Institution: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Aims and Scope
Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (Departures) publishes peer reviewed, innovative, experimental, aesthetic, and provocative works on the theories, practices, and possibilities of critical qualitative research. We welcome and showcase state of the art work in performative writing, performance texts, fictocriticism, creative nonfiction, photo essays, short stories, poetry, personal narrative, autoethnography, and other arts-based critical research. We are deeply committed to publishing interdisciplinary qualitative work that engages postcolonial and transnational perspectives in both local and global contexts. To this end, Departures seeks to publish critical and innovative qualitative work on contemporary political and social justice issues such as climate change, food insecurity, the refugee crisis, #BlackLivesMatter, #metoo, immigration, DACA, LGBTQ rights, indigenous rights, among others. We actively solicit and invite participation from minority, international, women of color, and immigrant scholars who are doing innovative, poetic, autoethnographic, decolonial, fictional, and other creative work from their various contexts, positions, and locations. We welcome and encourage informal queries.

Special/Themed Issues
We welcome special/themed issue proposals. We want to encourage scholars proposing such issues to consider a combination of both open-call and invited manuscripts; all of which would be subject to peer review.

Critical Interventions
The editorial team at Departures is pleased to introduce a twice-yearly invited forum called Critical Interventions (CI).  Presented in a variety of formats, these forums will be dedicated to conversations about specific social issues, innovative ideas in fieldwork, performative strategies, and creativity in fieldwork. Please direct inquiries about CIs to the CI forum editor, Jillian Ann Tullis (jtullis@sandiego.edu).

Book Reviews
Departures will publish 3–4 book reviews per year on new and innovative work in critical qualitative research. Please direct inquiries about book reviews to the Book Reviews editor, Rebecca Mercado Jones (rebeccajones@oakland.edu).

Information for Contributors
Unless specifically indicated otherwise, submissions to Departures have undergone a rigorous double-anonymous peer review. To facilitate the peer review process, no material identifying the author(s) should appear in the manuscript. Submissions to the journal should not be under review elsewhere or have appeared in any other published form. Authors must obtain copyright clearance for any copyrighted material.

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically through the ScholarOne Manuscripts site for Departures http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ucpress-departures.

Form and Organization
Manuscripts should be formatted in Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) in a PC-compatible version using a 12-point common font, should be double-spaced, and should not exceed 9,000 words including tables, captions, and endnotes. CI Forum submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, including endnotes (for the entire Forum). Book Review submissions should not exceed 2,000 words, including endnotes.

Manuscript title pages should be submitted separately and include (a) the title of the essay, (b) any acknowledgments, (if applicable, supply all details required by any funding and grant-awarding bodies), including the history of the manuscript if any part of it has been presented at a conference or included as part of a thesis or dissertation.#

Manuscripts should include (a) the title of the essay, (b) an abstract of not more than 100 words, (c) a list of five suggested keywords, (d) an accurate word count (including endnotes)

Citation Style
Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (2017), endnote style (not author date). For items not covered in the examples listed here, visit https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-1.html.

Book

1. Zadie Smith, Swing Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2016), 315–16.
2. Brian Grazer and Charles Fishman, A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 12.

Edition other than the first

3. Amy Einsohn, The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications, with Exercises and Answer Keys, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 401–402.

Edited Collection

1. John D’Agata, ed., The Making of the American Essay (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016).

Chapter/Part of Edited Collection

1. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Making of the American Essay, ed. John D’Agata (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016), 177–78.

Translated Book

1. Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016).

Journal Article

1–3 authors

1. Susan Satterfield, “Livy and the Pax Deum,” Classical Philology 111, no. 2 (April 2016): 170.

2. Shao-Hsun Keng, Chun-Hung Lin, and Peter F. Orazem, “Expanding College Access in Taiwan, 1978–2014: Effects on Graduate Quality and Income Inequality,” Journal of Human Capital 11, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 9–10, https://doi.org/10.1086/690235.

Four or more authors

3. Rachel A. Bay et al., “Predicting Responses to Contemporary Environmental Change Using Evolutionary Response Architectures,” American Naturalist 189, no. 5 (May 2017): 465, https://doi.org/10.1086/691233.

News/Magazine Article

1. Rebecca Mead, “The Prophet of Dystopia,” New Yorker, 17 April 2017, 43.

2. Farhad Manjoo, “Snap Makes a Bet on the Cultural Supremacy of the Camera,” New York Times, 8 March 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/technology/snap-makes-a-bet-on-the-cultural-supremacy-of-the-camera.html.

Website Content

1. “Privacy Policy,” Privacy & Terms, Google, last modified 17 April 2017, https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/.

2. “About Yale: Yale Facts,” Yale University, accessed 1 May 2017, https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts.

Social Media Content

1. Pete Souza (@petesouza), “President Obama bids farewell to President Xi of China at the conclusion of the Nuclear Security Summit,” Instagram photo, 1 April 2016, https://www.instagram.com/p/BDrmfXTtNCt/.

Personal Communication

1. Jane Gomez, email message to author, 1 August 2017.

Figures/Images and Copyright
Authors of accepted manuscripts will be responsible for clearing the necessary reproduction rights for any images, photos, figures, music, or content credited to a third party (including content found on the internet), that fall outside of the fair use provisions described in US copyright law. Images, figures, and other ancillary materials should be submitted as separate files, following the guidelines below.

  • Please provide the highest quality figure format possible.
  • Please be sure that all imported scanned material is scanned at the appropriate resolution: 1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale, and 300 dpi for color.
  • Figures must be saved separate to text. Please do not embed figures in the manuscript file.
  • Files should be saved as one of the following formats: TIFF (tagged image file format), PostScript or EPS (encapsulated PostScript), and should contain all the necessary font information and the source file of the application (e.g., CorelDraw/Mac, CorelDraw/PC).
  • Number figures in the order in which they appear in the manuscript (e.g., Figure 1, Figure 2). In multi-part figures, each part should be labeled (e.g., Figure 1(a), Figure 1(b)).
  • Figure captions must be saved separately, as part of the file containing the complete text of the manuscript, and numbered correspondingly.
  • The filename for a graphic should be descriptive of the graphic (e.g., Figure1, Figure2a).

Author Agreement
Please review the Author’s Rights and Warranties sections of the author agreement before submitting your article. The Departures in Critical Qualitative Research author agreement may be downloaded (in PDF) by clicking here.