JISD Call for Papers: Special Issue on Indigenous Resistance

2025-09-08

In this moment of accelerating fascist, imperial, and capitalist aggression, Indigenous peoples stand at the frontlines of struggle. Across the globe—from the genocide in Palestine, to the extractivist projects in Africa, Canada and Latin America to the ongoing illegal occupations of Hawaiʻi and Puerto Rico, and to the state-sponsored violence within the U.S., including deportations, incarceration, policing, and the stripping away of protections—Indigenous communities face colonial brutality, militarized dispossession, and structural assaults on their territories.

 

And yet, Indigenous resistance endures and remains steadfast. Through knowledge-making, food sovereignty, defense of territory, cosmologies of love and care, and collective organizing, Indigenous peoples are imagining and creating worlds beyond the brutality of empire. These practices and traditions of resistance are pathways toward liberation, dignity, and collective determination.

For this special issue of the Journal of Indigenous Social Development (JISD), we invite manuscripts that center Indigenous resistance as both theory and praxis. We especially encourage work that:

  • Engages Indigenous cosmologies, methodologies, and epistemologies as foundations of resistance.
  • Examines how Indigenous communities protect and defend Mother Earth, territories, and life itself.
  • Critically interrogates capitalism, imperialism, heteronormativity, and white supremacy.
  • Imagines and enacts futures grounded in collective autonomy, dignity, and liberation.
  • Draws on decolonial, transnational, and Queer frameworks that honor Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

We welcome diverse forms of scholarship, including critical analyses, community-based research, stories of on-the-ground praxis. Submissions may take various forms–scholarly articles to poems and creative narratives, that honor Indigenous dignified struggle and imagine decolonial futures.

Submissions will be peer reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis until December 31, 2025.