Call for Submissions: JDH Explorations

Journal of Design History

5 May 2023

The Journal of Design History (JDH) is launching a new section named Explorations for shorter submissions that can be provocative, reflective, creative, poetic, experimental, or responsive.

Aims
The aims of the Explorations section are:

• To support experimentation with new forms of scholarly communication, collaborative writing and interdisciplinarity.
• To extend the JDH’s authorship and readership base, support emerging and future scholarship and take steps to become more inclusive.
• To diversify research dissemination and promote timely responses to key debates

As design gains significance in the major debates around our past, present, and future, this section of the JDH seeks to nurture innovative, experimental, and creative interventions in researching and writing about design and its histories.

Call for Submissions

The JDH invites submissions for its new Explorations section. We encourage explorations that demonstrate design’s engagement with socio-political issues and from social groups and regions underrepresented in the JDH to date, as well as established academics. We are interested in contributions that connect with wider audiences, address racial, gender and social inequalities, highlight alternative narratives in design history, theory and criticism, or address labour conditions underpinning design practices. This is a space for research that demonstrates interdisciplinarity, by highlighting the significance of design to debates within Gender and Race Studies, Material Culture, Science and Technology Studies, Transmedia, Ecophilosophy, and Health Humanities, amongst others, and/or takes account of intersectional analyses of power.

Editors are accepting proposals for written work, which can include reflective writing, interviews, positioning papers, meditations, practitioner statements, educator statements, letters, reflections on methods, among other formats. In future, we hope to invite image-led pieces, video, and sound-based contributions. Contributions should be 1,500-4,000 in length (including endnotes) depending on the nature of the submission.


Pre-submission Enquiries Process
Authors interested in publishing in Explorations should proceed through the following steps:

• In the first instance, prospective authors submit to the Explorations Editors, via their email addresses below, a pre-submission enquiry including:
  • Working title of the proposed contribution.
  • Nature of the contribution (e.g., reflective writing, interviews, positioning papers, meditations, practitioner statements, among other forms of writing)
  • A draft of the work or an abstract (300-500 words) including how the proposal meets the aims of the section (see above), what question(s) it addresses, the main argument(s) it advances, and the originality of the research on which the work is based.
  • Any additional information that that Editors should take into account
• Explorations Editors will work on the contribution with prospective authors before inviting them to make a formal submission to the Journal’s manuscript management system ScholarOne Manuscripts for anonymised peer review.
• Explorations submissions will be double-anonymised peer-reviewed using the standard questions JDH reviewers ask about originality, clarity of objectives and consistency of argument. Reviewers evaluate whether the argument is adequately and appropriately supported and will check the quality and clarity of the written language. Please note that any figures will require copyright permissions at the acceptance stage.
• Explorations are published in the Journal of Design History’s online home on the Oxford University Press website. Contributions have their own DOI and are associated to a specific issue of the journal.

Contacts
To discuss a proposal or submit a pre-submission enquiry, please contact the Explorations
Editors:

Dr Livia Rezende, University of New South Wales, Australia, livia.rezende@unsw.edu.au

Dr Jane Tynan, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands, j.m.tynan@vu.nl