Issue Topic:
Building on issues 1 and 2, Community Change’s third issueseeks to continue unpacking the notion of ‘community change’—its complexities, transformations, and challenges in recent decades of intensified economic, environmental, and political instabilities. It will critically interrogate responses to these processes and investigate where, whether, and how this change is happening. It will also identify the actors within these processes, along with their claims to authority and their motivations. We call for scholarly articles, book reviews, multimedia, and artwork that examine the complexities of community change, probing whether these and related concepts are sufficiently and successfully mobilized to achieve genuine, emancipatory transformation, or whether they serve to reinforce existing structures and relations of power.
Themed Section:
This issue will also feature a themed section with scholarly works on environmental issues, climate change and its consequences, and sustainability. The Community Change editorial board will be interviewing Dr. Bill Hopkins on these themes. Dr. Hopkins is a Virginia Tech Professor of Wildlife Ecotoxicology and Physiological Ecology and is also the Director of the Global Change Center (The Fralin Life Science Institute). We welcome research articles on issues related to community change and the environment.
We are seeking reviewers for three environment-related books:
"The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists" by Naomi Klein
“This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent” by Daegan Miller
“Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming” by William Connolly
These book reviews will be published alongside peer-reviewed article submissions and the interview with Dr. Hopkins.
Key Dates:
Posted on 15 Nov 2018
Welcome to the second issue of Community Change!
Community Change is an online, peer-reviewed journal that explores multiple approaches to democratic development and change. We conceive of Community Change as an interdisciplinary space in which graduate students and emerging scholars from various academic backgrounds and scholarly approaches delve into ideas related to theoretical conceptions of “community change” - its strengths and aporia - as well as examine specific practices, actions, and projects orientated around impacting communities.
In our inaugural issue’s Call for Papers, the editors sought works which explore notions of community change in light of complexities, transformations, and challenges in recent decades of intensified economic, environmental, and political instabilities. Titled “Culture and the State: Explorations in Community Change,” articles in this second issue critically interrogate various community building initiatives. These works aim to locate where change is (or is not) happening, why, and in what ways. The authors and articles explore a range of conceptions, issues, and locations, including sustainability, democracy, art, gender, and race.
Opening this edition is an interview by Community Change editors Jared Keyel and Mary K. Ryan of Dr. Wornie Reed, Director, Race and Social Policy Center at Virginia Tech. This interview explores where our country stands today, post-Obama’s presidency and in the midst of emergent authoritarianism across the EuroAtlantic. Dr. Reed’s interview is a provocative discussion of race, inequality, and democracy in the time of President Trump.
We then move to three thought-provoking pieces from Ward on Re-Locating Haraway, Moayerian on Cultural War and Development in Trumpian Era, and Talukdar on Sustainability: What, Why and How? Each of these articles take a different approach and theoretical angle to explore contested interactions between the popular development discourses and democracy (Ward 2018), community cultural development initiatives and social justice (Moayerian 2018), and regional planning strategies and sustainability principles (Talukdar 2018).
We close this edition with two intriguing book reviews by Bruggeman of Art Can Change the World and Salmon of Is Racial Equality Unconstitutional?
Posted on 25 Sep 2018
We are excited to announce a new call for papers for a themed issue of the journal Community Change | Vol.2, No.1 (2018).
This year themed issue is:
Pursuing Democratic Community Change in the Time of Trump
The 2016 presidential election has brought changes and challenges to the United States. During his campaign, then-candidate Donald J. Trump declared that Mexican migrants were criminals, called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, and told supporters to engage in violence against opponents. In these ways, Trump brought xenophobia, nativism and political violence directly into the nation's political discourse. Hate crimes have spiked since Trump's narrow electoral victory and neo-Nazis and white supremacists have been emboldened to mount a number of very public displays and rallies. This heightened level of activity has pressed fringe groups into broader public consciousness. Executive actions and legislative attempts by the Republican-controlled Congress have tried to roll back health insurance for millions, civil rights protections, environmental safeguards and regulatory oversight of the banking and securities industry. Against this backdrop, we conceive of democratic community change as progressive, emancipatory, and liberatory in character.
Community Change's second issue invites articles that explore new ways of thinking to maintain exiting protections as well as analyze popular, community, and legal responses to Trump's claims and activities. We solicit scholarly articles (4,000-6,000 words), book reviews (1,000-1,500 words), multimedia, and artwork that analyze responses to the evolving political and social landscape since the 2016 election. These might include, but are not limited to: 1) explorations of new initiatives, on-going activism, and community organizing and how they have changed since the 2016 campaign and election; 2) analyses of historical movements that have informed or might inform current responses; and 3) pieces on tactics and strategies employed to resist, counter and educate citizens concerning the dangers for democracy and self-governance of nativism, xenophobia, white supremacy and other reactionary ideologies or political doctrines.
Key Dates:
Call for submissions open - October 11, 2017
Submission deadline - December 18, 2017
Author notification of selection - January 8, 2018
Online publication - May 2018
Posted on 27 Nov 2017