Special Issue of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies.
Deadline for contributions: 3 January 2027.
Edited by: Kata Gyuris
Publication presentation
The special issue of our open access, Q2 journal explores how contemporary literary, artistic and cultural practices engage with, interrogate, and imagine decolonial ecologies. While decolonial ecology is best understood as a constellation of different ideas, schools, and disciplines, Malcom Ferdinand’s insistence on the politicization of ecology offers a useful point of departure. In his book, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (2019; English trans. 2022), Ferdinand identifies a “double fracture” in modernity: the colonial fracture, which produces hierarchies among people, and the environmental fracture, which separates humans from nature, treating the latter as an object of exploitation. For Ferdinand, these fractures are inextricably intertwined, such that the histories of colonization and slavery cannot be separated from the exploitation of the natural world. This entanglement provides the conceptual foundation for the special issue.
Rather than further delineating the theoretical boundaries of decolonial ecology, the issue turns to contemporary cultural production to explore its potential to imagine and articulate alternative ways of conceiving the ecological world. It approaches art and literature not merely as illustrations of decolonial ecology but as forms of inquiry. How do contemporary cultural practices bring colonial and environmental concerns into conversation, and what new forms of ecological relation might they reveal? What can aesthetic practices make visible or imaginable that theoretical approaches alone may not, and how does aesthetic form itself contribute to decolonial ecological thinking? Here, cultural production is broadly understood to encompass literature, nonfiction writing, visual and digital media as well as public and participatory art, such as installations, murals, memorials. The special issue seeks theoretically grounded and culturally sensitive contributions that attend to the specific forms and contexts through which cultural practices engage with the possibilities of decolonial ecology in the Global South and beyond.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Colonialism and environmental violence
- Land, landscape, and colonial spatialities
- Energy, infrastructure, and extractive ecologies
- Indigenous epistemologies and world-making
- The Anthropocene and its decolonial critiques
- Race, coloniality, environment, and environmental justice
- Multispecies and more-than-human entanglements
- Water, oceanic histories, and colonial ecologies
- Ecological loss, memory, resistance, and repair
- Speculative worlds and alternative ecological futures
Submissions from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome, including, but not limited to literary studies, cultural studies, and visual culture.
Papers of 5000-7000 words should be submitted by 31st January 2027 to 
gyuris.kata@btk.elte.hu.
Submissions should conform to the HJEAS submission guidelines: 
https://reference-global.com/journal/HJEAS?tab=submission-guidelines#journal-tabs 
For inquiries or to discuss potential topics, please contact the Special Issue Editor, Kata Gyuris, using the email address provided above.
Website address
https://reference-global.com/journal/HJEAS
Contact details
(Posted 8 September 2026)
Negative Journal. Issue 3 (General Issue & Queer Cluster).
Deadline for contributions: 15 January 2027 (abstracts).
Edited by: Dr Julie Reshe, Dr Aaron Aquilina
Publication presentation
The Negative Journal, co-edited for this issue by Dr Julie Reshe (editor-in-chief) and Dr Aaron Aquilina (guest editor), invites contributions exploring negativity, alongside a special cluster on queer negativity.
The general call welcomes work on pessimism, nihilism, antinatalism, suffering, depression, meaninglessness, non-being, and un-becoming. Rather than treating negative experiences as conditions to overcome through hope or emancipation, contributions should attend to their philosophical, aesthetic, and existential significance. Papers may explore negativity in philosophy, literature, art, psychoanalysis, or the limits of language, including its exclusions, political uses, and uneven distribution.
The special cluster examines intersections between queerness, negativity, and death, questioning assimilation, neoliberal homonormativity, reproductive futurity, and the promise of happiness. Possible topics include queer pessimism; antisociality and anti-politics; sex and desire; trans subjectivity; failure, refusal, and asexuality; queer temporality; horror and posthumanism; camp and negational laughter; decay and extinction; and the possibilities or impossibilities of queer expression.
Work selected for the queer negativity cluster may also be considered for a future edited volume with Negative Press.
Timeline (of the publication process)
- abstracts by 15th January 2027;
- full papers by 1st June 2027 (c. 4000 words)
Website address
https://www.negativepress.ie/negative-journal
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
negativity cfp(Posted 10 October 2026)
Review of International American Studies (RIAS). RIAS Vol. 20, Fall-Winter (2/2027) – “Archipelagic Imaginaries and the Americas: Islands – Narratives – Mythologies” / “Imaginarios Archipelágicos y las Américas: Islas – Narrativas – Mitologías”.
