Polyseme: The Language, Literacy, & Culture Review
After hearing horror stories of the closets that 3-5 graduate students often share throughout their doctoral work and seeing first-hand the tiny spaces in which some full-time professors reside, I was absolutely shocked in 2012 when I first walked into my office–an office all to myself, which as since become the hangout area for some doctoral students in my department, Master’s students in English and History, and even a number of undergraduates who either win short-term work contracts with my department or wander in because some faculty member suggested they speak to me concerning some digital project or tool in which they’re working. It is part steam punk laboratory (littered with digital components–from the ancient to products still in beta-testing–and papers), part library, part office, part coffee lounge.
In September, a year after I first moved in, I found a box full of journals entitled LLC Review. I was surprised to learn that the LLC program had once run a small-print journal from 2002-2009, but for three years the journal remain dormant. In the unique graduate position “to make” stuff, I immediately seized the opportunity to revamp this journal. After a number of meetings throughout the fall and winter, it looks like it’s going to happen.
Relaunched as Polyseme: The Language, Literacy, and Culture Review, I have re-envisioned the publication as a free and open-access journal dedicated to examining the concepts and processes of language, literacy, and culture in relationship to social, historical, technological, and ideological formations. We are interested in innovative, experimental approaches to scholarship and encourage interdisciplinary methods that enhance traditional disciplinary divisions and promote critical debate and creative expression.
The first issue of Polyseme is dedicated to the theme of intellectual activism, also the topic of the First Annual LLC Graduate Student Conference. While selected papers from this conference will be solicited for revision and publication for our first issue, you do not have to participate in this conference to submit. Book reviews have already been assigned and we have begun to accept submissions for this issue…This issue will be published in September 2014.
Polyseme: The Language, Literacy, and Culture Review
Call for Papers
Polyseme: The Language, Literacy, and Culture Review invites graduate students and scholars who have recently obtained their doctorates to submit original, unpublished essays and reviews related, however loosely, to the theme of its inaugural issue: intellectual activism.
Where do or should scholars stand with regard to activism and transformative politics? Does traditional scholarship confront and challenge the dominant culture or serve to safeguard the status quo in the privileged comfort of the “ivory tower” of academia? How can we re-envision the university as a place of intellectual activism or reinvent the role and responsibility of the scholar? These are a just few questions to be addressed in this issue.
We are looking for articles from all disciplines in the social sciences and the Humanities that explore the relationship between the university and activism, between scholars, activists, and artists. Topics might include the following:
- Historical or theoretical analyses of activist movements/strategies within the university
- Coalition-building between scholars and activists
- University-Community relations and/or community-based learning
- Theorizing and practicing action-research methodologies
- Policing of radical ideologies in institutionalized educational settings
- Critical pedagogies and their discontents
- Institutionalization of feminist politics in the university
- Academic publications as oppositional discursive spaces
- Conservative policies/activisms and the academy
- The relationship between social media and social justice
- Building and preserving public history and cultural heritage
- Immigration policies and reforms
- Urban renewal projects and “community development”
- The relationship between the text and the critic
- Protest as performance and performance as protest
Polyseme is an Open Access electronic journal dedicated to examining the concepts and processes of language, literacy, and culture in relationship to social, historical, technological, and ideological formations. We are interested in innovative, experimental approaches to scholarship and encourage interdisciplinary methods that enhance traditional disciplinary divisions and promote critical debate and creative expression. Essays are subject to a double-blind, peer-review process. The journal is sponsored by the Language, Literacy, and Culture PhD Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
We are accepting academic essays (4000-6000 words), shorter essays related to pedagogical or methodological issues (2,000-3000 words), digital art, and experimental Image+Text combinations. Essays should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style and can be submitted via email as a .doc or .docx file to the editors at wisnie1@umbc.edu. The deadline for submission is June 1.
For more information about the journal and submission policies: http://polyseme.umbc.edu/
The Projector 
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