Special Issue Call for Submissions: Fall 2026 and Fall 2027

SPECIAL ISSUE FALL 2026

Title: Arts-based research and artful approaches as Black homeplace
Guest Editors: Adwoa Onuora, Trent University and Stephanie Fearon, York University, Ontario, Canada

Black communities have historically leveraged the arts for knowledge production and intergenerational cultural transmission. Artful approaches have served as a way for Black artists, activist, and academics to “situate themselves in a world structured by anti-Blackness" (Raiford, 2024) and to imagine what is possible (hooks, 2008). Increasingly, Black researchers have sought to challenge dominant notions of what constitutes valid research, acknowledging that research aimed at creating meaningful change ought to honor our ways of knowing and being in the world. This commitment is evidenced in the burgeoning body of Canadian scholarship that examines the experiences of Black communities across a wide range of systemic and institutional settings. Fearon (2022, 2024), for example, explores how Black mothers in Canada reimagine learning opportunities for their children. Drawing on storytelling (particularly the African tradition of call and response), she integrates culturally rooted African practices into both the research process and its representation. Hassen (2025) employs photovoice to illuminate the lived experiences of Black residents navigating spatial inequities in Toronto’s urban greenspaces. Likewise, Edwards (2025) positions arts-informed methodology as a means of fostering identity, self-expression, and self-exploration among Black youth in Canada, affirming its value as an approach that decentralizes conventional research standards and processes. Collectively, these works underscore the transformative potential of arts-based research, demonstrating how artful approaches can function as Black homeplaces—sites of healing, renewal, and epistemological equity. In laying this foundation, Black feminist activist and intellectual bell hooks tells us that homeplace is:

... about the construction of a safe place where black people [can] affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination. We could not learn to love or respect ourselves in the culture of white supremacy, on the outside; it was there on the inside, in that “homeplace,” most often created and kept by black women, that we had the opportunity to grow and develop, to nurture our spirits (hooks, 1990 p. 384).

In the struggle to liberate African/Black peoples the world over, homeplaces have been nurturers of anti-racist worldviews and actions. The homeplace has enabled our community members to survive alienating ideologies and societal practices. Homeplace thus forms a central part of African/Black communities and can be a significant source of resistance to oppressive social structures. hooks' conceptual rendering of homeplace opens up possibilities for viewing artful approaches to research as refuge, resistance, and reclamation.

Inspired by Black feminists’ conceptions of homeplace (hooks, 2015) and Black artistic research traditions (Crooks et. al 2023), we aim to extend understandings of how African/Black scholars, activists, and artists use inquiry processes to envision humanizing homeplaces for African/Black communities.

For this special issue, “Arts-based research and artful approaches as Black homeplace” we welcome submissions that engage Black creativity and knowledge-making through research and the research process. We invite contributions from practitioners, scholars, artists, and activists working at the intersections of Black studies, arts-based methodologies, and social justice.

Submissions may include:
• Scholarly articles (5,000–7,500 words)
• Visual essays and photography that allow meaning making about Black lives and Black futurities
• Multimedia works accompanied by a 1,000-word contextual statement
• Performances or creative representations
• Poetic expressions and reflections on homeplace
• Examples of scholarly works that reimagine homeplace on digital platforms

Key themes for this special issue may include:
• Black homeplace as a site of epistemological equity evidenced in and through artbased and/or arts-informed research methodologies
• Advancing child and youth-centred creative methodologies
• Engaging homeplace through African/Black children’s artful ways of knowing and creative inquiries
• Digital reframings and renderings of homeplace
• Reimagining homeplace as acts of refusal
• Remembering the spiritual within artful forms of inquiry
• Black artists, activists, and everyday practitioners disrupting anti-Blackness through artful inquiry and visual arts research

Submissions due by April 30, 2026. Inquiries should be directed to Adwoa Onuora at adwoaonuora@trentu.ca and Stephanie Fearon at sfearon1@edu.yorku.ca.

Please review the Art/Research International submission guidelines and download the journal's formatting guide before making your submission. These can be found on the journal website at:
https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/ari/index.php/ari/about/submissions#authorGuidelines 

Please clearly indicate on your title page that you are directing your submission to this special issue.

