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Call for Manuscripts

The 2025 Volume 24 Submission Period is Now Open.

Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research will accept submissions until April 01, 2025 at 11:59 p.m.

Submission Guidelines

Submissions must not be under review elsewhere or have appeared in any other published form. Manuscripts should be no longer than 25 pages (double-spaced) or 7,000 words (including notes and references) and can be prepared following MLA, APA, or Chicago style. All submissions should include an abstract of no more than 150 words and have a detached cover page listing the author/s’ name, institutional affiliation, and contact information. Authors should remove all identifying references from the manuscript. To be hosted on the Kaleidoscope website, media files should not exceed 220 MB in size. Larger files can be streamed within the Kaleidoscope website but must be hosted externally. Authors must hold rights to any content published in Kaleidoscope, and permission must be granted and documented from all participants in any performance or presentation.

Special Call: Our Time

As I sit to write this special call, it is January 20th, 2025. It is both Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and inauguration day for the 47th US President. I’m remembering the political polling, the social media posts, the legacy media coverage, the enthusiastic conversations with others, the hope felt by so many when hearing their candidate speak, each an instance of communication regarding the presidential election and each a contribution to the discourse we experience throughout our lives. I’m wondering how we ended up here, again, and joking to myself that I should have saved last year’s special call (i.e., Resilience and Progress) for after the election. I’m reflecting on the past and present and imagining possible futures, both near and years away, for my communities and for me. That is what I’m asking authors to do, as well, for Kaleidoscope Volume 24, with the special call Our Time.

For this special call, I am interested in papers that reflect, through any topic, on one or more of these temporalities: the past, the present, the future. In particular, I am interested in research with (auto)ethnographic components that directly connect these larger abstractions to the people who (will) experience them.

As you are preparing your manuscript, consider the following guiding questions on both the personal and cultural/community levels. How did you/we get here? What is the role of the past in what comes after? What role do we play in the past, present, or future? What challenges does the present present? What does the future of the communication studies discipline look like? How do imagined futures shape the present? How are the past, present, and future intertwined? What ethical obligations should be considered when working to create the future?

The editor welcomes submissions from a variety of qualitative methodologies and mixed-methodological approaches, including critical/cultural analysis, web-based and new media research, autoethnography, poetic and arts-based inquiry, performance scripts, as well as other qualitative methods. Authors should identify in their cover letter whether their submissions address the special call. All submissions, including those for the special call, should follow regular submission guidelines. All authors must be graduate students at the time of submission.

To submit a manuscript, please visit opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/kaleidoscope.

For additional information and questions, contact Sean Maulding at kalscopejrnl@gmail.com.

To submit a manuscript, please visit opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/kaleidoscope

Inquires should be emailed to kalscopejrnl@gmail.com

Preparing Submission Materials

To submit your manuscript through OpenSIUC, click on “Submit manuscript” in the left sidebar. You will want to have the following materials ready:

  • Contact information for you (and co-authors, if applicable)
  • Article title
  • Shortened article title (for running head)
  • Key words
  • Abstract (150-word maximum)
  • Cover page footnote (could include a short description of your institutional affiliation, any acknowledgments to individuals who contributed to the article, and anywhere the article was presented prior to publication)
  • Full text of submission (manuscript in Word Doc or RTF format which not does exceed 25 double-spaced pages or 7,000 words and does not include any identifying information about the author)

Publication

Authors are completely responsible for the factual accuracy of their contributions and neither the Editorial Board of Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research nor the Department of Communication Studies, Southern Illinois University Carbondale accepts any responsibility for the assertions and opinions of contributors. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to quote lengthy excerpts from previously published articles.

Please e-mail kalscopejrnl@gmail.com for inquiries.