Journal Manifesto
Intersectional Apocalypse is a student-run, peer-edited, open access journal focused on collecting and sharing knowledge that is intersectionally feminist, LGBTQ2IA+ positive, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive. We are a diverse group of students who are invested in intersectional feminist action, including amplifying marginalized perspectives through radical publishing. The title of our journal, Intersectional Apocalypse, refers to the way in which the world has already begun to end for certain people, and envisions a time when all feminist thought and action is intersectional and a new world is on the horizon. Through exploring how our experiences vary based on how our identities interact and intersect, we show that we are more than a single identity of women, or people of colour, or queers, but a combination that is unique. By engaging with many different communities, in different locations, and with different backgrounds, we are striving to have many varied points of view and experiences represented in our journal.
We believe that decolonial, queer, feminist, and anti-racist knowledge is too often under-represented in academic spaces, or inaccessible to those who would benefit from it most, and as such we strive to reject many traditional aspects of journal creation while also producing work that engages with relevant and important topics. The majority of academic journals are controlled by several large commercial publishers who rely on free labour from authors and peer reviewers, and charge university libraries and individuals exorbitant amounts for access to this knowledge and information -- which they themselves may have produced. In creating and sharing this journal openly and without restriction, we aim to exist in open protest to the capitalist and oppressive structures that restrict and control academic publishing.
Intersectional Apocalypse is invested in the Diamond mode of open access -- meaning that readers don’t have to pay in order to access the work and that authors maintain their rights over their creations and don’t have to pay to make their work openly available. By doing this, we are challenging the consolidation of power that the major commercial publishers have accrued, which has played a part in producing huge discrepancies in knowledge and power afforded to different social groups. Additionally, being open access contributes to a growing movement that aims to recreate the ways in which knowledge is created, shared, and owned, and declares that buried knowledge will not stay down. The creators of the journal are passionate about having knowledge free and available to those who seek it. Having open access to knowledge is a form of activism and we are here to disturb imbalances of power. Furthermore, we reject notions of gatekeeping within academia and the limitation of knowledge creation to those with access to post-secondary institutions, and aim to uplift forgotten voices by not restricting who can publish with us. Intersectional Apocalypse also aims to push the boundaries of peer review. Our goal is to create a collaborative, engaging experience for journal contributors. With this process we aim to give our contributors the ability to not only share knowledge, but to collaborate with their peers on their work. It is our goal to create a positive, engaging, and inclusive platform where we as a community can work to unpack oppressive narratives and systems.
Licensing
Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC): This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.
Any of our contributors is free to choose a different license, and should they prefer a different license, it shall be made known in their submission. If you choose to do so, please specify this in your submission.
If any derivative work is made that would infringe upon any license used in our journals, permission must be requested from our contributors.
Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels: To offer due respect and acknowledgement of the knowledge of Indigenous communities' right to limit access to some forms of information, some of the work present in Intersectional Apocalypse may also use Traditional Knowledge Labels, as developed by Local Contexts. Should any submitted work be restricted through the use of Traditional Knowledge, it will be hosted on another site to better enforce the limited reach requested by the TK Label used. If you would like to use TK licensing, please specify so in your submission. For more information, please visit the Local Contexts website explaining the use of TK Labels.