Call for proposals - Museological Review Issue 27

Submission deadline for abstracts/proposals: Monday 29 January 2024

What if we could trust the ground under our feet? Museums as spaces of rootedness and response-ability

Sometimes it seems like the sign of our times is constant instability - from the COVID health crisis to climate change, from wars erupting across the globe to the rise in far-right nationalisms, from growing economic disparity to the multiplication of racist, xenophobic and sexist discourses. As if we could no longer trust the ground we stand on; as if, at any moment, things could abruptly change in new, unpredictable ways.

The 27th issue of Museological Review looks at museums as spaces of rootedness and response-ability. It wishes to place museums (and other institutions, collectives, and organisations doing museum-like work with archives, communities and mediation of knowledges) at the centre of the question of livability in times of capitalist ruins. As many museums today are once again attending to their situated contexts and histories; we believe there is an argument to be made regarding the contemporary significance of roots and rootedness in museum practice. Thinking of roots is a reminder that no one lives everywhere and everyone lives somewhere; of the invisible rhizomatic structures that allow for communication and maintenance; of roots as forms of situated knowledges, vital to understanding and becoming-with the realities of each place.

Rooted museum work might look like short or long-term alliances, partnerships, and collaborations with museums’ neighbours and local communities; museums engaging in ecological work like orchards, gardens, or recuperation of green areas; practices where museum power (be it epistemological, aesthetic, financial or symbolic) is shared with its co- habitants. We are looking for instances where museums care, attend-to, and sustain those they share a place with, with all the messiness this collaborative work implies. These actions may be big projects involving the many, or very well be modest and small. Nonetheless, they are necessary for co-creating new futures in times of ecological and capitalist ruin, and for recomposing the frameworks needed to live together, and once again trust the ground under our feet.

Besides traditional academic papers, we are open to practitioner papers that creatively engage with the material world and museum work, and interviews, exhibition reviews, reflective papers and/or personal accounts, as well as visual submissions and short contributions. We especially invite contributors from the Global South and systematically disenfranchised voices from around the world, encouraging submissions regarding topics that include but are not limited to

• Museums engaging in place-making and grounded practices
• Institutional initiatives for power-sharing or collaboration
• Community-oriented initiatives in museums and as museums
• Decentralised praxis in museum studies
• Commons and commoning in museums and cultural production
• (In)sustainability of institutional models and formats
• Institutions and local ecosystems: social, political and economic networks
• Collective and collaborative archiving and exhibiting

Museological Review is accepting submissions in the following formats:

• Academic and practitioner papers (maximum 5,000 words);
• Interviews (maximum 3,000 words) with museum and cultural practitioners, collectives, artists, and researchers;
• Exhibition reviews (maximum 1,000 words) including reviews of exhibitions and propositions that move across well-established categories and structures of display and challenge Western exhibition models;
• Reflective papers or personal accounts (maximum 2,000 words) which refer to collective and participatory experiences, archival materials and records, and artistic practices and research. Visual submissions (maximum 5 images) which approach and depict the main topics of this issue;
• Short contributions (maximum 500 words) such as poems, manifestos, transcriptions and records of oral histories.

Submissions and enquiries should be emailed to museologicalreview@leicester.ac.uk. The deadline is Monday 29 January 2024.

Requirements

All submissions must include the following:

• Title of proposed submission and full contribution/submission
• Full name of the author(s)
• 350-word proposal (150 words for visual submissions and short contributions)
• Interviewee consent form (for interviews only)
• 3-5 keywords
• Mailing address and email, professional qualifications, institutional affiliation (if any)
• Social media handles, if you would like to be tagged in our posts (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram)

Results

The authors of selected abstracts/proposals/visual and short submissions will be contacted in early February 2024. The deadline for the submission of the full academic and practitioner papers, interviews, exhibition reviews, and reflective papers or personal accounts is late March 2024. The editorial process (peer-review and editing) of accepted submissions will take place from April to June 2024. Final publication decisions will be made after the peer review and editing process. The issue will be available from the Museological Review webpage between September and October 2024.

See our notes for contributors.

Format

• A digital copy of the typescript is required in Microsoft Word format
• All submissions must be in English. British English spelling is preferred
• Times New Roman font size 12-A4 format (21 cm x 29.7 cm)
• Double line spacing
• Normal margins (2.54 cm on all sides)
• Note: It is not possible for the editorial team to undertake or arrange for independent proofreading and the obligation for thorough checking is the responsibility of the authors. The publication cannot be assured until final revisions are accepted.

Visual submissions format

The image can be manipulated and edited. A title and a short caption of max 150 words should enhance the message, but the image must be able to communicate on its own merit. Visual submissions must be original work. Any identifiable person depicted must consent to their image being published. Please submit your image as a .jpeg or .tif file to a resolution of 600 dpi and 3508x2480 pixels. Please submit your caption in a Microsoft Word document.

Illustrations/figures/tables

Written papers can be accompanied by black and white or colour photographs, line drawings, maps, tables or any other visual element. All illustrations and figures should be numbered consecutively in the order in which they are referred to in the text. Please note that they must be fully captioned and supplied separate from the manuscript document, NOT included in a Word document, as .jpeg, .tif or .bmp files (NOT eps).

Referencing/bibliography

References must be presented using the Harvard system (author and date given in the text, e.g., Connerton, 1989; Cook, 1991: 533).

The bibliography should be at the end of the paper, arranged alphabetically by author, then chronologically if there is more than one work by the same author. Use the inverted format as follows: Connerton, P. (1989). How Societies Remember. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Cook, B.F. (1991). ‘The archaeologist and the Art Market: Policies and Practice.’ Antiquity 65: 533.

Copyright

It is the author’s responsibility to obtain copyright approval for non-original materials included in submissions.

If the author wishes to include any material in which they do not hold the copyright, written permission from the copyright owner must be obtained before submission. This applies to direct reproduction as well as ‘derivative reproduction’, where a new table or figure has been created which derives substantially from a copyrighted source.

The author must provide appropriate acknowledgement of the permission granted to them for reuse by the copyright holder in each caption or figure. The author is solely responsible for any fees which the copyright holder may charge for reuse.

Acknowledgement of funding sources

Source of funding for the research reported in the submission should be acknowledged at its end. All authors should disclose in their submission any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of the submission.

Museological Review (MR) is a peer-reviewed journal, published annually by the PhD cohort of the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. It is a forum for the exchange of museological ideas and the development of academic skills.

Submissions are free of charge.