“COLLECTIVE VOICE OF THE VOICELESS”: 
CAMPUS VIOLENCE, RESISTANCE, AND STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL

Editors: Martina “Mick” Powell (guest editor) and Heather M. Turcotte

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In 2014, over fifty US college and university collectives filed formal Title IX complaints against their institutions for a variety of reasons, including the mishandling of sexual assault cases by the administration.  Students, faculty, and staff nationwide continue to face both blatant and covert entangled acts of racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transantagonism, and xenophobia, which, when presented to administrations, are systematically ignored, rewritten, and/or co-opted for dismissive neoliberal civility campaigns. This recent mobilization across US campuses materializes within, and because of, historical and transnational contexts of violence against communities who resist and defy the intersecting structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and capitalism.

In her foreword to soulscript, an anthology of poetry edited by June Jordan, Staceyann Chin writes, “the collective voice of the voiceless is still one of the most powerful tools of change.” This forum is concerned with the ways in which “voiceless” members of college, university, and academic communities respond to the particular set of violences that surround them through coalition building, active resistance, and legal measurements. Additionally, we are interested in how campus collectives show solidarity with national and transnational publicized sites of violence, particularly around sexual assault, police brutality, and the lynchings, kidnappings, and mass murders of individuals, students, and communities. Importantly, this forum aims to serve as a space for critical conversations on surviving campus culture, academia, and international state violence.

Authors are invited to submit essays, poems, videos, pictures, and creative prose pieces that address any of these topics in relationship to college, university, and academic life from a variety of geopolitical locations (and in relationship to other educational structures):

• Institutionalized, individual, and intersectional violence: In what ways is violence operating individually and systematically in your space? How is it connected and informed by other sites of violence?;
• Shaping, structuring, and sustaining productive and safe coalitions, solidarities, and community;
• Responding to the reproduction of violence within coalitional work; 
• Accounting for identity, power, privilege, and inequality that shape movement participation and collective responses (e.g., intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, citizenship, religion, ability, and modes of embodiment);
• Transformative methods of knowledge production and exchange that builds accountable community praxis: How do you subvert violent, pervasive forms of knowledge? How do you disrupt discursively violent academic spaces?;
• Organizing acts of resistance: How, why, when? What mobilizations are most effective or not?;
• Creating a collective voice and ways of documenting it;
• The productivities and limitations of the law: What does law (and rights) offer us? What does it eclipse? How do we decriminalize our campuses and refuse increased militarization and surveillance of students, faculty, and staff?;
• Strategies for survival: Every day and long term visions;
• Communities of care: How do coalitions (whether formally or informally structured) care for one another? What is our collective sense of care?; and
• Self-Care

Submissions should be roughly 1,500 words and are due by March 30, 2015. Please submit your work for consideration to “College Feminisms Submissions,”  and indicate in your cover letter that you would like your submission to be considered for the forum. More general information on the submission process can be found at: submission guidelines.