Palestine & Futurities
SUBMISSIONS DUE: DECEMBER 15, 2026
This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Women’s Studies will explore Palestine, futurism, and how the two meet. The CJWS is a feminist journal and forum connecting scholarly theories with grassroots activism. Palestinian liberation and women’s liberation are intertwined and integral to each other, with a feminist approach needed in response to the colonial reality, military occupation and state violence. It is a place to exchange ideas, personal experiences, expertise and creativity.
The ongoing Palestinian Nakba and intensification of zionist settler-colonial violence have made increasingly visible the connections between the oppression of Palestinians and interlocking systems of domination that shape this world. At the same time, this context has generated new solidarities, political possibilities, cultural production, and collective organizing, prompting attention to movements, struggles, and intellectual traditions that have worked to create different conditions of life.
Situated in this urgent moment of transformative potential, we are interested in examining Palestinian futurities not simply as representations of what might come, but as practices of future-making. This approach asks how Palestinian futures are engaged in relation to broader projects of collective liberation and coalition-building, and how struggles for Palestinian liberation illuminate relationships among communities confronting settler colonialism, racism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, and imperialism. We propose that past and present must inform political action, accountability, and structural change as pathways toward justice-oriented futures. Ultimately, we understand the future not as a singular destination, but as a field of collaboration and possibility.
This issue will encompass a wide range of topics. We welcome submissions that engage Palestine and futurism broadly. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Palestinian temporalities and futurities
- Indigeneity, settler colonialism and politics of time
- Exile, diaspora, displacement, return and futurity
- Memory, history and future-making
- Re-building/making Gaza
- Mothers, children, and future making
- Decolonizing and post-national futures
- Sumud, intifada, and collective action/practice
- Palestinian speculative art, including literature, film, performance, visual art, and/or media
- Futurity as relational
- Intertwined Futurisms/Coreading Palestinian futurities with Afro, Indigenous, and other traditions of liberatory and decolonial futurities
- Coalition building and collective liberation
- Political organizing and future-making
- Community based and activist scholarship
- Survival, refusal, grief and futurity
- Climate apocalypse and ecological futures
- Technology and AI
- Solidarity, saviorism, and liberalism
- Anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim racism
- Relationships between speculation and political practice
- The limits and possibilities of future-centered approaches
- Women’s resistance as future-making/future-facing
- Imagining as political
- Community knowledge production as collective-imagining
- Temporality and land
- Disarticulation of Palestinian identities and Palestinian as identity
Submissions are open to all, including (but not limited to) students, cultural workers, and early-career and/or independent researchers. We are also accepting translated submissions that tackle translation as a politically engaged creative practice. Submissions will be peer reviewed.
We are accepting:
- Academic/research articles (not exceeding 4,500 words)
- Creative non-fiction and/or personal essays (not exceeding 3,000 words)
- Book reviews (not exceeding 1,000 words)
- Poetry
- Art, including for the issue’s cover
Please submit through our online portal at https://cws.journals.yorku.ca
Important dates:
- Submissions are open September 15 – December 15, 2026
- Contributors will be notified by mid-March 2027
- We anticipate publication by September 2027