016), and exploring Sophie Marie Niang’s (2024) scavenging as methodology, A Call is an attempt at a new methodology of creating, presenting, and relating to data. Scholars are invited to submit their postcards on a range of topics about pleasure, whimsy, and beauty as a way to approach creating, presenting, and relating to data. A Call employs a scavenging methodology that asks scholars to actively and meaningfully engage in the process of selecting a topic, potential collaborators, postcards for exchange, and the final product. A Call, using Katherine McKittrick’s (2021) work on and use of footnotes, shares in its footnotes a one-sided conversation between a scholar and an unnamed collaborator. Sharing one side of the conversation is an invitation to the imagined audience to be in relationship with the unnamed scholar, thus becoming their imagined collaborator. The conversation in the footnotes is one attempt at what McKittrick defines as Black method—being “precise” and “detailed” in the limited space on the back of a postcard. Throughout, A Call is an attempt at mapping out how to engage in and with slow scholarship, beauty as method, scavenging methodology, and asks scholars to consider what beautiful scholarly ephemera we leave behind in the digital world.