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Call for Manuscripts

The 2025/26 Volume 24 Submission Period is Now Open.

Kaleidoscope: A Graduate Journal of Qualitative Communication Research will accept submissions until February 28, 2026 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: Communication & Play

Play is typically considered to be unserious and light-hearted. However, as can be seen in everyday examples of playfulness such as identity expression, or the intensity with which video game players approach their favorite games, play can deeply enrapture its participants. As stated by anthropologist and play theorist Brian Sutton-Smith (1997), “[T]he word play stands for a category of very diverse happenings” (p. 3, emphasis in original). Throughout his work, Sutton-Smith emphasizes play as being characterized by ambiguity: that while we might all know “play” when we see it or feel it, we can rarely agree on a definition when trying to put it into words. I find this ambiguity to be a strength when centering play as the focus for this issue’s call for papers. To put it simply (and perhaps a bit playfully), I encourage authors to play with our understandings of play.

In addition to general submissions, this call asks authors to consider the broad ways we encounter and experience play in our lives as communicators. As you are preparing your manuscripts, you may consider the following questions: How does play inform our communication practices? In what ways do understandings of play and identity intersect with one another? In what contexts do we typically use language, concepts, and theories of play to understand and explain our experiences? If used in different contexts (e.g., the workplace), how might play reframe our understandings of those communicative experiences?

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.

References

Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press.

For additional information and questions, contact Mario Sanders at 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)

To submit a manuscript, please visit Submit Article.

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-mailkalscopejrnl@gmail.com for inquiries.