Call For Book Chapters

Don’t Get Lost in Their Sauce:

Navigating Academic Identity, the Creative Self, and Reductive Practices

Edited by

Amir A. Gilmore, Washington State University

Adrianne Mitchell, Washington State University

“See, when I had no money, I still had sauce. See if you don’t got no sauce, then ya lost. But you can also get lost in the sauce.” –Gucci Mane (2013) 

Sauce and the culture surrounding sauce is multifaceted and nuanced. Within the context of food and cooking, sauce is an essential element that adds flavor, moisture, richness, visual appeal, and aroma to cuisine. Originating within Hip-Hop popular culture, sauce is a moniker for the creative cultural embodiment of swagger through confidence, aesthetics (e.g., fashion, styling, music), and gait. We extend the notion of the Sauce within the Ivory Tower to our quality of being (Baraka, 1967) as critical scholars. The Sauce allows scholars to accentuate their creative selves as it informs who we are and what we do and how we write as educators and researchers. Within this context, the Sauce derives from the culmination of centering lived embodied experience as “a profound source of knowledge” (Yancy, 2005, p. 215) and the epistemological aesthetic traditions of minoritized communities. This intimacy of shared presence—this inward integration between the flesh, spirit, and cultural aesthetics traditions becomes a bridge for mattering, humanity, love, healing, reconciliation, futurity and the creation of experimental theories, methodologies, and counternarratives that traditional social science research cannot accommodate (i.e., bland, dry, watery, unappealing, lifeless). 

Not all sauces are the same, as some are commodified, pre-packaged, and pre-made—and that is often the case within the ivory tower. As a minoritized scholars, it is crucial to have your own sauce because it is essential to your quality of being and without it— you can “get lost in the sauce.” Higher education’s sauce is undergirded by an adherence to oppressive structures, cultural norms, and politics of ownership, violence, extraction, and commodification that disproportionately refute the epistemological traditions of minoritized scholars and their communities, rendering them illegible. This epistemic narrowing or unhealthy art of reduction, dilution, and debasement of cultural knowledge and ways of being are acts of violence (Mitchell, 2018) against the creative self are an epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2008) that stifle knowledge, innovation, and your quality of being—leaving you sauceless. As such, it is vital to refuse something that seeks to reduce your irreducible being. Don’t get lost in their sauce.

This themed “cookbook” on the Sauce will illuminate how minoritized scholars can, and do, manage to resist and refuse these social forces. This book gives space to authors to explain the importance of their Sauce; how it informs their politics and academic work (teaching, research, service, and administrative), and their generative refusal of the academia’s epistemic narrowing of their knowledge and identities. In effect, chapters will highlight the multifaceted culture surrounding the Sauce in academia and provide a model for a future of higher education that embraces creativity, diversity, embodied cultural knowledge. Moreover, this book will share their recipes (e.g., strategies and affirmations) to aid those entering the professoriate wanting to develop their sauce as scholars and how not to get lost in academia’s sauce. Through carefully curated zest-themed chapters, this text will present a wide array of perspectives from authors that challenge the hegemonic logics to make way for academic work that they wanted to make.

Each book chapter will be approximately 4,000 words (not inclusive of citations). The book chapters do not have to be overly academic, as we are seeking contributions that provide a perspective from an embodied/(counter)storytelling/approach. If interested, please submit a 250-word book chapter proposal by May 1st, 2025.

If you have questions or comments, please feel free to contact us via email: amir.gilmore@wsu.edu or adrianne.mitchell@wsu.edu.