Deadline for contributions: 30 Jan. 2027.
Edited by: Marta Silvera Roig and Asunción López-Varela Azcárate
Publication presentation
Throughout the history of the Americas and the wider Atlantic world, islands have occupied a unique place in cultural imagination. From Indigenous cosmologies and Caribbean creation narratives to the transatlantic mythologies of the Canary Islands, colonial fantasies of paradise, maritime frontiers, prison islands, and contemporary environmental anxieties, islands have served as privileged sites for the production of myth, memory, and cultural meaning. Whether understood as spaces of refuge or confinement, utopia or catastrophe, rootedness or mobility, islands continue to function as laboratories of imagination through which societies negotiate questions of identity, sovereignty, ecology, and belonging.
Recent scholarship in Island Studies, Archipelagic Studies, Environmental Humanities, Indigenous Studies, and Transoceanic American Studies has challenged the traditional perception of islands as isolated and self-contained entities. Instead, islands increasingly emerge as dynamic nodes within networks of cultural exchange, migration, ecological interdependence, and historical transformation. Such perspectives encourage us to move beyond continental paradigms and reconsider the Americas through archipelagic, oceanic, and relational frameworks.
Particularly significant in this regard are the Canary Islands, whose geographical position and historical trajectories have rendered them one of the most consequential archipelagos in the making of the Atlantic world. Long before the emergence of modern nation-states, the Canaries functioned as a crossroads connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas, serving simultaneously as a site of indigenous memory, colonial encounter, maritime mobility, and cultural mediation. The archipelago occupies a distinctive place in transatlantic imaginaries, having generated myths of origin, disappearance, and rediscovery, including narratives surrounding the Fortunate Isles, Saint Brendan’s Island (San Borondón), and other legendary Atlantic geographies. At the same time, the Canaries have played a crucial role in the circulation of peoples, commodities, languages, religions, and cultural forms that helped shape the Americas as a hemispheric and oceanic space. Their position invites scholars to rethink conventional boundaries between Europe and the Americas, continent and island, center and periphery, while foregrounding the archipelago as a dynamic site of cultural production and historical transformation.
The Americas offer particularly fertile ground for such inquiry. Indigenous island cosmologies, Caribbean archipelagic identities, Pacific Islander experiences, Atlantic crossings, migration routes, border regimes, and environmental vulnerabilities all contribute to complex and often competing narratives of insularity. Islands in the Americas have been imagined as Edens and dystopias, sites of exile and resistance, laboratories of empire and decolonization, spaces of cultural preservation and transformation. Simultaneously, they have inspired literary, visual, cinematic, musical, and digital representations that continue to shape local and global imaginaries. This issue seeks to investigate islands as mythical, symbolic, and narrative formations within and across the Americas and the Atlantic world. We understand myth broadly, encompassing foundational stories, collective memories, cultural imaginaries, symbolic systems, and narrative frameworks through which island spaces are imagined, contested, and transformed. We welcome contributions that explore islands not merely as geographical locations but as cultural, political, environmental, philosophical, and affective formations that reveal the interconnected histories and futures of the Americas.
Timeline (of the publication process)
1) The Author receives an automatic confirmation upon his or her submission of their text to the OJS system;
2) Within a month of the closing of the Call for Papers, the Author receives the Editors’ decision on the qualification/rejection of the text for the peer-reference stage for a given issue and/or a suggestion to submit the text to a different thematic issue of the journal / different section of the journal;
3) Within three months of the preliminary qualification the Author receives two peer references including possible suggestions for revisions;
4) the qualified and positively evaluated text after corrections and revisions is published within 18 months of the closing of the Call for Papers, unless it has been individually negotiated with the Author that the text should be considered for a different issue of the journal.
Website address
https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/RIAS/announcement/view/302
Contact details
Prof. Marta Silvera Roig
marta.silvera@ulpgc.es
(Posted 6 November 2026)
Er(r)go: Theory – Literature – Culture. Issue 56 (1/2028) – Plastic/plasticity/plasticness.
Deadline for contributions: 15 March 2027.
