CALLS FOR SUBMISSIONS: Papers for Communication and Democracy’s Special Issue on Critical Race Theory 

Danielle Hodge, danielle.hodge@colorado.edu 

Special Issue Description

In 1995, critical race scholar Derrick Bell asked a pointed question of the legal critics of the time: “Who’s afraid of critical race theory?” Interrogating the ways critical race theory (CRT) was reduced to a discipline of “deficiencies,” Bell articulated CRT as an epistemology concerned with the racialization of law, power, and policy that demanded a process of radical assessment. Rearticulated as the “perfect villain” (Wallace-Wells, 2021) and a “divisive concept” (Vought, 2020) twenty-five years later, CRT has since been subject to an onslaught of nationwide assaults that seek to ban its teaching and discussion in both K-12 and higher education contexts. These bans have detrimental implications for free speech, academic freedom, and the possibility for a healthy democracy as they limit what can be taught, learned, and discussed about US history, race and racism, and the contemporary political sphere. Understanding and intervening in these attacks is thus of vital importance for scholars of communication and democracy.

Consequently, in this special issue, we ask: Who’s STILL afraid of critical race theory? We seek a venue to respond to the persistent attacks against non-white, but specifically, African American and Black thought, bodies, and lives. Importantly, we are concerned with how these intellectual ambushes are inextricable from broader attacks on democracy that CRT helps to explain. In other words, how do we understand CRT as a sociocultural and political lightning rod that has exposed a democratic and communicative crisis? 

Bell (1995) reminds us that “at a time of crisis, critics serve as reminders that we are being heard, if not always appreciated” (p. 908). Yet, in the face of so many attacks, the lack of being heard, let alone appreciated, is palpable. This special issue seeks to bring scholars together to be heard and to lay out an agenda for the relevance of CRT in the field of Communication. We seek to engage in the following kinds of questions:

1. What should Communication scholars be doing with CRT in their research and teaching? 
2. How does CRT move forward scholarship on race and communication? 
3. How do attacks on CRT help us to understand the relationships among race, communication, and democracy? 
4. What’s at stake for communication scholars whose epistemologies are systematically and systemically relegated to the margins? 
5. What does it mean to consider CRT as an insurgent epistemology? 
6. How can CRT be used to radically assess the attacks on CRT and African American Studies and re-evaluate Communication? 

Submission Guidelines

To reflect the tenets of CRT, we welcome manuscripts that take on a variety of forms that include traditional journal articles, counterstories (e.g., composite counterstories, narrated dialogue), and autoethnographies that align with the guidelines detailed by Communication and Democracy and are no more than 12,000 words. Please visit the website (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rfsy21) for further information and complete submission guidelines.

Full manuscripts should be submitted by January 15, 2025 to Communication and Democracy. Please select "Who's STILL afraid of critical race theory" when submitting your paper to ScholarOne. The issue is expected to be published by October 2025. 

Questions about this special issue should be directed to the guest editors, Danielle Hodge and Karma Chávez at danielle.hodge@colorado.edu and karma.chavez@utexas.edu.   

References

1. Bell, D. (1995). Who’s afraid of critical race theory? University of Illinois Law Review 1995(4), 893-910.
2. Wallace-Wells, B. (2021, June 18). How a conservative activist invented the conflict over critical race theory. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-inquiry/how-a-conservative-activist-invented-the-conflict-over-critical-race-theory
3. Vought, R. (2020). Memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies. Executive Office of the President. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/M-20-34.pdf