Special Issue: Color Inquiry
For some time, color has fascinated literary writers, musicians, and artists (Han Kang, Maggie Nelson, Jay-Z, Joni Mitchell, The Beetles, Weezer, Rothko, Matisse, and so on). These writers, musicians, and artists have focused their attention on a color and followed it. In so doing, they have used color to explore and examine the diversity of human experience and what it means to be human in deeply complex worlds. Color studies have allowed these artists to creatively explore the joyful, the traumatic, the mundane, the spectacular, memories, and memories yet to be created. Drawing on this rich history, Cohen’s (2013) edited volume on color in ecology demonstrated how following a color in ecological systems can illuminate complexity. Simply put, focusing on the movements of color materializes the complex nuances of life. If these artists, writers, and ecologists have used color in these ways, then why not qualitative researchers? What might color inquiries generate in the field of qualitative inquiry? What might color generate for you in your thinking? What might happen if we purposefully play with color in qualitative inquiry?
To be considered for this special issue, please submit a 150 word abstract that includes your selected color and what you plan to do with your contribution. You will pick a color and follow it. That following will create its own path, sometimes straightforward, sometimes circumnavigating, sometimes stopping and starting, and everything in between. As the color creates a path, you may write poetry, create art, work/play in natural elements, write in other genres, and so on. Thus, this path may ask you to engage in multiple methods and modalities as the color asks you to traverse both the personal and political. Do what the color asks of you, not what you ask of the color. You are encouraged to stretch our qualitative imaginations theoretically, artistically, methodologically, and beyond. Arts-based work and textual innovations are welcomed.
Abstracts due: March 6, 2026
Please review the full call for more details.
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