Feminist Art Practices and Research. COSMOS. Call for Contributions to the first launch issue of academic journal.

Cherríe Moraga, a Chicana feminist writer, activist, poet, essayist, and playwright, in the poem ‘Dreaming of Other Planets’ (1993) writes, ‘Of other planets I am / Dreaming / Of other ways / Of seeing / This life.’

Moraga imagines other realities and ways of being with/in the world(s). Similarly, Denise Ferreira da Silva in ‘On Difference Without Separability’, a text included in the exhibition catalogue of the 32a São Paulo Art Biennial Incerteza Viva (Bienal São Paulo, 2016), questions what would happen if ‘The Ordered World’ sustained by three ontological pillars of ‘separability, determinacy, and sequentiality’ was imagined as ‘a Plenum, an infinite composition in which each existant’s singularity is contingent upon its becoming one possible expression of all the other existants, with which it is entangled beyond space and time.’

The journal Feminist Art Practices and Research. COSMOS is born out of a shared desire for other ways of seeing-feeling-thinking-making and attends to the potentials of entanglements with/in regenerative feminist art in its polivocal and capacious possible configurations. It imagines cosmologies interfacing multitudes of positions, alliances, and positionalities,interrupting the logics of hetero-patriarchy, (neo)colonialism and coloniality, and racialised capitalism. The journal is a work of speculation, re-casting and re-situating spaces, chronologies and subjectivities through the lens of transformative and activist feminist politics. It aims to generate transnational and intersectional dialogues and chronicle present cultural urgencies while attending to and caring for historical amnesias, unexpressed voices, and entangled dispossessions.

Cosmos, as a term, implies approaching the universe as a justly-ordered entity. Within humanities discourse it has a transformative potential for social justice as it disrupts the univocal cosmology of Western liberal thought and practice. Feminist cosmologies encourage interdependencies, restructuring dualistic models of the world. This acknowledges art worlds and arts systems as pluralistic cosmologies that enmesh relations and yet are also responsively contoured by questioning their alterities. As such, Cosmos is imagined as a publication forum–including verbal, visual, and audiovisual content– for artists, artivists, activists, scholars, curators and writers who explore feminist practices with/in the arts.

To celebrate the 2025 launch of the journal Feminist Art Practices and Research: Cosmos, we are inviting submissions for its first issue envisioning what the work of Cosmos could be and, more broadly, what academic publishing could become; how can a journal on feminist art and research foster dialogical approaches as the basis of a feminist ecology and cosmology? What are the urgencies and challenges we currently face, and how can these be addressed through solidarity? What are the transformative benefits of Indigenous and/or Blac/k feminism, and how can feminisms think with intersecting yet distinct discourses such as queer or trans theories or methods? We welcome contributions that explore the collaborative and collective potential of Cosmos as an intellectual forum cultivating and sharing new knowledge(s) that critically engages with art practices and research grounded in feminist politics; but also as a commitment to feminist politics and ethics. Some of the questions we hope to mobilise with this first issue include:
● What are the prefigurative feminist art practices that insist on shared presents and potential futures? What are the means through which this is mobilised?
● How to expand feminisms via engagement with a wider range of affects, experiences, and identities, and all sentient beings?
● How can the utopian performances imagined in Moraga’s ‘Dreaming of Other Planets’ enable us to interrogate liberatory potentials enacting other ways of being to build a cosmology that responds to multiple histories of dispossessions and alternative worldmaking?
● Drawing on Ferreira da Silva’s notion of the ‘Entangled World’, how can feminist art and research catalyse cosmopolitical relations enlivening elementary entanglements]? What new feminist orientations are necessary to create re-configured just worlds?
● How can feminist anti-colonial critiques bring justice for bodies?

Cosmos welcomes a range of contribution formats that foster innovative dialogic and collaborative approaches and experimental transdisciplinary modes of communication reflective of the multiplicity of feminisms within the arts including:

1. Research articles of 8000-10,000 words including footnotes and references
2. Provocations: intellectual critical engagement with current events of 2,000-4,000 words
3. Creative responses: audio/video/visual/interactive essays of 2,000-3,000 words of a critical supporting statement and 5-15 minutes video or audio or 5-15 images
4. Pedagogies in the arts including submissions of teaching material of 2,000-8,000 words
5. Constellations: Writing to/from (correspondence and/or collaborative writing) to reimagine the epistolary form and its rich tradition in feminist politics of 2,000-4,000 words. The section is driven by a dialogical critical feminist methodology of engaged writing and collaborative knowledge creation. It is imagined as a record-keeping of intellectual dialogues to foster alliances and develop new ways of interconnected thinking through engaging with one another.

Submissions should not have been published previously, and will be subject to revision and acceptance by peer reviewers and the Editorial collective.

Each contribution is due by 30 March 2025 and needs to be submitted through the Taylor&Francis submission portal: https://accounts.taylorfrancis.com/identity/#/login?authorize=true&client_id=59f21242bb410562f60413514f5108d80ede3086581e834d9027687f7a875502&response_type=code&scope=mail&redirect_uri=http:%2F%2Fnew-api.taylorfrancis.com%2Fuser-auth%2Fcallback%2F100.65.128.150&state=&flow=new&journal=Feminist%20Art%20Practices%20and%20Research:%20Cosmos&brand=rptnf.

More about the journal, its aims and scope: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rfar20/about-this-journal#journal-metrics. Instructions for authors can be consulted here: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rfar20.