About the Journal
Commoning Ethnography is on a publication break in 2024. We will not publish an issue this year. Submissions will reopen in 2025.
Commoning Ethnography is an off-centre, annual, international, peer-engaged, open access, online journal dedicated to examining, criticizing, and redrawing the boundaries of ethnographic research, teaching, knowledge, and praxis.
We welcome submissions that explore the boundaries of ethnographic knowledge, experiment with forms of ethnographic writing, disturb the authority of single authorship, consider how property norms shape ethnographic research, and rethink communities of ethnographic research in a variety of yet unanticipated ways. We also welcome ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the commoning projects that exist within contemporary life, be they within academia, social movements, political spaces, emergent economies, environmental debates, creative practices or in intimate and quotidian arenas of social life.
We accept standard research articles, as well as a range of other collaborative, creative and explorative works. We are interested in reflective, engaged, and impassioned writing. We are also interested in work that challenges norms of ethnographic writing by expanding the rules of authorship and finding novel ways to enhance collaborations with research partners, incorporating their voices, thoughts, and discontents into our own practices of research. We are particularly interested in work that reflects an off-kilter, handmade approach to knowledge production and dissemination; this includes, but is not limited to, new graphic forms like cartoons or photo essays. We also encourage work that extends the limits of established academic networks, breaches boundaries between the centres and peripheries of academia, and considers critically who and what can be included in our conversations.
We accept the following types of submissions:
Articles
We welcome articles that critically engage with the themes of Commoning Ethnography. Articles will normally be between 4,000 and 8,000 words.
Commoning Conversations
We welcome transcripts of scholarly conversations on a specific topic, such as those generated at a conference roundtable, plenary discussion, or departmental debate. Transcripts should be edited for coherence. We also welcome transcripts of slow-burning conversations between scholars on a particular topic, for example via an ongoing email conversation. We also encourage the submission of conversations between scholars and research interlocutors. Submissions should be up to 10,000 words, but can be substantially shorter.
Provocations
We invite submissions from a group of authors (up to ten), each providing approximately 1000-2000 word responses to a particular ethical, theoretical, pedagogical or methodological question, or to a current social issue. We particularly welcome submissions that include authors from a diverse range of academic disciplines/fields of expertise, backgrounds, and nationalities. Please email the Editorial Collective with your initial idea before submitting.
Fieldnotes
Particularly suited to graduate students, this forum provides scholars the opportunity to reflect critically on emergent research findings, developing methodologies, field-writing techniques, and the ethical conundrums of research. We also welcome groups of scholars, as well as research partners and collaborators, writing for this section around a particular theme. Up to 4000 words each. Please email the Editorial Collective with your initial idea before submitting.
Reviews and review essays
We invite reviews of books, films, exhibitions, theatre, fiction, TV series or other creative works that speak to the journal's theme. A single review should be up to 1000 words, while a review essay of multiple works should be between 2000-4000 words. Please email the Editorial Collective with your initial idea before submitting a review.
Experimental works
In the spirit of experimentation, we won't predetermine this category. We welcome work that extends the boundaries of ethnographic practice, academic writing and expression, and commoning praxis. Please email the Editorial Collective with your initial idea before submitting.
Photo, visual and multimedia essays
We welcome submissions that place original visual work, such as photos, illustrations, field drawings, or comics, in conversation with a critically engaged text. Submissions should be no more than 4000 words.
All rules are made to be broken, and we welcome work that extends, challenges and creatively falls outside of these guidelines.
Special issues
We occasionally publish guest-edited special issues. Please send a proposal to the Editorial Collective, which includes an overall rationale, abstracts for each of the individual submissions, brief biographical details for each author, and a proposed date for submission.
Peer Review Process
Each submission is reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers, selected nationally and internationally for their expertise.
Publication frequency
The journal publishes one issue at the end of each calendar year, with staggered publication of early release articles and works throughout the year. There will be occasional special issues published in-between.
Access and copyright
Commoning Ethnography is a fully open access journal. Articles are licenced under the Creative Commons, which means authors retain full copyright, and can distribute and reprint their work as they wish.
Language
Commoning Ethnography is currently published in English, and we also welcome pieces written in te reo Māori. In the spirit of bridging the linguistic and geographic boundaries of academia, and enhancing dialogue between scholars from English and non-English speaking countries, we are open to publishing works that have been translated into English from other languages. We sometimes have resources to fund this translation work. We are also considering how, in the future, we might expand the linguistic versatility of the journal.
ISSN: 2537-9879
