Volume III, Issue 1 (Fall 2024)

Call for Papers: Disruption as Resistance: Labor, Noise, and Refusal

Ampersand: An American Studies Journal at Boston University invites scholarly and creative contributions for our next issue, Disruption as Resistance: Labor, Noise, and Refusal. This issue seeks to inflect scholarly trends with practical and personal concerns of graduate workers, contingent instructors, and faculty emerging from, amid, or looking ahead to labor organizing, disruptive actions, and noise-as-resistance.

2024 has been a turbulent year on many university campuses. This Ampersand theme specifically responds to the graduate worker union strike at BU and the changes it has made to how we understand our positions as teachers, researchers, and scholars. We see this issue as making noise about our difficult bargaining journey and taxing labor environment as graduate workers and disrupting norms and complicit silences. Recent journals and conferences across the disciplines have attended to labor, activism, and power as guiding themes to drive pedagogy and practice forward in justice and collaboration. We seek pieces that disrupt status quos on the level of subject as well as genre, tone, medium, and language. We are particularly interested in personal essays, creative pieces, and multimodal projects that elevate perspectives about precarious labor and reconsider our assumptions about labor and labor environments today.

We believe fields are moved forward and supported by the intellectual, emotional, and physical labor of the newest scholars: graduate students. For this reason, our journal centers the work of graduate workers, emerging scholars, and contingent faculty. Historical period, disciplinary approach, method, and topic remain open for contribution provided the work addresses our theme of disruption, broadly construed.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Past, present, and future labor strikes and organizing
Disruptive noise, noisy technologies and activisms
Power and politics of refusal
Distraction and noise and media saturation
“Cutting through the noise” as well as silences and silencing
Noise and/or labor as a racialized, gendered, classed, ableist phenomenon
Invisible labor and enforced labor
Architectures of labor, resistance, and revolution

Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a short bio (100-150 words), along with your CV, to https://airtable.com/appXyQg3pQrEZnm2T/shrAK7WyHL3sR1PqZ. All abstracts are due by September 30, 2024. Selected contributors will be asked to send completed submissions by early November.