References
Crooks, J., Fontaine, D., & Forni, S. (Eds.). (2023). Making history: Visual arts & Blackness in Canada. Royal Ontario Museum.
Edwards, F. (2025). Black youth mental health: Reconstructing identity through art-based Research. Journal of Critical Research Methodologies. https://cdspress.ca/wpcontent/uploads/2024/12/JCRM_Edwards-Akunesiobike_BlackYouth_Proof_FINAL.pdf
Fearon, S. (2022). Freedom dreaming with Black Canadian mothers. Frontiers in Education, 7, 1025651. https://doi.org/10.3389/FEDUC.2022.1025651/BIBTEX
Fearon, S. (2024). I See You, Mama: Low-Income Black Mother Leaders Reimagining Schools as Homeplace for Their Children. Journal of Canadian Studies, 58(3),482–502. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs-2023-0045
Hassen, N. (2025). Narratives of exclusion: A photovoice study towards racial equity and justice in public urban greenspaces. Landscape and Urban Planning, 254, 105233-. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2024.105233
hooks, b. (1990). Homeplace (a site of resistance). In J. Ritchie & K. Ronald (Eds.), Available means: An anthology of women’s rhetoric(s) (pp. 382–390). University of Pittsburgh Press.
hooks, b. (1997). Homeplace: A site of resistance. In Undoing place? A geographical reader (pp. 33-38). Routledge.
hooks, b. (2000). Feminist theory: from margin to center (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
hooks, bell. (2008). Outlaw culture: resisting representations. Routledge.
hooks, b. (2015). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics. Routledge.
Raiford, L. (2024). Black Habits of Photography. African American Studies & African Diaspora Studies, UC Berkley. https://africam.berkeley.edu/news/Black-habitsphotography?utmn

 

SPECIAL ISSUE FALL 2027

Title: Color Inquiry
Guest Editor: Susan Naomi Nordstrom, University of Alabama

For some time, color has fascinated literary writers, musicians, and artists (Han Kang, Maggie Nelson, Jay-Z, Joni Mitchell, The Beetles, Weezer, Rothko, Matisse, and so on). These writers, musicians, and artists have focused their attention on a color and followed it. In so doing, they have used color to explore and examine the diversity of human experience and what it means to be human in deeply complex worlds. Color studies have allowed these artists to creatively explore the joyful, the traumatic, the mundane, the spectacular, memories, and memories yet to be created. Drawing on this rich history, Cohen’s (2013) edited volume on color in ecology demonstrated how following a color in ecological systems can illuminate complexity. Simply put, focusing on the movements of color materializes the complex nuances of life. If these artists, writers, and ecologists have used color in these ways, then why not qualitative researchers? What might color inquiries generate in the field of qualitative inquiry? What might color generate for you in your thinking? What might happen if we purposefully play with color in qualitative inquiry?

I invited three other scholars to think these questions at a lively 2024 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry panel. This special issue opens the call to more contributors and approaches to color inquiry.

To be considered for this special issue, please submit a 150 word abstract that includes your selected color and what you plan to do with your contribution. You will pick a color and follow it. That following will create its own path, sometimes straightforward, sometimes circumnavigating, sometimes stopping and starting, and everything in between. As the color creates a path, you may write poetry, create art, work/play in natural elements, write in other genres, and so on. Thus, this path may ask you to engage in multiple methods and modalities as the color asks you to traverse both the personal and political. Do what the color asks of you, not what you ask of the color.

You are encouraged to stretch our qualitative imaginations theoretically, artistically, methodologically, and beyond. Arts-based work and textual innovations are welcomed.

Should your abstract be accepted, your commitment to the project will include the following:
• You will have approximately six months to follow and write-create with your color. Write-create a maximum 3000-word (including references) article of-with-about your color inquiry. Image-intensive pieces will have an abbreviated word limit that will be negotiated with the special issue editor. Play. Have fun.
• Due six months after date of receipt of acceptance of invitation.
• We will engage in an internal peer review. Upon receipt of the manuscripts, you will be asked to review two manuscripts and o`er generative feedback with the manuscripts. You will have approximately one month for these reviews.
• You will then have approximately two months to revise your manuscript and prepare it for publication.

Timeline
• Abstracts due: March 6th 2026 to snnordstrom@ua.edu
• Invitations to submit full papers/projects sent: April 3, 2026
• Full papers/projects due September 30, 2026
• Peer Review October-November 2026
• Revised manuscripts due March 31, 2027
• Late Spring- Summer 2027 – Manuscripts submitted Art/Research International
• Fall 2027 – publication

Please contact Dr. Susan Nordstrom, Associate Professor of Qualitative Research, at the
University of Alabama, should you have any questions. snnordstrom@ua.edu