Current call for submissions:
Imaginations Journal invites submissions for an open issue, to be published in December 2025. We are interested in articles that discuss the social and political inheritances of the image across periods (e.g. decades, centuries, moments, etc.) and geographies (e.g. continents, nations, regions, etc.) as well as the aesthetic considerations of image producers in light of emergent technologies. General submissions may include the following: new technologies, interactions between text and image, text as image, images and the self, dynamic and static images, omnipresence of screens (big and small), thinkers of the image, images across concerns, disciplines, and methodologies (e.g., visuality, medicine, science, politics, gender, sexuality, race, digital humanities, environmental humanities, forms of being and knowledge, etc.).
See recent open issues 10.2 and 15.1 for example: ‘Link to Open Issue 10.2’ and ‘Link to Open Issue 15.1’
At Imaginations Journal, we invite creative pieces as well as traditional academic articles (9,000 words max.). We can and do publish innovative multimodal works (e.g. video essays, photo essays, etc.) as well as original art works. We will also accommodate publications in any language, and we will work with authors in order to ensure meaningful translation of their work into English.
A clean manuscript is crucial for a timely and smooth production process. These guidelines are meant to minimize friction and unnecessary formatting issues.
For more details, and before submitting your article, please refer to the Complete Style Guide. A PDF version is available here.
Full submissions should be sent by 31 October 2025 to be guaranteed review. We will consider late submissions. Please send messages to:
Deadline: 500-word abstract due January 15, 2025, papers due June 1, 2025
In an age of endless disruption, how do we live with the rapid advances and early analyses of artificial intelligence software, moral panic, and the voracious consumption of already oppressive datasets and social relations? We have already seen some deep scholarly engagement with issues of ethical database scraping and intellectual property violations (Crawford 2021; Delfanti & Phan 2024; Luka & Millette 2018), environmental impacts (Hogan & Lepage-Richer 2024; Valdivia 2023; MIT Technology Review Insights 2023; Torres 2024), and workflow interferences and augmentations (Ahmed et al 2024; Grohmann et al 2022; Khovanskaya et al 2022; Poell, Nieborg & Duffy 2022). How can we imagine and design critical and creative futures (Alcoff 2020; Nakayama & Morris 2015; Tozer et al 2023; Varon & Peña 2021) for artists, activists, scholars, and consumer-worker-citizens considering these latest AI developments? How do we resist (re)colonization impulses (Couture & Toupin 2019; Campbell & Forman 2023; Hampton 2023) in the AI context? Building on recent work (e.g., Chan et al., 2020; Cifor et al, 2019; Coleman 2023; Lewis 2024; Ricaurte Quijano 2021; Stinson & Vlaad 2024), how can we imagine rebuilding… revisualizing… repairing… refusing… the world(s) we live and work in? In this issue, we want to explore a range of critical framings and interventions that understand AI as the latest wave of technological change that may be able to help or hinder us in our weird and sometimes wonderful daily grind(s), rather than as a totalizing and inevitable replacement of human existence.
In this call, we seek accounts and theorizations of research and everyday projects that carry with them a critical analysis of or intervention into the enigmatic promises of AI imaginaries. But we aim to make a larger socio-cultural contribution. We seek to critically imagine and design insightful, sustainable and joyful futures in the context of ubiquitous digital demands and possibilities, including the recent explosion of AI in our work worlds and everyday lives.
