Submit by October 17, 2025 for a Special Issue of Wicazo Sa Review
This special issue emerges from the conviction Indigenous youth are not passive subjects of research but active collaborators and architects of futurity and worldmaking. Guided by critical Indigenous Studies, Indigenous feminisms, and youth-centered methodologies, we seek works attending to our refusals, kinship, educational, and relational knowledges as generative practices and pursuits of sovereignty and decolonization.
We welcome all interdisciplinary submissions that explore questions such as:
- How are Indigenous youth creating theory, art, and/or political action that exceed the structures of colonialisms and capitalism?
- In what ways do Indigenous youth practices and youth-led scholarship unsettle and intervene in colonial theory, archives, institutions, and knowledge systems?
- How can storytelling, oral histories, sound, visual art, film, and embodied practices emerge and sustain vital sites of Indigenous youth knowledge-making and frameworks?
- What does it mean to build and dialogue Indigenous youth studies, attending to care, contradiction, and the continuation of Indigenous epistemologies and teachings?
- How do Indigenous youth enact liberatory possibilities and sovereignty in everyday life—through education, organizing, digital worlds, cultural production, community care or beyond? How do young people envision and practice decolonization on their own terms?
This issue seeks contributions across genres—including scholarly articles, essays, stories, poetry, art, photography, and multimedia work—revealing the many registers and projects of the historical to present issues and resistance of Indigenous youth. We particularly invite pieces tracing and engaging connections between Indigenous and Black studies and feminist works, Afro-Indigenous experiences, Palestinian youth and resistance, or dwell in the relational tensions of decolonial struggles.
By placing Indigenous youth at the center, this special issue insists on the social, political and intellectual urgency of their visions. We aim to build a collective project documenting and learning from their movements and commitments to life otherwise.
To share this information, please see: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G-ZdYJ7qqkA5mLpny-BbQJrm3XBwYUSL/view?usp=sharing
Submission Guidelines
Abstracts should be no more than 400 words, outlining the main argument, method, and/or creative approach.
Please include 3–5 keywords with your submission. Abstracts must be Indigenous-led to empower our voices, research, and scholarly work. Please include tribal affiliation(s) and your 100–150-word bio. Accepted authors will be invited to submit full pieces for peer review.
Submission Deadline: October 17, 2025
Submit abstracts and/or if you have questions, please direct to Kara Roanhorse: roanhorse@unm.edu

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