sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies
Submission Guidelines
Submissions to the upcoming 2021 volume of sprinkle are now open. For 2021 (Volume 14), we are soliciting both scholarly and creative submissions, as follows:
scholarly submissions:
- critical engagement with genders and sexualities from all academic disciplines
- intersectional explorations of feminist and queer studies
- 3000 words maximum, submitted as an MS Word or pdf file
- formatting and citations in APA style
creative submissions:
- critical engagement with genders and sexualities in any of the following formats:
- text files (e.g., poetry; fiction; creative nonfiction): 3000 words maximum
- audio files (e.g., spoken word; interview): 10 minutes maximum
- image files (e.g., photography; painting): minimum 300 dpi for color and minimum 600 dpi for grayscale
- video files (e.g., short film; animation): 10 minutes maximum
- Please include a short creator’s statement (500 words maximum) explaining how the work is informed by and/or contributes to intersectional explorations of feminist and queer studies
- Please note that, for creative submissions, due to the current parameters of the Digital Commons submission process, potential contributors are asked to submit the creator’s statement as the primary file and their creative work as an additional file. For more information on this, please see the Formatting Requirements section of our Policies page.
For Volume 14, the sprinkle Editorial Team especially encourages submissions that provide commentary and analysis on contemporary matters and current events, including, but by no means limited to: bodies, embodiment, and body politics; BIPOC & BLM activism; law and policy; the sociopolitical effects of COVID-19; and environmental justice & the climate crisis/action.
Additional formatting and technical details, as well as prior volumes, are available throughout sprinkle’s Digital Commons site. In particular, please consult our Aims & Scope page for more information about our publishing commitments at sprinkle, as well as the Policies page for additional submission information (e.g., who can submit; general guidelines).
Please note that submissions must be authored/created by undergraduate students, recent graduates (undergraduate degrees completed within the last year), or graduate students in their first year of graduate studies.
Also, all authors/creators are required to complete our Submission Agreement, available online as part of the Digital Commons electronic submission process, and authors/creators are responsible for securing relevant permissions/rights to reproduce materials (including, but not limited to, maps, diagrams, images, and video clips) borrowed from existing sources as well as consent and assent for any identifiable images and/or artifacts that might be included in a submission. For more on this, see the section titled “On reproducing the work of others” and the suggestions about completing a plagiarism check before submitting below.
Submissions for Volume 14 are due no later than April 1, 2021; click the “Submit Work” link to begin your submission.
Note that Cal Poly students will be able to log in to the Digital Commons site to submit via their Cal Poly Portal login information; students from all other institutions who already have a Digital Commons account should be able to use their existing login credentials to submit. Students from other institutions who have never created a Digital Commons account will need to create one before initiating their submission.
If you have questions, please contact us at sprinkle.journal@gmail.com.
Finally, please review these additional guidelines and suggestions related to copyright and related matters, adapted from Georgia Journal of Science.
On reproducing the work of others
The journal cannot reproduce any image that is not the authors’/creators’ original work unless we have permission from the copyright holder. Examples of such images include figures from papers not published by sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies; images and media borrowed from the internet and additional existing sources (e.g., advertisements; film stills; video clips); maps from Google or GIS; screen shots/grabs of materials from outside sources; and practically anything else that is not an author’s work.
It is the author’s responsibility to obtain permission for any and all such materials they would like to reproduce with their submission. In many cases, this is as easy as finding a company’s permissions page on the internet and adhering to the requirements that are described. For example, we can publish a map from Google, but only when we and the author have followed Google’s requirements. Also, many images are freely available for reproduction under Creative Commons license. The author and this journal need only follow the requirements of that license. Sometimes a copyright owner only wants attribution, but a credit line is often not sufficient to secure permission. In some cases, the author must correspond with the copyright holder to obtain that permission.
Even images from government websites and GIS maps can present a problem. Third parties may own the copyright to such images or the layers used to construct a map in GIS. Again, it is an author’s/creator’s responsibility to provide evidence to the editors that such materials can be reproduced.
Plagiarism check
Prior to submission of a new manuscript, authors/creators are encouraged to run their to-be-submitted version through Turnitin, Grammarly or other such software to check for plagiarism. In your letter of submission, please note whether such actions were taken. Any quoted material, even as short as two or three words, must be enclosed in quotation marks.