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Call for Applications:
2025 Feminist Formations and NWSA Paper Award (NWSA Membership is required)
 

Feminist Formations is proud to announce a new award, in collaboration with the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA). The Feminist Formations - NWSA Scholarly and Creative Work Competition is now open.

   The Feminist Formations - National Women’s Studies Association annual competition will select one winner whose work will be published in Feminist Formations and receive an award of $500. The competition is open to scholars at all ranks, including independent scholars and artists. Multiple modes of knowledge production will be considered, including, but not limited to traditional scholarly articles, essays, poetry, and visual imagery. We are particularly interested in work that contributes to Black, Indigenous, and women of color feminisms; trans feminist studies; critical disability studies; and transnational feminisms. We also seek work that contributes to the journal’s mission to support “robust interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational feminist scholarship that can inspire incisive and politically meaningful analyses and action.”

  Submissions are due by June 1, 2025 at Feminist Formations and NWSA Paper Award. Applicants must be current NWSA members. We cannot consider submissions that have been previously published or are currently being reviewed by other journals.

   Manuscripts must adhere to the publishing guidelines of Feminist Formations, found at: https://feministformations.submittable.com/submit. Please contact the Feminist Formations Editorial Assistant (email: feministformations@oregonstate.edu) with questions or concerns about the submission process.

Feminist Formations is housed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University. It is published three times a year by the John Hopkins University Press. For more information, visit www.feministformations.org

   The National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), established in 1977, is a professional organization dedicated to leading the field of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. For more information, visit www.nwsa.org

Feminist Formations invites submissions that reflect the journal’s mission to cultivate a forum where feminists from around the world articulate research, theory, activism, teaching, and learning.   

An interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, we publish innovative work by scholars, activists, artists, poets, and practitioners in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. Our subject matter includes national, global, and transnational feminist thought and practice; the cultural and social politics of genders and sexualities; and historical and contemporary studies of gendered experience. The journal values established and emerging lines of inquiry and methods that engage the complexities of gender as implicated in forms of power such as race, ethnicity, class, nation, migration, ability, and religion.


We are particularly interested in cutting-edge feminist work in the following areas:  

BIPOC Feminisms • Asian and Asian American Feminisms • Pacific Islander/Oceanic Feminisms • Black Feminisms • Borderlands Studies • Chicanx/Latinx/Chicane/Latine Feminisms • Critical Ethnic Studies • Critical Youth Studies • Critical Geography • Cultural Studies • Disability Justice and Crip Feminisms • Indigenous Feminisms • Performance Studies • Posthuman Studies • Public Scholarship • Queer of Color Critique • Queer Theory • Feminist Affect Theory • Rhetoric • Trans Feminisms • Transnational Feminisms • Visual Cultures


For any questions about the journal in general or about submitting, please feel free to contact our Editorial Assistants, I-Yun Lee and Eric Warren, at feministformations@oregonstate.edu.

Submissions should be prepared in the following manner:   


 

• Check to make sure that your manuscript falls within the Feminist Formations guidelines of 8,000-11,000 words. The word count includes notes. 
• Anonymize: remove all identifying information from the document, and document 'headers.' The exception is the cover page, which should contain the author’s institutional affiliation and contact information (i.e. postal address, phone number, and e-mail address). 
• Submit your complete manuscript through Submittable in three files as follows:  1st file) Cover page in the text box provided;  2nd file) Abstract and keywords to be anonymized and uploaded;  3rd file) Complete manuscript, including the abstract and keywords.  Files must be in Word .doc (NOT .docx or .rtf). 
• Follow the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) 17 author-date system with parenthetical citations. All text, including quotations, must be double-spaced. 

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Feminist Formations
"Writing African Feminist Subjectivities"
Guest edited by Atia Sattar, Man Kaplan, Stina Soderling

Feminist Formations invites submissions for the special issue Feminist Visions and Struggles for a Gradeless University. This issue aims to stitch together a practical and theoretical foundation from which to imagine and facilitate feminist futures for higher education. We seek papers that critically engage with grading practices from a range of intersectional feminist perspectives. We are particularly interested in how a feminist pedagogical lens can draw attention to the social and institutional structures that grades function within, including but not limited to the colonial origins of the education system; racism and ableism in assessment; and the gendered care work of feminist education. Papers might offer methods for alternative grading that embody feminist principles, analyses of normative grading regimes, or interventions into dominant discourses around ungrading and the university structure. We invite contributions that not only confront grading as a material and institutional framework inimical to feminist pedagogy, but also imagine the converse: alternative forms of assessment capable of structuring feminist institutions of higher education. 

