Proposed Formats: 

• Stories about your research (750-1500 words) 
• Auto-ethnographic stories (750-1500 words) 
• Comic panels/Chapbooks (3-10 pages), comic zine example, chapbook example
• Speculative fiction pieces (750-2000 words) 
• Interviews (10-30 minutes) 
• Original art works (300 DPI scans as PDFs, JPEGs, or PNGs)
• Podcast episodes (10-30 minutes), podcast episode example

Editorial Timeline

We are accepting abstract submissions until Friday, January 9th, 2026. The abstracts should be no less than 150 words, and no more than 500 words. You will be notified of your selection the week of January 19th, 2026.

Submit now!

The past 6 years at SPARK we’ve seen scholars from various fields tell stories about their research and experiences. When the editorial board met this fall to create the call for SPARK, we discussed the complex range of emotions that we are experiencing at this particular historical moment. Drawing inspiration from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s notions of ‘Capacious Grief’, ‘Joy in our Own Otherness’, and ‘Expansive Solidarity’, Volume 6 of SPARK looks broadly at the idea of working as researchers, creatives, and humans within the conditions that shape our understanding of the past, our present realities, and futures that we aspire for ourselves and our communities–taking into account the emotions and possibilities that this process generates. 

Through considering our inheritances at this critical time, we are able to locate our futures and legacies. Present conditions are inherited from our ancestors, communities, and traditions. When our predecessors depart this world, we are left with their struggles, gifts, and legacies of survivance. And we continue to grapple with the institutions and knowledge systems that remain behind them, both individually and as a society. Facing multiple ongoing genocides, inheritance of empire’s reach, attacks on critical race theory, erosion of civil and gender rights, and climate disasters, to name a few, our present conditions are overwhelming. Our present realities elicit a spectrum of emotions–yes, grief and anger, but also perhaps hope and gratitude, as future possibilities. How do we find solidarity in one another across generations, disciplines, and identities? How do we respond and relate to the entangled histories we have inherited from the past and the legacies we aspire to pass on to future generations? And how do we cultivate joy and excitement amidst a “polycrisis” of terror and injustice? This issue hopes to explore the collapsing intersection between the histories we inherit, the legacies we create, and the possibilities we imagine for collective futures.

Themes and Questions to Consider:

• Inverses: How do elements of inverses, such as  joy and grief or isolation and solidarity, play out in your scholarship?  
• Collective Futurities: What is our commitment to speculative futures? How does art, bioscience, or humanities inform radical imaginings for the future?
• Collective Memories: What places, people, objects, or institutions hold memory and legacy? How do institutional memory and community memory relate? What sparks memory to be generative, versus hindering?
• Context and Healing: What historical context(s) exists regarding research in or for your communities? Is this a place of grief or joy, or both? How does your work heal histories?
• Solastalgia: How do we mourn the changing climate, and find solace in community? What can grief bring to our academic practice? 
• Embodying Research: What intersecting emotions or embodied practices do you carry in your research? What are our responsibilities to our emotions as researchers?
• Inheriting Struggles: What struggles have you inherited? What knowledge or strategies have ancestors passed down for grappling with injustice?? What knowledge will you pass down to the next generation of scholars? 
• Identities: What identities are a gift to inherit and what are a challenge? How does (re)creating and intersecting identities inform your research? How does your scholarship enact the identity of ancestors-in-training?