CFP: Feminist Accountability and Transformative Justice - Special Issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly

We are irrevocably implicated in the systems of oppression we seek to dismantle, and the effects of those systems live with us and within us. Accountability—understood as taking responsibility for our contributions to and complicity in systemic harms—offers a framework for practicing feminist solidarity, building community, and supporting both individual and collective healing. This special issue explores feminist accountability as a practice that moves beyond punishment and retribution toward transformative justice as an ethical and political project. We are especially interested in work that engages the tensions, limits, and possibilities of accountability: not only as an ethical ideal, but as a lived, contested, and situated practice across interpersonal, institutional, and structural contexts. We invite submissions that examine how accountability is practiced today and how it intersects with broader frameworks of transformative justice. What does it mean to take responsibility for harm within feminist communities? How might accountability reshape our understandings of power, complicity, and solidarity? What challenges arise when transformative justice frameworks—often developed in grassroots and activist contexts—are brought into academic spaces? In keeping with Feminist Philosophy Quarterly’s commitment to inclusive, intersectional, and community-engaged feminist philosophy, we especially encourage submissions that engage and build upon the work of scholars from historically marginalized communities and those most affected by the forms of harm under discussion. Submissions may address, but are not limited to:

-Feminist accountability as a practice: its limits, tensions, and conditions of possibility
-Accountability beyond carceral logics: abolitionist and transformative approaches to harm
-Transformative justice as ethical and political praxis
-Responsibility, complicity, and refusal in conditions of structural injustice
-Practices of repair, restitution, and non-reconciliation
-Community-based responses to harm: care, conflict, and collective healing
-Navigating accountability in a context of backlash and reaction
-The misuse of accountability practices and procedures
-Accountability within feminist movements: power, exclusion, and internal critique
-Pedagogies of accountability: teaching, learning, and institutional responsibility
-The politics of “calling in,” “calling out,” and other modes of response
-Citation as accountability: feminist lineage-building and epistemic responsibility
-Coalition-building and solidarity across asymmetries of power
-Mutual aid, abolition feminism, disability justice, and transformative justice
-Intersections of restorative and transformative justice frameworks
-Feminist responses to interpersonal, gendered, and sexual violence
-Feminist responses to state violence, war, and genocide
-The ethics and politics of care within transformative justice practices

 
Submission Details:
Deadline: January 4, 2027
Length: Up to 9,000 words (including notes, excluding references)

Review Process: Double-anonymous peer review

File Format: PDF or Word (DOC/DOCX/RTF)

Submissions should be prepared for anonymous review, with all identifying information removed from the manuscript. Authors should submit two separate files: An anonymized manuscript & a title page including the paper title, author name(s), institutional affiliation(s), and contact information.

Submissions should be sent to the following email address: femacctj (at) gmail.com

Submissions must follow the Chicago Manual of Style (author–date system).

For full author guidelines, please see: https://ojs.lib.uwo.ca/index.php/fpq/information/authors

The special issue is planned for publication in late 2027/early 2028 in the journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly.

For any questions on this special issue, please contact the guest editors: Fulden İbrahimhakkıoğlu ([email protected]) and Amy Marvin ([email protected]).