Aims and Scope

Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (Departures) publishes peer reviewed, innovative, experimental, aesthetic, and provocative works on the theories, practices, and possibilities of critical qualitative research. We welcome and showcase exemplary work in performative writing, performance texts, fictocriticism, creative nonfiction, photo essays, short stories, poetry, personal narrative, autoethnography, and other arts-based critical research. We are deeply committed to publishing interdisciplinary qualitative work that engages postcolonial and transnational perspectives in both local and global contexts. Departures seeks to publish critical and innovative qualitative work on contemporary political and social justice issues, such as climate change, food insecurity, the refugee crisis, #BlackLivesMatter, #metoo, immigration, DACA, LGBTQ rights, indigenous rights, and more.

In our call for manuscripts, we prioritize submissions that exhibit a departure from conventional qualitative methodologies. These departures may be theoretical, analytical, methodological, or representational. We invite authors to articulate these departures both in their approach and format and through the substantive contributions they make towards methodological innovation. We encourage authors to actively attend to the nature of their departure in their submissions and explain it in their manuscript in ways that are congruent to their overall work.

We actively solicit and invite participation from scholars who experience minoritization and/or historical under-representation of one or more form. We invite scholars who are engaged in poetic, autoethnographic, de/colonial, fictional, and other creative work from their various contexts, positions, and locations. We welcome informal queries.