Pitches wanted (racial capitalism) | $100-$250 per piece

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: SCIENCE FOR THE PEOPLE

Deadline: 25 November 2020

The BIPOC Caucus of Science for the People and Science for the People Magazine are now accepting submissions to our Spring 2021 issue, Racial Capitalism. Find our submission guidelines and submission form below (o en español aquí), and read more about contributing here.

RACIAL CAPITALISM IN THE AGE OF CONFLICT, CONTAGION, AND CLIMATE CHANGE

The COVID-19 pandemic is disproportionately killing communities of color. Peaceful protests and voting alone have not stopped police from killing Black people. BIPOC and low-income communities are at the frontlines of the ever-worsening climate crisis. Faced with these ongoing crises, as well as global systems of oppression propped up predominantly by neoliberal financial systems and US imperialism, ongoing and new uprisings of People’s movements, from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter, continue to inspire resistance and transformation. How can we further explain and fight systems of oppression, while building and supporting systems of liberation? How is scientific enterprise complicit in, yet also poised to fight, a global system of racial capitalism?

Racial capitalism, originally defined by political theorist Cedric Robinson, is a framework that analyzes how the capitalist mode of production locates racialized groups within a system of global value-creation and -extraction. This racialization usually falls along social categories, like race and national origin, to perpetuate the exploitation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). Racial capitalism reduces social relations to forms of exploitation: from tokenism and cooptation in interpersonal relations to systems of dispossession, incarceration, imperialism, and genocide. As legal scholar Nancy Leong says, racial capitalism “[degrades] that identity by reducing it to another thing to be bought and sold.” Scientific study and industry have long been structured to perpetuate racial capitalism in the US and around the world.

The BIPOC Caucus of Science for the People (SftP) believes that for SftP to commit to our mission of being a radical science organization dedicated to anti-oppression, it behooves us to publish writing on the impact that racial capitalism has on BIPOC communities around the world as exercised through STEM education and industry.

For the spring 2021 issue of SftP magazine, “Racial Capitalism in the Age of Conflict, Contagion, and Climate Change,” the BIPOC Caucus is requesting proposals for articles, interviews, book reviews, and artwork exploring questions such as,

• How is science implicated in the disparities and challenges experienced by BIPOC?
• What are actions that scientists can take to confront anti-Blackness and promote anti-racist and decolonial practices?
• What BIPOC-led organizations are contesting racial capitalism through the lens of science?
• What social imaginaries and forms of resistance can we create and celebrate in this moment?

TOPICS MAY INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:

• Racialized exclusion, targeting, and disparities in accessing education resources (Govt/Military Funding, Student Debt, HBCUs)
• Environmental Racism and impact of the climate crisis on BIPOC communities
• Impacts of COVID-19 on BIPOC communities
• #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia
• Neocolonial knowledge production in the Global South (brain drain, labor migration, diaspora movements, etc)
• Anti-Blackness and exploitation in government STEM agencies and academia
• The corporatization of BIPOC technical organizations (NSBE, GEM, etc.)

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Submit proposals here or in the form below.

Deadline for submissions: November 25, 2020

We accept proposals for features, opinions, book and media reviews, and artwork. Articles can be proposed in languages other than English.

Please keep proposals under 300 words 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 will 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 the intersection of science. 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.

TYPES OF ARTICLE AND RATES

• For short pieces of 600-1000 words, often published via SftP Online, we pay $100. We have previously published poetry in this category as well as prose.
• For slightly longer pieces — reviews, columns, and other articles with lengths from 1200 to 1500 words — we pay $200.
• For feature-length stories, with lengths of 2000 words and above, we pay $250.

CONTACT INFORMATION:

• Submissions: Via the webform (scroll down the page)
• Website: https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/

TO HELP YOU CRAFT YOUR PITCH:

• Learn more about the publication: Science for the People is dedicated to building and promoting social movements and political struggles around progressive and radical perspectives on science and society. It is committed to the democratic practice of science for the benefit of humanity and the planet. More information here.
• Read through a selection of recent articles/stories on its website.
• Check out our collection of pitch excerpts on this page and find more sample pitches at The Open Notebook Database and at SuccessfulPitches.com.