Co-Editors
Alecia Jackson, Maggie MacLure, Lisa A. Mazzei, & Elizabeth A. St. Pierre
CALL FOR PAPERS
The Routledge International Handbook of Post Qualitative and New Approaches to Inquiry aims to radically reorient how inquiry is thought and enacted. Mapping possibilities for innovative and post qualitative thought and practices, this field-defining reference will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplinary and geographic locations who are taking up a range of postfoundational theories and approaches, such as poststructuralism, posthumanism, postcolonialism, Indigenous thought, feminist new materialisms, speculative philosophy, new empiricism, immanent ontologies, affect theory, queer theory, digital humanities, environmental humanities, disability/crip studies, Black studies, and neurodivergent studies, to name a few. This handbook aims to provide ontoepistemological enactments of inquiry not confined by dominant knowledge traditions.
Like the chapters in this handbook that will be experimental in nature, the book itself will stretch the typical handbook model. Rather than this call inviting papers for specific, pre-identified themes, we seek chapters that challenge orthodoxy through inventive and creative approaches that have not been legitimatized in other disciplines. In this way, the handbook will be an intervention and disruption to what might be “known” or “established” as post qualitative inquiry. Additional priority will be given to inventive work from scholars in a variety of career stages, philosophical orientations, and geographic locales. Submissions from scholars living and researching in locales outside of the Global North are especially encouraged. The editors welcome experimental formats such as polyvocal chapters, creative-critical contributions, arts-based texts, “messy” genres that disrupt traditional representation, and more. We aim for the handbook to be different. Rather than a linear structure of discrete chapters, we aspire to create a format that puts chapters in dialogue with each other around key concepts or problematics. The handbook will present what is made possible given the reorientation of thought and enactments presented by the chapters.
The Routledge International Handbook of Post Qualitative and New Approaches to Inquiry neither updates nor adds to the canon of conventional 20th century social science research methodologies driven by epistemological desires to identify, sort, capture, and know what exists. Those methodologies and their methods, which seldom identify their realist ontological assumptions, have never been able to accommodate inquiry which decenters epistemology and turns to ontologies of immanence in which everything is always coming into being. When the world is no longer stable, waiting for man to do science on it, conventional methodologies and methods become irrelevant; and inquiry can be capacious, inventive, experimental, creative, and speculative.
We invite papers written by those who turn away from prescriptive methodologies and methods designed to repeat what exists. We call for papers that track new and different kinds of inquiry for the 21st century: inquiry not yet named and closed off into existing categories, inquiry that comes into being along with the world which is always different.
Authors should submit an abstract of up to 500 words that describes how their chapter takes up any of the aims of the handbook as presented above. Please also include key words that indicate how your proposed chapter aligns with the call.
Proposal abstracts are due March 31 and can be submitted using the following Google form: https://forms.gle/Y4bCdBme5Gw4Xa7E7
Questions can be directed to Lisa Mazzei: mazzei@uoregon.edu
TIMELINE
2026
- February 28 Call for proposals
- March 31 Abstract of proposals due
- May 31 Notification of acceptance
- December 1 Initial drafts due
2027
- April 30 Feedback on drafts
- August 31 Final chapters due
- December 1 Deliver manuscript to Routledge
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