Pitches wanted (cooperation) | $100-$250 per piece

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE

Deadline: 25 August 2021

Science for the People seeks proposals for articles, art, and other content for the upcoming issue, “Cooperation: Theory and Practice for the Commons” (Volume 24, Number 3, Winter 2021).

Life under capitalism resembles a top-heavy house built on quicksand: not only are the people at the bottom drowning, the roof itself constantly collapses, crushing many, only to be propped up by stopgap fixes. It is “every person for themselves,” of atomized individuals with little regard for the community they support and which supports them. A society functioning according to logic of capital is not only irrational but also fatal to humanity. In due time, we on the left must displace and fundamentally restructure our current social system.

Towards this revolutionary goal, there are variegated strategies for both the short and long term: strengthening communities through mutual aid and for crisis response, organizing workplaces to challenge and seize production, contesting political power with mass uprisings, and more. One concept and practice is infused throughout these struggles: cooperation.

Herein, we define cooperation by 1) its contradiction to competition, and 2) its functioning at the level of collectives as opposed to that of individuals. With this, we seek submissions relating to the following themes:

• The science of cooperation: discussion ranging from evolutionary biology, ecology, and behavioral neuroscience, to sociology and political science, and about how scientific theories on cooperation, competition, and individualism reinforce and are influenced by capitalist ideologies.
• Cooperative endeavors in science: radical examples such as the creative commons, efforts to decommodify research, grassroots science education and policy activism, preferably with perspectives from Indigenous communities and the Global South.
• Critical history and political economy of cooperatives, collectivization, mutual aid, and other non-capitalist enterprises.

It is our hope that this issue will contribute to substantiating and reclaiming cooperation as a concept to guide the work of scientists and as praxis for social change. Ultimately, as social beings with common interests to survive and thrive, we owe ourselves this introspection and a call to radically cooperative actions.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Submit proposals here (English) or here (Spanish).

Deadline for submissions: August 25th

• We ask prospective authors to provide a detailed outline.
• We accept proposals for features, opinions, book and media reviews, artwork and more. You can read more about the kinds of articles we publish and our rates here.
• Please keep frameworks under one page and image uploads to 20 Mb total.
• Science for the People articles are geared toward non-specialists, and are written in a journalistic format and from a radical perspective. We consider submissions from scientists across the STEM fields, scholars working in science and technology studies, as well as non-scientists and non-specialists. We especially encourage submissions from activists and those organizing in the sciences, and those working in the humanities and arts at their intersection of science and technology. We particularly welcome women, people of color, non-binary individuals, and others traditionally underrepresented in these fields to send submissions to Science for the People.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

Submissions: Via the webform

Website: https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org