CALL for journal articles: “Building an Open Qualitative Science”

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CALL FOR ARTICLES

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences

ISSUE ON: Building an Open Qualitative Science

The qualitative research tradition appears to be on an upward trajectory. In the last five years alone, qualitative scholars have generated a raft of influential findings within such core social science areas as poverty and material deprivation, residential segregation, policing and the criminal justice system, health disparities, immigration and ethnicity, housing and eviction, public surveillance, populism and the radical right, and science and genetics. This influential line of recent qualitative scholarship is joined by an equally influential stream of “fast science” qualitative journalism appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and all manner of other media outlets. The country depends heavily on these two streams of qualitative work to build a richer basic science, to develop policy, and to understand ongoing crises and new developments in real time.

Although no one could dispute the profound impact of these scholarly and journalistic streams of qualitative work, the growing success of the form has also made it a target of criticism, much of it raising concerns about replicability, transparency, and representativeness. In some cases, this “open science” criticism comes in an overtly hostile form, a type of criticism that’s focused on discrediting the tradition in its entirety or, alternatively, advocating on behalf of particular variants of it.

The American Voices Project (AVP), the country’s first platform for conducting qualitative interviews with a nationally representative sample, was also spawned by this growing commitment to open science but instead proceeds by developing a new qualitative form that’s intended to stand side-by-side with the already immensely successful existing variants. The AVP’s simple objective is to begin the task of building a new qualitative research form that rests on representative samples, open data, and secondary analysis and that’s intended to supplement—rather than replace—existing qualitative forms.

The purpose of this call for articles is to roll out this AVP-based qualitative analysis by opening up the AVP dataset to qualified scholars and analysts. We welcome research on the many topics—including health, poverty, politics, protest, employment, coping, and anomie—that the AVP interviews can assist in understanding. Although most issues of RSF are topically focused, this issue will be topically broad and is instead unified by a commitment to exploring the hopefully broad payoff to this new form of qualitative data collection. The balance of this call discusses the design of the AVP, the topics covered in the interview schedule, and the types of research questions that it opens up and that are supported by this call.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

Submission instructions and timeline

To secure the interview and survey protocols and a sample interview, please submit the nondisclosure agreement here. After doing so, prospective contributors can apply by submitting a CV, an abstract of their study (up to two pages in length, single spaced), and supporting tables, figures, pictures, references, or other relevant material (up to two additional pages). These should be submitted by no later than 5 pm EST on January 5, 2022 to https://rsf.fluxx.io. (NOTE: If you wish to submit a proposal and do not yet have an account with RSF, it can take up to 48 hours to get credentials. So please start your application at least two days before the deadline.)

All submissions must be original work that has not been previously published either in part or in full. Only abstracts submitted to https://rsf.fluxx.io will be considered. Each paper will receive a $1,000 honorarium when the issue is published. All questions regarding this issue should be directed to Suzanne Nichols, Director of Publications, at journal@rsage.org, and not to the email addresses of the editors of the issue.

A conference will take place at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City on December 9, 2022. The selected contributors will gather for a one-day workshop to present draft papers (due a month prior to the conference on 11/11/22) and receive feedback from the other contributors and editors. Travel costs, food, and lodging for one author per paper will be covered by the foundation. Papers will be circulated before the conference. After the conference, the authors will submit their revised drafts by 2/22/2023. The papers will then be sent out to three additional scholars for formal peer review. Having received feedback from reviewers, the editors, and RSF, authors will revise their papers by 8/17/2023. The full and final issue will be published in spring 2024. Papers will be published open access on the RSF website as well as in several digital repositories, including JSTOR and UPCC/Muse.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

CFP for Journal Special Issue on Religion and Bioethics

Dr Tyler Tate from Oregon Health and Science University, United States, and Dr. Hossein Godazgar from University of Warwick are editing the Research Topic of ‘Religion and Bioethics: A Sociological Perspective’ for the journal Frontiers in Sociology.  The call for papers and details are available here:  https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/25414/religion-and-bioethics-a-sociological-perspective

I would be grateful if you could also circulate this to researchers and/or practitioners who might be interested in the sociological study of the intersectionality between religion and bioethics.

Submission deadlines are 31 January 2022 (for Abstracts) and 04 July 2022 (for full manuscripts). Please note that we will pursue a thorough scientific peer-review process. We look forward to receiving your abstracts and full manuscripts.

About this Research Topic

Both ‘religion’ and ‘morality’ were central themes in sociology as practised by its pioneers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. However, their central position as major fields of social scientific enquiry and attention has been lost over time. This Research Topic is an attempt to recover these traditional, long-forgotten, but vital, parts of sociology. In doing so, it focuses on the conceptual interrelationship between the meanings of ‘religion’ and ‘bioethics’ at the ‘first-order’, everyday ‘lay’ or ‘folk’ level in various social contexts across the world from countries of the ‘global north’ to those of the ‘global south’ and from so-called ‘Abrahamic religions’, i.e. Judaism, Christianity and Islam, to ‘non-Abrahamic religions’, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism, Sikhism and the so-called ‘indigenous religions’ of animism, naturalism and totemism.

This Research Topic presupposes that the meanings of both ‘religion’, as highlighted by Beckford (2003), and ‘bioethics’, as emphasised by Nietzsche (1990) and Charles Taylor (1985) in relation to the definition of ‘morality’, are by no means unitary, universal, fixed and homogenous. Their definitions change across various social contexts in time and space. As Steven Lukes (2010), referring to Hacking (1999), stresses in relation to ‘morality’, contingency, nominalism and externalism are essential components of both ‘religion’ and ‘bioethics’. Therefore, it would be fascinating to explore and understand how and to what extent the understandings of ‘religion’ (and its cognate terms, including ‘non-religion’) and ‘bioethics’ (in relation to themes such as cloning, abortion, organ transplantation and blood transfusion, sexual health and orientation, the value of life, death, killing and letting die) intersect each other in various social contexts.

