Theme: Intimate Empires

Call for Contributions - New Voices in Postcolonial Studies Magazine

New Voices in Postcolonial Studies invites contributions for a magazine issue on “Intimate Empires.” We are interested in how imperial formations are lived, felt, negotiated, and resisted in the most intimate spaces: the body, the home, the family, the neighbourhood, the church or mosque, the classroom, the stage, and the screen, as well as in everyday encounters with animals, ecosystems, technologies, and other more‑than‑human worlds. Rather than treating empire as a distant structure or a finished past, this issue asks how it persists in routines, affects, and relationships, and how it organises intimate relations with land, water, climate, animals, and digital infrastructures that are being reconfigured in the present.

How do people carry empire in their gestures, accents, desires, faith practices, kinship ties, and multispecies relations? How do migration, borders, racialisation, and extractive economies reorganise intimacy across human and nonhuman worlds alike? And how are these intimate empires being reimagined, unsettled, or refused by new generations of artists, activists, and thinkers? We especially welcome work from early‑career scholars, students, independent researchers, artists, and practitioners.

Possible themes and questions

Contributions may address (but are not limited to):

• Family histories and intergenerational memories of empire, including silence, shame, nostalgia, and conflict.

• Domestic spaces as imperial spaces: housing, care work, cleaning, food, and the coloniality of “home.”

• Intimacy, sexuality, and desire in imperial and neo‑imperial contexts (heteronormativity, policing of relationships, mixed and diasporic intimacies).

• Everyday urban empires: policing, public transport, neighbourhood segregation and gentrification, migrant infrastructures.

• Religion, ritual, and spiritual life as sites where empire is reproduced, negotiated, or challenged, including cosmologies that foreground more‑than‑human relations.

• Bodies of empire: health, illness, disability, dress, gesture, and comportment as technologies of colonial discipline or resistance.

• Intimacies with land, water, and climate: environmental racism, extractivism, ecological grief, and climate injustice as imperial inheritances.

• Animals, plants, and multispecies worlds in imperial and post‑imperial settings (for example: plantation ecologies, invasive species, animality and racialisation, companion species in diaspora).

• Intimate infrastructures: electricity, pipelines, shipping routes, data centres, and digital platforms as everyday imperial presences in human and nonhuman lives.

• Intimate archives: diaries, letters, testimony, family photos, oral histories, parish records, and community or activist archives.

• Performance, theatre, film, music, and digital culture (memes, TikTok, fan communities) as spaces where intimate empires and multispecies entanglements are staged, contested, or mocked.

• Intimacies of labour and care: domestic work, feminised and racialised care economies, emotional labour in universities and NGOs, and care across species and environments.

• Methodologies for studying intimate empires: autoethnography, creative‑critical writing, collaborative and community‑based research, arts practice, and the ethics of vulnerability and exposure.

We are open to contributions that engage with any geographical or historical context, including so‑called “minor,” “internal,” or post‑socialist empires, as well as contemporary formations of bordering, policing, extraction, and climate violence.

Forms and formats

This is a magazine issue, not a peer‑reviewed journal, so we particularly welcome accessible, experimental, and creative forms. We welcome creative contributions in the form of short essays, provocations, videos, visual art, and other hybrid or multimodal works. Possible formats include:

• Short essays and reflections (1,000–3,000 words)

• Provocations and manifestos

• Creative‑critical pieces (lyric essays, vignettes, experimental forms)

• Videos and performance documentation (with a short accompanying text)

• Visual art and photo‑essays (with a short accompanying text)

• Interviews and conversations

• Reviews of performances, exhibitions, films, or books

If you have an idea that does not fit neatly into these categories, you are welcome to pitch it to us.

Who can submit?

We welcome contributions from:

• Postgraduate and early‑career researchers

• Artists, theatre‑makers, and cultural workers

• Community organisers and activists

• Writers and practitioners working outside formal academia

You do not need to be “an expert” in postcolonial studies; we are interested in grounded, situated, and experimental voices that speak to the lived intimacies of empire in human and more‑than‑human worlds.

Timeline and submissions

• Proposal/abstract (max 250 words) and a short bio (50–80 words) by: 25 March 2026

• Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2026

• Full contributions due: 31 May 2026

Please send proposals and any queries to: newvoicespocostudies@gmail.com with the subject line: “Intimate Empires - Magazine Submission”. In your proposal, briefly outline your piece, indicate the intended format (essay, video, visual work, etc.), and note any access or content considerations we should be aware of.

About New Voice in Postcolonial Studies

New Voices in Postcolonial Studies is a research network for emerging and marginalised voices working on and around postcolonial thought, practice, and politics.