Edited by: Anna Foltyniak-Pękala and Sławomir Konkol
Publication presentation
Plastic is a defining material of our age. Its properties—malleability, durability, the capacity to imitate almost any form, toxicity, and resistance to decomposition—are at the same time properties of contemporary culture. Plastic may therefore be read both as a historical substance and as a “theory machine”: a tool for thinking about the materiality and mediality of culture, about artificiality and simulacra, as well as about the Anthropocene and the lasting traces modernity leaves upon the environment. One of the important points of reference for this issue is Ranjan Ghosh’s project of the “plastic humanities,” developed, among other places, in his monograph The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, 2022). Ghosh proposes the concept of the material-aesthetic as a way of thinking about literature and culture through the prism of plastic, and at the same time about plastic itself as an aesthetic, philosophical, and medial category. Understood in this way, “material mediality” allows us to approach plastic not merely as an object of representation, but also as a medium, a figure, and an organizing principle of contemporary experience.
The emergence of synthetic polymers coincided historically with a period in which modernity was intensively reshaping its cultural, medial, and aesthetic forms. Ghosh traces this convergence primarily in relation to Western literary modernism, showing that plastic and modern modes of representing the world did not develop independently of one another. They share a preoccupation with artificiality, formation, imitation, and transformation. This perspective invites us to ponder not only how plastic appears in cultural texts, but also how plastic itself becomes one of the models through which modernity is conceived.
This perspective, however, remains firmly rooted in the experience of Western modernity. The context of Central and Eastern Europe complicates it in important ways. In late twentieth-century Poland, synthetic materials functioned not only as part of the fabric of everyday life, but also as signs of modernity and of a “Western lifestyle” under conditions of an economy of scarcity. This produced an inverted ideological tension: while in the West plastic could signify consumer abundance and mass production, here it often became a substitute for that abundance, its promise, and a prosthesis of modernity. This contrast opens onto a broader question of how the meanings of plastic shift across different social, economic, and geopolitical conditions.
The title of the issue deliberately activates several meanings at once. “Plastic” refers to a specific synthetic substance and to its material presence in the world; “plasticity” to the capacity for formation, transformation, and adaptation, as explored, among other contexts, in philosophies of the subject, neuroplasticity, and reflections on embodiment; while “plasticness” evokes aesthetic, visual, and medial dimensions. Understood in this way, the term’s polysemy makes it possible to think of plastic not only as a material, but also as a figure of artificiality, imitation, and formal mutability, while at the same time entering into a dialogue—critical where necessary—with Ghosh’s project without simply reproducing it.
Timeline
- deadline for the manuscripts: 15 March 2027,
- publication date: June 2028.
Website address
https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/ERRGO/announcement/view/298
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 25 October 2026)
Lexis – Journal in English Lexicology. Youth Slang and Word-Formation in Digital English.
Deadline for contributions: 30 March 2027.
Issue edited by Elisa Mattiello (University of Pisa, Italy) and José A. Sánchez Fajardo (University of Alicante, Spain)
Issue presentation
Over the past two decades, the rapid expansion of social media platforms has profoundly transformed linguistic practices, particularly among younger speakers. Online environments such as TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and messaging platforms have become key sites for the creation, dissemination, and institutionalisation of new lexical items. These forms, commonly described as “internet slang” or “digital slang” (Eble [2009]; Crystal [2011]) reflect the dynamic interplay between technological platforms, youth identity practices, and linguistic innovation.
A growing body of research has documented the sociocultural dimensions of online slang, examining its role in generational identity, digital communities, and patterns of social media usage (e.g., Tagliamonte & Denis [2008]; Androutsopoulos [2014]; Hilte, Vandekerckhove & Daelemans [2021]). Studies have also highlighted how younger generations – often described as “digital natives”, i.e. individuals who have grown up immersed in digital technologies (Prensky [2001]) – actively develop and disseminate novel lexical items and expressions through online interaction (Dimock [2019]), such as rizz (< charisma), touch grass, lurker. Much of this work approaches social media slang primarily from sociological, cultural, or communication-oriented perspectives.
This special issue of Lexis aims to shift the focus towards the linguistic mechanisms underlying these innovations, with particular attention to word-formation processes in contemporary English social media slang. Digital communication provides fertile ground for lexical creativity, including processes such as blending (vlog < video + blog), clipping (rizz), compounding (doomscrolling), acronym formation (GOAT < Greatest Of All Time), conversion (friend (n.) < friend (v.)), semantic shift (cloud ‘data storage’), respelling and orthographic play (smol < small; seggs < sex) (Mattiello [2008]; Crystal [2011]; Bauer, Lieber & Plag [2013]) These processes frequently interact with multimodal and platform-specific constraints, as well as with the rapid circulation of linguistic forms across online communities. For instance, the 280-character limit on posts on X (formerly Twitter) increases the use of abbreviated forms; also, on Reddit, users with a higher number of upvotes are guaranteed that their content gains more visibility and is more linguistically impactful.