This special issue will bring together submissions across arts, humanities, visual culture, and media fields of study as well as feminist STS, critical disability, knowledge media design, research-creation, world-building and futurisms studies. We aim to generate provocations, approaches, and examples that can address the renewed racialized, gendered, colonial, economic, and geopolitical power dynamics at play in the AI context.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- The ways in which the notion of “self” slithers in the AI context, flowing and drifting between materiality and virtuality, including melding together AI capabilities with/around/about prosthetics, digital intimacy, and affect;
- Critiquing reactive and derivative predictive models and modes of futurisms and imagining ways of looking that incorporate but go beyond foresight, “for-see,” and socially just world-building opportunities;
- How we can create meaning-making with emerging technologies, reversing the notion that technological creators do not know how technology will be used by general publics and vice-versa;
- The ways that we are already experiencing AI apathy, as forms of technological fatigue, civic disengagement, or pedagogical frustration;
- How AI operates as the latest technological “disruptor” in a digital landscape littered with the debris of its predecessors. For example, how do early adopters and artists harvest the opportunities presented by AI as a society and disciplinary “disruptor” in social and commercialized ways?
- Why and how tension is amped up through conflicts generated by open or accessible “democratic” modes of creativity and inclusion and the commercialization impetus of “Creative Industries.” For example, how can the idea of “open AI” and the operations of “Open AI” (the company) be theorized together or separately;
- Analysing the specificity of impacts of Generative AI on creativity and visual cultures in/from the Global South, potentially extending into considerations of how industrial structures are being normalized in Global North (minority) forms, reshaped by AI and emergent digital technologies;
- The potential for AI to outright kill, or by some means rekindle (sub)cultural literacies, expressions, and formats (fanfiction, social media, video, audio, publishing);
- Curatorial critiques and valorizations of AI exhibitions and artistic work, including how some tools limit or support the creative explorations of marginal artists, artistic legacies and narratives;
- The effect of AI on creative labour, how systems of cultural production and distribution inevitably privilege capital over creative workers and consumer-worker-citizens, and how active resistance to such privilege can repair and revive these fields of production and distribution
Contributions may include: research articles or manifestos (4,000-6,000 words), video essays, multimedia research-creation pieces, and exhibition and book reviews (approx. 1,500 words).
Contributions may be in English or French. Email your 500 word abstract by January 15, 2025 and/or enquiries to:
Maryelizabeth.luka@utoronto.ca
* While an academic journal can’t pay directly for an artistic contribution, we recognize that this is a tough and precarious time for artists and that artists ought to be compensated for their expertise and time. We want to support artists whose work is featured in this special issue of Imaginations.
We can offer compensation for up to three artists for preparatory time through a micro-residency with the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) Cluster of Scholarly Prominence at the University of Toronto Scarborough, once their abstract is accepted for development. This will mean that we will include the contribution in the special issue of Imaginations, following peer review, and will feature it on the CLCF blog, pointing to the contribution in the journal. The contribution could be a reflection on or analysis of their own work, or a presentation of select images or outputs from their own work, for example. Using CARFAC and IMAA preparation, artist residency, and writing fees as a basis for estimated time and effort, each micro-residency would result in a $1,200 honorarium payment.
Guest Edited by Mary Elizabeth (ME) Luka, Caroline Klimek, and Aline Zara, University of Toronto.
In this call, we seek accounts and theorizations of research and everyday projects that discuss the critical perspectives on food images and visual narratives. We aim to draw on food’s narrative power to determine the various aspects of food storytelling in the past, present, and future, which reflect the values of people, cultures, and regions. We seek to integrate perspectives on food to examine the everydayness of food and its capacity to explore the human world.
This special issue will bring together submissions from the arts, humanities, and sociology, including but not limited to cultural studies, food studies, media studies, and visual culture. We aim to generate approaches, examples, and provocations to address the renewed racialized, gendered, colonial, economic, social, cultural, and/or political power dynamics in food imagery and storytelling.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Today, we use food to tell stories about culture, ethnicity, family, identity, and religion around the world. Food storytelling encompasses branded imagery, digital products, film, photography, and publications. Food's ordinary everydayness makes it a quintessential object for studying its intervention in society and its nuanced functioning in the human world (Curtin & Heldke 1992). Its socio-cultural character enables the examination of the relationship between people, communities, and cultures, and the meanings they construct through food in a continuously evolving world (Murcott 1996).
