𓇼OPEN CALL𓇼

Unlearning:
Against Western Knowledge Production

Closes 31.10.2025

re:wave is an East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) queer feminist press, open collective, and learning commons that publishes online and open-access written, oral, multimedia, and experimental work.

We are looking for contributors for our first issue.

While planning for our first issue, the editorial team at re:wave have had multiple conversations on the subject of mainstream knowledge production that is often West-centric. We have grown tired of neoliberal universities and academic publishing who tend to hold an authoritative voice over knowledge which reproduce hierarchies, extraction and racist thinking, such as singular Asian perspectives and western notions of Asian particularity.
In the footsteps of Toni Morrison, we do not want to “keep [you] explaining over and over again” (an excerpt from a 1975 panel in Portland State University) to the skeptic. Instead, we ask: what if we stopped answering back to the skeptic? What conversations would this silence redirect us to instead? What kind of knowledge surfaces when we learn from the ground up?

We are looking for any form of cultural texts that meets us at frustrations and questioning of West-centric knowledge production system that renders women, queer, and Asian to be ‘knowable’. These texts can include research articles, opinion pieces, interview pieces, cultural critiques, non-fictional reports, fictional stories, poetry, letters, translation, drawing, banner or placard designs, photography, short films, podcasts.

Here are some works/ideas that the editorial collective has been thinking about. Your submission does not have to be on any of these themes. Rather, we have included them to springboard your ideas:

Things That Make Me Feel Less Lonely by Mattilda Berstein Sycamore

Venus in Two Acts by Saidiya Hartman

Trinh T Minh Ha’s ‘Anti-Ethnography’

It Is Not a Desert Where Grandmother Sits by Menna Agha

Reconsidering Reparations by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

re:wave’s editorial team places our trust in the submitters based on their written works’ trajectory and their participation in their own activism. We are also prepared to learn and discuss together the editorial process required to develop our critical perceptions on queer-feminist ethics in research.

Please familialise yourself with our Submission Guidelines before submitting your work through our online submission form below.

We accept simultaneous submissions, but please do let us know as soon as possible if your work has been accepted elsewhere.

We also invite submissions beyond ESEA where there are overlapping narratives and junctions we can meet at. Our struggles do not exist in isolation but only in relation to one another, and through our publications, we aim to visualise our solidarity and interconnectedness.

Submissions close on the 31st of October 2025.

Submit here

by Pippa Sterk

read Pippa’s reflection on re:wave’s peer review processpeer reviewed by nadine makarem

Index