CFP Special Issue, Volume 22 (2026) : Contingency, Precarity, and Jeopardy: Labor in the Space Between

Abstract Submission Due Date: April 1, 2025.
Notification of Acceptance: May 15, 2025.
Accepted Essays Due Date: January 1, 2026.

It has become a cliché in academic spaces to acknowledge the increasing precarity of work in our field. University and government austerity, state censorship of LGBTQ+ and DEI-related learning, and the increasing ubiquity of AI replacements for intellectual labor produce interlocking crises that motivate us to hand-wringing commentary, but also to active response. Working in an environment of economic and existential uncertainty about our jobs and our fields, academic laborers have exited their roles, made do within limitations, adapted creatively, rebelled, and found new modes of solidarity—and sometimes all of these within the span of an academic year. 

This special issue calls for a response to our own precarity that draws out the lineages, theoretical structures, and persistent historical inequities that tie our experiences to those of laborers in “the space between.”

Not unlike our era, the years from 1918-1940 were marked by shifts in technology, changes in understandings of gender, racist rhetoric and violence, and the rise of fascist movements, all of which impacted workspaces in the home, the factory, the farm, and the office. We hope that this issue will illuminate the ways in which the uncertainties and dangers of labor under capitalism shift and persist, unite and divide workers, pressure identities differentially, and self-perpetuate over time. 

We welcome papers across disciplines that expand our ideas of labor, question the value of labor, point to alternate economic systems, and commemorate laborers who resisted and who succumbed to labor’s precarities. Essays on artistic work and the artist as laborer in the modern period are appreciated, but we hope to publish these alongside essays that call attention to the domestic, industrial, academic, and agricultural labor that made art possible. While Marxist engagements with the conditions of labor are part of this conversation, the frameworks we envision may move far beyond Marx in their theoretical orientations.

Accordingly, we seek to make space in this issue for contingent and/or precarious academic laborers to theorize contingently. As la paperson writes in A Third University is Possible, “A recognition of impossibility means to theorize contingently—that is, my thinking is temporary; my right to think aloud is contingent on the apparatus of legitimated colonial knowledge production that ought to be abolished.” While critiquing the systems of power that create our field’s dependence on precarity and contingency, we recognize contingent laborers’ often-uncelebrated ability to perceive and intervene creatively in those systems, to imagine what it would look like to abolish them. We welcome approaches to the topic and the field that demonstrate what insights become possible only by thinking through and with contingency, precarity, and jeopardy. 

Ultimately, we hope in this issue to bring together scholars who take seriously our histories of precarity and engage with abolitionist futures in and beyond the academy.

We welcome any proposals related to this theme; suggested topics include the following: 

• Migrant labor, its exigencies and effects on families and communities, its racialized nature, the impacts of agricultural crisis
• Labor organization between the wars, especially as experienced or represented by marginalized identity groups or professions
• Post-WWI labor experiences of returning soldiers, including experiences with collecting disability and encountering barriers to and accommodation for disability in the workplace
• Medical and other labor associated with the flu pandemic of 1918, its risks and long-term consequences
• Maternal labor in childbirth, the impacts of eugenics, medicalization of childbirth, and changes in the legal status of contraception on reproductive labor
• Violence at the workplace, including genre fiction representations of detectives’ or criminals’ labor, as well as representations of violence in workplace settings or around labor organization 
• Representations and/or realities of forced or compelled labor, including the labor of incarcerated people
• Carework, its gendered and racialized dimensions within the household, as well as the complexities, dangers, and rewards of carework in other people’s houses 
• Creative labor both in and outside of recognized industries such as radio, film, and publishing, as well as the unrecognized and uncompensated labor of amateurs, fans, and other industry outsiders
• Physical labor, its idealization in capitalist and fascist frameworks, its impacts on the body, its gendered and racialized dimensions
• Teaching modern/modernist literature in a precarious era for academic work, particularly from the perspectives of contingent faculty 
• Effects of austerity, politically motivated censorship of education, and the corporatization of the university on teaching and research in our fields
• Contemporary and/or postmodern representations of labor in the space between in all cultural forms

Please submit abstracts of essays and any inquiries to the editors, Layne Craig (a.layne.craig@tcu.edu) and Alexandra Edwards (a.k.edwards@tcu.edu). Abstracts of essays due April 1, 2025. Notice of acceptance will be given by May 15, 2025. If accepted, essays of 6,000-7,500 words, with MLA citation style, will be due by January 1, 2026.