Recent research has also noted that younger users, especially members of Generation Z, display a high degree of familiarity with emerging neologisms and internet slang, reflecting their intensive engagement with digital platforms and their role in shaping new linguistic trends (Jeresano & Carretero [2022]; Talle Vacalares et al. [2023]). These trends are also believed to have an impact on mainstream language, as young speakers tend to initially break established rules, before becoming more standard-oriented as they grow older (Androutsopoulos [2011: 151]). While generational dynamics and social media practices remain important contexts for these developments, the present issue seeks to explore how digital environments foster specific patterns of morphological and lexical innovation in English slang. This innovation has been associated with ‘linguistic manipulation’, a process through which young speakers act as engineers of language change and innovation (Yannuar et al. [2022: 9]). Consequently, with the rise of digital platforms and shared virtual communities, it is indispensable to study the extent to which young speakers ‘move’ and ‘shake’ English linguistic standards (Eckert [1997: 1]).
In addition, recent linguistic research has begun to explore evaluative and pejorative morphology in slang, including the emergence and productivity of suffixes such as -y/-ie and -o, as well as combining forms and suffixoids such as -holic, -itis, -head, -brain, and related elements (Sánchez Fajardo [2022]; Mattiello [2024]; Mattiello & Sánchez Fajardo [2025]; Sánchez Fajardo & Mattiello [2025]; Mattiello [2026]), such as blackie and weirdo (for the suffixes), and screenaholic, scrollitis, gearhead, and wrinkle-brain (for the combining forms and suffixoids) These forms contribute to the expressive and often impolite character of slang vocabulary and illustrate how evaluative meaning is encoded morphologically in English. Although such formations are not limited to social media contexts, digital communication has provided a particularly fertile environment for their circulation and semantic development. While the aforementioned studies on evaluative morphology in English indicate that derivational patterns – particularly in diminutives and approximatives – are often linked to specific slang forms, this volume intends to broaden this scope. By exploring a wider array of word-formation mechanisms, such as compounding and conversion (such as clickbait and to ghost), we aim to provide a more comprehensive account of the structural diversity within digital English.
Thus, we invite contributions that investigate the formation, structure, diffusion, and linguistic properties of English social media slang, with a particular focus on word-formation phenomena in digital discourse.
Timeline
- May 2026: Call for papers
- March 30, 2027: Deadline for submitting abstracts to Lexis via the journal’s submission platform
- May-June 2027: Evaluation Committee’s decisions notified to authors
- November 15, 2027: Deadline for submitting papers via the journal’s submission platform (Guidelines for submitting articles: https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/1000)
- November and December 2027: Proofreading of papers by the Evaluation committee
- January 2028: Authors’ corrections
- February 1, 2028: Deadline for sending in final versions of papers
Website address
- https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/ (journal)
- https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/10480 (issue)
- https://ojs.openedition.org/index.php/lexis (submission of abstract and/or article)
Contact details: Prof. Denis Jamet-Coupé: lexis@univ-lyon3.fr
(Posted 22 April 2026)
RECAP: Research in Education Curriculum and Pedagogy: Global Perspectives. Inclusion in Motion: Rethinking Policy and Pedagogy in Latin American and Caribbean Classrooms, Thirty Years on from Salamanca.
Deadline for contributions: 31 March 2027.
Edited by: Dr Melissa Jogie, University of Roehampton, UK.
Publication presentation
Thirty years on from the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education (UNESCO, 1994), Latin America and the Caribbean have gone through a complex and challenging process towards building inclusive education systems. The region’s normative frameworks and public policies have incorporated the principles of inclusive education to varying degrees, while curricular and pedagogical practices in classrooms continue to face tensions between the normative mandate and the actual conditions of implementation.
This special issue of RECAP: Research in Education Curriculum and Pedagogy invites academics, researchers and teams to submit papers that critically examine the progress made, the challenges that persist and, in particular, what works in relation to inclusive education, special education and public policy in Latin American and Caribbean.
To bring together original and rigorous research that provides evidence on the curricular and pedagogical transformations driven by inclusive education policy frameworks in Latin America and the Caribbean since 1994, with particular attention to practices, strategies and interventions that have demonstrated positive and sustainable outcomes.
Timeline (of the publication process)
- Full manuscript submission deadline: 31st March 2027
- Notification of first review outcomes: 30th June 2027
- Estimated publication date: November 2027
Website address
Research in Education Curriculum and Pedagogy
Contact details
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 16 October 2026)