Literature on feminist pedagogy provides a rich framework for understanding and undoing systems of privilege and power within the classroom and higher education institutions at large. Many feminist teachers accordingly recognize that grades are an integral aspect of the power system we want to disrupt. However, feminist critiques of assessment practices and their material and institutional frameworks remain underdeveloped. This gap is precisely where this special issue will intervene. Our goal is to amplify the conversations and interventions taking place in feminist circles that challenge traditional assessment models and envision a gradeless university. 

Just as the university can serve as an incubator for movements for change, so can it incorporate those movements for its own benefit. Insofar as the movement towards ungrading is no exception, effective feminist pedagogy may require more than the adoption of alternative grading structures; it may also require the cultivation of (re)orientations to academia, student learning, and even collegial responsibility to intervene in the colonial, masculinist, and neoliberal contexts of the university. This special issue will therefore explore alternative grading practices as decidedly feminist as well as illustrate frameworks for thinking and activism that engage with critical, decolonial, and abolitionist perspectives. It calls on practitioners of feminist and gender studies to honor the vision and mission of our field by disrupting the tyranny of grading both within and beyond the classroom walls.

We encourage proposals that draw on feminist educators’ own experiences with alternative grading and related practices, and/or illustrate how these approaches to assessment can disrupt institutional structures and their systems of rewards and punishment. Potential topics and questions include: 

● Feminist analyses of grading, including alternative grading practices and methodologies. What does a feminist perspective make visible or possible that is currently missing from the alternative grading movement? Do grades matter? What matter do grades have? Why engage in this work when it’s so difficult? 

● Experiences and experiments in (not) grading. What is a feminist tactic you have used to resist the grading regime in your classes, and what conditions enabled this resistance?

● Engagements with theoretical frameworks that enable resisting grades. For example, how can discourses on decolonization, disability, labor, wellness, and care work inform feminist approaches to alternative grading and assessment models? Can alternative grading practices offer a “corrective” to ableism, racism, and sexism within education?

● The role of students. In what ways can students reinforce or disrupt normative grading practices? How do alternative grading strategies reorient student labor and priorities? 

● Institutional structures, supports, and challenges. How do you negotiate the university’s tendency to co-opt pedagogical innovations and methods of learning that challenge the neoliberal structure? What other practices (e.g. peer review, final grade requirements, faculty evaluation, and faculty contingency) need to be rethought or dismantled in order to create a gradeless university? 

● Alternative grading across different institutional contexts. How does alternative grading vary between public and private universities, small and large institutions, etc? What are the experiences of ungrading and/or challenging grading structures in minoritized community colleges, or HBCUs that have long engaged in practices of radical change and worldmaking? How do practices vary across disciplines and class sizes?

● Labor and (not) grading. Who does the labor of challenging the grading regime? (How) is this labor gendered and racialized, and how can an intersectional feminist lens help us shift this labor burden? What is the role of scale in practicing alternative grading; what is possible in a small seminar class versus a lecture with 300 students? 

● Collectivity and social movements. What is the role of collective action in imagining and building a gradeless university? How do, or can, struggles against grading connect with movements beyond the walls of the university? What feminist pedagogical lessons might movements teach us as academics?

● Historicizing the current interest in ungrading. What can we learn from, for example, the alternative school movement of the 1960s or the anarchist schools of the early 20th century? 

● Envisioning futures for gradeless education. What might need to happen beyond the university in order to make a gradeless university possible? What kinds of worlds are made possible when alternative assessment practices are embraced? What values and forms of knowledge are prioritized in those worlds?  

Proposed submissions can take a range of shapes, including traditional academic articles, scholarly personal narratives, interviews, annotated assignments and/or syllabi, and invitations for future collaborations. 

Submission Process: Abstracts should be submitted to the Feminist Formations Submittable page by July 31, 2025.

Following the deadline, guest editors will review the manuscripts and determine those to be sent for full review. Citations should follow the Chicago Manual of Style. For more details, please see Feminist Formations submission guidelines. Manuscripts will be subject to anonymous review and must adhere to the publishing guidelines of Feminist Formations, found at: https://feministformations.org/. Scholarly essays should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes and references. Files must be in Word .doc (NOT .docx or .rtf).

Anticipated Publication Date: Spring 2026

For information on submission preparation, download a Feminist Formations style guide, submission checklist, and anonymization guide.

Questions about the submission process may be sent to editorial assistants Eric Warren and I-Yun Lee at feministformations@oregonstate.edu. Questions about the review process may be sent to the guest editors at feminismwithoutgrades@gmail.com.  

 
Feminist Formations is a leading journal of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, published three times a year by the Johns Hopkins University Press. It is housed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University, under the editorship of Patti Duncan. For more information, see www.feministformations.org.