[acc-cca-l] Call for Proposals: PUBLIC 75: Coalitions | Deadline July 3rd

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Call for Proposals
PUBLIC 75: Coalitions
Edited by Tammer El-Sheikh and Zulfikar Hirji
(Expected Spring 2027)

The seventy-fifth Issue of PUBLIC will explore “Coalitions” that organize artists, cultural workers, writers, and scholars, both politically and in terms of aesthetic sensibilities.

In conventional use, the term “coalition” refers to groupings of people united in the pursuit of a common economic, political, or military goal. Arising from a 2025 conference panel called “Narrating the Colonial Present,” this issue examines creative responses to colonial, settler colonial, and neo-colonial violence, both here on Turtle Island and abroad: in Gaza and the West Bank, Sudan, Lebanon, Iran, and elsewhere. The geographer Derek Gregory, whose book The Colonial Present (2004) informed our panel title, identifies a pattern of colonial “mapping,” “opposing,” and “casting-out” in Iraq and Afghanistan as well after 9/11 and the so-called “War on Terror.” It’s this unfolding history of political violence to which the issue responds. As part of an interlinked global decolonial struggle, we invite contributors to join a coalition in the conventional sense. The research, writing, and creative work we will feature, however, explores the possibility of a less conventional and equally urgent coalition: one forged by artists through aesthetic experiences and powerful affects, and in images, performances, curatorial initiatives, and the like.

In this moment of intensifying global conflict, how have artists and cultural workers found adequate forms for their indignation, their concern and fellow-feeling, and their convictions? How do groupings of artists, artist duos or collectives, united in their social justice aims, intervene in the public sphere to achieve those aims? What lessons for such groupings in the present are offered by similar artistic coalitions in the past and across the globe? How do affinity groups across the arts manage internal dissent and failure in pursuit of their collective goals?

Topics

Identity, Identifications, and Aesthetics:
Ethnic (Black, Arab, Indigenous, Asian and more) Futurisms; Afro-Arab Aesthetics; Decolonial and Anti-colonial aesthetics; Diasporic and identity-based art; Expressions of allyship, empathy, and solidarity

Materials and Modes of Dissemination:
Film festivals and programs; Artist-run centre exhibitions; Museum collections and exhibitions; Documentary, documentation, and archives; Manifestos, letters/mail art, and petitions; Equity initiatives and social justice education

Histories and Geographies:
Colonial and settler colonial histories; Anti-colonial movements and revolutions; Non-alignment in the Global South; Urban planning and the public sphere; Cosmopolitanism and migration; SWANA (Southwest Asia and North Africa), Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Americas, the Circumpolar North

Politics and Visual Activism:
Pro-Palestine visual culture; Representing genocide; Settler colonial culture; Global LGBTQIA2S+ rights, struggles, and imagery; Global and post-feminist imaginaries; Mutual aid and visions of horizontal organization; Polemics, agitation, and agit prop; Visual activism in the boycott, divestment, sanctions (BDS) movement and peaceful resistance; Anti-racist visual culture (M4BL, BLM); Truth, reconciliation, and global Indigenous rights in art and visual culture

Types of Contributions

- Academic papers (5,000 words; must undergo peer review)
- Experimental, narrative, and personal essays (3,000 words max.)
- Dialogues or roundtables (2,000 words max.)
- Short texts, manifestos, calls for action (1,000–1,500 words)
- Photo and image-based essays (1,000–1,500 words)
- Poetry (1–5 pieces for consideration)
- Artist projects (1,000-word text and 8 images max.)

Deadline — July 3rd, 2026 by 11:59pm (EDT)
See full details and submit at: PUBLICJOURNAL.CA/SUBMIT<https://publicjournal.ca/submit/>


About the Issue Editors

Tammer El-Sheikh is Associate Professor of Art History at York University. His scholarship has focused on modern and contemporary art of the SWANA region and its diasporas. He teaches in the areas of postcolonial theory and art history, the art and politics of the Middle East/South West Asia and North Africa, Islamic art and architecture, art historical methods, and the history and practice of art criticism. El-Sheikh is the editor of Hybrid Bodies: An Anthology of Writings on Art, Identity, and Intercorporeality (2020), and guest editor of a special issue of Asian Diasporic Visual Art and the Americas on Modern and Contemporary Art of the SWANA Diasporas (2025). He has written feature articles and reviews for Parachute, C Magazine, ETC Magazine, Canadian Art, Black Flash, ESSE, and MOMUS, and longer essays for a number of exhibition catalogues both in Canada and abroad. His scholarly writing has appeared in Arab Studies Journal, ARTMargins, RACAR, and ADVA. He is a member of the editorial team at the journal RACAR.

Zulfikar Hirji is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University. He is an anthropologist, social historian, and curator interested in how human societies articulate, represent, and perform understandings of self, community, and other. His research focuses on Muslim societies in a range of historical and contemporary contexts. He works on a range of issues including the production and performance of identity, the role of cultural workers and social movements, the dynamics of family networks and inter-generational migration, the socio-legal formation of communal identity in colonial contexts, and form and context of urban violence in religiously plural societies. He has conducted archival research and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in East Africa, South Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, and North America. Hirji’s research is published in books and articles for academic and non-academic audiences as well as film and exhibitions.

About the Journal

PUBLIC: Art | Culture | Ideas is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal that explores the intersection of visual cultures and critical studies. Since 1988, it has served as an intellectual and creative forum that focuses on the intersections of aesthetic, theoretical, and critical issues. In each themed issue, PUBLIC encourages a wide-ranging dialogue by bringing together artists, theorists, curators, philosophers, creative writers, and historians.

PUBLIC is committed to supporting a diversity of voices, ideas, and perspectives in our publishing. We welcome contributions from those who identify as Black, Brown, Indigenous, and People of Colour (POC) of all abilities, genders, and sexual orientations. We are particularly interested in the perspectives of those whose voices have historically been diminished or excluded.

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