Public Humanities is an international open-access, cross-disciplinary, peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of humanities scholarship and public life.

The journal invites submissions for the upcoming themed issue Scholarship Under Attack, which will be guest edited by Honor Brabazon and Sarah Turnbull.

The deadline for submissions is 18 December 2026. 

Description 

This special issue will explore current attacks on scholarship and scholars, and the multiple ways in which law, broadly conceived, is understood and deployed in these attacks with implications for who is allowed to shape and engage in the public sphere. 

Scholars engage in the public sphere not only directly, by sharing their expertise in public forums, but also indirectly, by educating generations of students, providing the independent research necessary for informed democratic decision-making, and creating spaces for collective development of new ideas and modes of interaction.  Certain legal and normative frameworks, such as those governing academic freedom, university autonomy, and collegial governance, have long protected this work, albeit unevenly.  

Whilst these frameworks have been chipped away over decades, they are now more openly and aggressively being dismantled.  Moreover, despite universities' professed commitments to decolonization and to equity, diversity, and inclusion, it has been equity-seeking scholars, along with the disciplines in the arts and humanities that scholars traditionally excluded from the academy fought to develop, that have been the most common targets. 

This special issue will consider the different ways that the various legal, policy, and normative landscapes that govern academia are being leveraged, shifted, and negated in current attacks on antiracist, decolonial, gender and sexualities, and other critical scholarship and scholars, with direct and indirect impacts on who is able to shape and engage in the public sphere.  

Contributions may explore the following, amongst other topics:

• long-term implications of unprecedented legislative interference in university autonomy, including banning concepts and schools of thought or mandating particular practices
• attacks on extra-mural academic freedom and harassment of academics
• who is made most vulnerable by adjunctification, concessions, firings, and program closures
• mobilisation of technocratic policies to silence antiracist and decolonial campus protest
• who runs the university, and who is the university, especially when collegial governance is weakened or overridden
• significance of shifts and continuities in policing on campuses (e.g., police, immigration enforcement, private security)
• patterns in, and institutional support for, contra-power harassment in the classroom
• impacts of chronic underfunding and increased reliance on consultants on equity and institutional autonomy
• links between attacks on scholars and scholarship and paradigms of the neoliberal or authoritarian university, and links to broader attacks and power dynamics beyond the academy
• 'chill', self-censorship, and 'quiet quitting' and/or solidarity and fightback amongst equity-seeking scholars
• faculty union responses to these attacks (e.g., legal challenges, labour action, member mobilisation)
• how legal/policy/normative frameworks from within or outside the academy are being leveraged, negated, or subverted in university communities' responses to these attacks

The issue welcomes a diversity of perspectives, including international perspectives, and encourages submissions from early career researchers.  Submissions will be assessed based on alignment with the issue's themes and on overall balance of topics represented in the issue.  Submissions should not be solely descriptive but situate events within a broader analytical context.  

Submission Guidelines

Article submissions should be no more than 8,000 words, not including abstract, footnotes, and bibliography.

Submissions should be written in accessible language for a wide readership across and beyond the humanities: see How to Write for Public Humanities.

Authors should consult the journal’s Author Instructions prior to submission. 

All authors will be required to declare any funding and/or competing interests upon submission: see the journal’s Publishing Ethics guidelines for more information

Articles will be peer reviewed for both content and style.

Articles will appear digitally and open access in the journal.

 Contacts

The editors are very happy to discuss potential articles. Please contact: 

• Honor Brabazon: honor.brabazon@uwaterloo.ca
• Sarah Turnbull: s3turnbull@uwaterloo.ca

Questions regarding peer review can be sent to the Public Humanities inbox at publichumanities@cambridge.org.