Food is a source of power, memory, and identity, as well as a communication system of beliefs, practices, values, and meanings (Barthes 1961/2008; Corvo 2016). Food imagery is more potent and more communicative in today’s visually dominated world as it is present across all communication mediums, including advertisements, films, journalism, digital platforms, and social media (Mitchell 1995). Food imagery not only captures appetizing meals in pictures but also reproduces aspects of reality, including food production, hunger, and insecurity in newspapers (Bourdieu 1999), as well as gender portrayals in magazines and television shows (Parasecoli 2005; Rhee 2019).
Pictorial representations of food facilitate the transmission of stories and visual messages in various contexts, enabling image consumers to perceive, create, and interpret meaning (Berger 1972). This polysemic power of food images empowers the production and spread of marginalized stories in diasporic communities, the re-conceptualization of ethnic foods, and the concepts of appropriating and consuming ethnicity (Barthes 1961/2008; Parasecoli 2014; Ray 2017) as well as the evolving landscape of food and culinary tourism (Everett 2008). Visual stimulations also highlight the hegemonic power struggles between mainstream or accepted foods and ethnic or “othered” foods, which represent historically marginalized communities and their cultural histories (Stano 2015). Building on current work, this issue examines a range of critical interventions that explore the intricacies of food’s everyday-ness, its meaning-making characteristics, and its commentary on society.
Contributions may include: research articles or manifestos (4,000-6,000 words), video essays, multimedia research-creation pieces, exhibition and book reviews (approx. 1,500 words), or snackables (short academic essays of approx. 1000 to 2000 words).
Contributions may be in English or French, and if you would like to submit a piece in any other language, please contact us. Email your 300-word abstract by November 30, 2025, and/or enquiries to: antara24@yorku.ca
For information on submission guidelines, please refer to: https://imaginationsjournal.ca/index.php/imaginations/submission_guidelines
Barthes, Roland. “Towards A Psychology of Contemporary Food Consumption”, Food and Culture: A reader (3rd ed.), edited by Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. Routledge. 2013. pp. 50-62 (Original work published in 1961)
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. Penguin. 1972.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Social Definition of Photography”, Visual Culture: The Reader, edited by Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall. Sage. 1999. pp. 287-318.
Corvo, Paolo. Food Culture, Consumption and Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Curtin, Deane W., and Lisa M. Heldke, editors. Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food. Vol. 704. Indiana University Press, 1992.
Everett, Sally. "Beyond The Visual Gaze? The Pursuit of an Embodied Experience Through Food Tourism." Tourist Studies 8.3 (2008):. 337-358.
Mitchell, William John Thomas. Picture theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press. 1995.
Murcott, Anne. (1996). “Food as an Expression of Identity”, The Future of The Nation-state, edited by Sverker Gustavsson and Leif Lewin. Routledge. 1996. pp. 49-77.
Parasecoli, Fabio. "Feeding Hard Bodies: Food and Masculinities in Men's Fitness Magazines." Food and Foodways 13.1-2 (2005): 17-37.
Parasecoli, Fabio. "Food, Identity, and Cultural Reproduction in Immigrant Communities." Social Research: An International Quarterly 81.2 (2014): 415-439.
Ray, Krishnendu. "Bringing The Immigrant Back Into The Sociology of Taste." Appetite 119 (2017): 41-47.
Rhee, Jooyeon. "Gender Politics in Food Escape: Korean Masculinity in TV Cooking Shows in South Korea." Journal of Popular Film and Television 47.1 (2019): 56-64.
Stano, Simona. "Semiotics of Food." International handbook of semiotics. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2015. pp. 647-671.
WHO WE ARE
Imaginations is a multilingual, open-access journal of international visual cultural studies. It is published twice yearly and is double-blind peer-reviewed. As a knowledge democracy project, Imaginations is free to submit to and free to read. Founded at the University of Alberta in 2010, the journal is funded by the federal granting agency of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Imaginations | ISSN: 1918-8439
Editor-in-Chief: Markus Reisenleitner
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