Call for Submissions

Refugee Futurities: Speculating through Displaced (After)Lives.

a decomp journal e-zine

decomp journal is now accepting unpublished work for its fifth themed online zine, “Refugee Futurities: Speculating through Displaced (After)Lives. ”

How can refugee experiences and artistic productions complicate our understandings of time, space, modernity, and borders inherited through imperial violence, to speculate about other possible futures? While state apparatuses characterize refugees as crises that need to be managed or redressed under the language of international law and human rights, countless artists, writers, community organizers, and scholars continue to offer an abundance of speculative visions around what futures can look like for refugee subjects. 

This question and zine theme draws from scholars and artists in critical refugee studies that engage the “social, historical, political, and cultural dimensions of displacement.” Y-Dang Troeung proposes “refugee worldmaking” to conceive of refugee creative practices and labours that enable survival and transform ways of living, being, and knowing. Ma Vang offers “history on the run” to question how the “refugee” comes to be known as a figure of loss, secrecy, and unknowability. Mimi T. Nguyen conceptualizes the “gift of freedom” to theorize the refugee’s ongoing entanglement with empire. Questions of refugee futurities have also been taken up by artists who engage with the concept through different artistic practices, mediums, and forms, expanding and exceeding conventional narratives of refugee experience.

Collectively, these scholars and artists invite us to ask what it means to embody multiple temporalities of past, present, and future, while also critiquing the conditions of imperialism and militarized violence that have shaped refugee experiences through the narrative of endless, yet always “new,” crises.

We invite you to engage with speculative refugee futurities in ways that respond to topics including, but not limited to:

  • Challenges around redefining conventional meanings of refugee

  • Queerness and queering bodies, re-imagined kinship, chosen/found family

  • Vexed relations in the wake of imperial war, militarized violence, and forced displacement

  • Memory, haunting, and ethical archives across geographies 

  • “New” and “old” media and technology, techno-Orientalism, virtuality

  • Aesthetic practices and labours of refugee subjectivity (intellectual, erotic, political, etc.)

  • Troubling assumptions about imperial time, space, modernity, nation-state belonging, and borders

  • Complexities of refuge in relation to Indigeneity and settler colonialism

  • Specific refugee contexts, geographies, and histories 

  • Methodologies in critical refugee studies scholarship, art, and cultural production (e.g. Keywords from the Critical Refugee Studies Collective)

Genres include (but are not limited to):

  • Poetry

  • Creative prose (e.g. Short stories, essays, fiction and non-fiction)

  • Visual art

  • Video and audio work

  • Academic essays and forums

  • Multimedia and experimental projects (e.g. interactive and/or performance work)

We welcome submissions that do not necessarily conform to these genres or experiment, bend, and play with them. Please ensure submissions can be published on a digital platform, where decomp journal and zines are housed!

Submission & Guidelines: Submit your work after reviewing our guidelines at https://decompjournal.com/submit

Note: decomp journal uses a third-party platform called Submittable to process submissions. We encourage sending submissions before the deadline in case of any technical issues.

DEADLINE TO SUBMIT: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 3, 2022 @ 11:59 PM (PST)

Questions or concerns? Contact us:

refugeefuturities.decompzine@gmail.com

Website: https://decompjournal.com

Instagram/Twitter: @decompjournal

Facebook: decompmagazine

submit

[decomp journal Guidelines]

We invite submissions of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and art and other media. All submissions should be sent in using our online submittable platform. 

  • For poetry: You can submit up to 3 poems at a time

  • For Prose: 8,000 words maximum. If you write pieces that are under 1,000 words, feel free to submit two.

  • Art/other media: We accept art across all mediums as long as they can be uploaded in JPG, mp3 or mp4 files

We only accept previously unpublished work and yes, we consider websites, blogs, youtube channels, etc, as previously published.

We readily encourage simultaneous submissions, all we ask is that you notify us when another market accepts your work.

We aim to respond to submission within 90 days. If you don’t hear from us at all please reach out.

Unfortunately, there is no payment at this time.

If your work is accepted, it is subject to minor editing and copyrighted upon publication, plus you automatically grant us First North American Serial Rights to publish it first and Archival Rights to archive it online. Rights revert back to the author upon publication. If a piece of yours is reprinted, please mention it appeared in decomp first.