Dear colleagues,
The Community Literacy Journalwill publish a special issue in Fall 2025. We seek proposals from individuals or a team interested in guest editing the special issue.
Please submit a proposal for a special issue no later than July 15, 2024. We ask that you include the following in your proposal:
Special Issue Theme and Context
What theme will your proposed special issue address? Why is this theme timely, important, and relevant to CLJ readers? Has there been a similar special issue focus in the past? If so, how would your special issue build upon it?
Guiding Questions
What are some of the questions you hope the special issue will address?
Tentative Timeline for Fall 2025 Issue
Call for Special issue proposals issued: May 23, 2024
Special issue proposals due: July 31, 2024
Decision made about guest editors: August 31, 2024
Announcement of call for papers: September 15, 2024
Article proposals due to guest editors: October 15, 2024
Invitation to authors from guest editors: November 30, 2024
Article drafts due to guest editors: February 30, 2025
Reviewer Feedback and revision requests sent by guest editors: May 1, 2025
Article revisions due to guest editors: July 1, 2025
Articles sent by guest editors to copyeditors: August 22, 2025
Copyediting requests to authors from guest editors: September 15, 2025
All articles sent to guest editors for final review: September 25, 2025
Issue goes live: November or December, 2025
Submission and Contact Details
Submit a 500-word proposal (excluding works cited) that indicates theme and context, questions addressed, and contribution to the field, as well as your qualifications to serve as guest editor. Proposals should be submitted as .doc or .pdf files to rlorimer.
The subject line of the email submission should read “CLJ Special Issue Proposal.” For more information or queries, email Special Issues Editor, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, at the email above.
Journal Description
The Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, creative writers, and community literacy program staff. We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, students, and artists.
We understand “community literacy” as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions. It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations, but it can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.
For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used. Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well. Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.