Waikato Islamic Studies Review – Call for Papers

Waikato Islamic Studies Review – Call for Papers  : http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/UWISG/review.shtml

On behalf of the University of Waikato Islamic Studies Group, I warmly invite submissions of papers which examine Islam in the widest sense to the Waikato Islamic Studies Review for publication consideration.

Articles can be as short as 2000 words and up to a maximum of 5000. For full details regarding paper guidelines and submissions and the Waikato Islamic Studies Review please see:http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/UWISG/review.shtml

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me asap if you think that you might like your work considered; the next edition is due for publication in September or November 2021. 

Kind regards,

Abdullah Drury
Editor: Waikato Islamic Studies Review
Email: abdullah@xtra.co.nz

Call for Papers: Waikato Islamic Studies Review

http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/UWISG/review.shtml

On behalf of the University of Waikato Islamic Studies Group, I warmly invite submissions of papers which examine Islam in the widest sense to the Waikato Islamic Studies Review for publication consideration.

Articles can be as short as 2000 words and up to a maximum of 5000. For full details regarding paper guidelines and submissions and the Waikato Islamic Studies Review please see:http://www.waikato.ac.nz/fass/UWISG/review.shtml

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me asap if you think that you might like your work considered; the next edition is due for publication in March 2021. 

Kind regards,
Abdullah Drury
Editor: Waikato Islamic Studies Review
Email: abdullah@xtra.co.nz

Call for Papers: Transformations of Latin American Catholicism

Call for Papers: Transformations of Latin American Catholicism since the mid-20th Century for International Journal of Latin American Religions

http://bit.ly/2Y62UIc

Call for Papers: Transformations of Latin American Catholicism since the mid-20th Century

The International Journal of Latin American Religions (JLAR) invites researchers to submit manuscripts to a thematic section focused on considerable relatively recent changes in Latin American Catholicism. The pluralization of the religious field that has marked most Latin American countries and the new social dynamic that has led to new political experiences and ideological spectrums both present themselves as important ingredients of the analytical background in Latin American Catholicism transformations. Under the impact of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and countless socio-economic transformations, Catholicism in the region has also experienced significant mutations, presenting new amalgamations and social expressions. The thematic section will gather articles presenting research results from various disciplines and academic perspectives dealing with many contemporary expressions of Catholicism in the Latin American region since the mid-20th century.

This thematic section will be part of the second issue of volume 5, to be published in December 2021, and will have as guest editors Dr. Renata Siuda-Ambroziak, American Studies Center, University of Warsaw, Poland, and Dr. Rodrigo Coppe Caldeira, Pontifical University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Submissions are due by June 30, 2021.

Call for Papers Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne/Academic Journal of Sociology

Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne/Academic Journal of Sociology
According to the legend, in May1973 David Bowie was travelling through Poland back from a tourist journey from Moscow. At the Warszawa Gdańska station the train had a very long technical stop. It was used by the British artist to walk into the city and by chance buy a vinyl with the songs performed by the folklore band “Śląsk” at a local music store. We can find echoes of this accidental meeting today on his album “LOW” in the song “Warszawa”. We would like to follow this path and that is why we decided to focus on the topic of the influence of Polish culture on the broadly understood world culture and technology.

You are welcome to contribute to the newest issue of the ‘Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne / Academic Journal of Sociology’. The topic of the issues will be one hundred and fifty years of the influence of Polish culture on world science, literature, music and technology.

You are expected to focus on the topics in sociology, cultural studies, musicology, literary studies, and history. They will touch upon the strong Polish accent of the global reception of its cultural systems, which would be treated on two different levels:

  1. As the influence of the Polish culture in the form of famous names of Polish artists;
  2. And as the reception and presence of elements of the Polish culture in the works of foreign artists, scientists and other creative personalities.

The texts that touch upon the following issues, are especially welcome:

  • – the influence of Polish scientists on the world science, among them Aleksander Czekanowski, Stefan Banach (we would happily accept articles also about the works of Florian Znaniecki or Ludwig Gumplowicz);
  • – the influence of Polish male and female writers and poets on world literature (W. Gombrowicz, R. Gary, W. Szymborska), referring to the last name of the famous poet, a Noble Prize winner, we would be happy to accept, among others, articles about the work of the other Polish Nobel Prize winners);
  • – the influence of the Polish composers, musicians as well as painters and directors that remained outside Poland (Mieczysław Weinberg, Zbigniew Preisner, Roman Polański, Zdzisław Beksiński);
  • – the reception of Polish science in tje global technology (e.g. the discoveries of the ancestor of the “Silicon valley” Jan Czochralski or K-202 by Jacek Karpiński)
  • – the reception of Polish culture in music, science, literature, photography, cinematography etc.

Deadline for the abstract/outline submission:
31 December 2020 to email: m.choczynski@uksw.edu.pl

Deadline for the paper submission:
31 January 2021 to email: m.choczynski@uksw.edu.pl

The text should be no more than 24,000 characters (with footnotes and a list of cited works) and must be adapted to the standards of citation / footnotes that is found on the journal website(Uniwersyteckie Czasopismo Socjologiczne/Academic Journal of Sociology).

Please attach to your paper your short academic profile (up to 500 characters), affiliation, a list of works cited in the paper and a summary in Polish and English with keywords.

Leading Editors: Tomasz Michał Korczyński, Marcin Choczyński

Prize: Best Doctoral Thesis or First Monograph in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World

The Sixth Round of the BRAIS-De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World is now open for submissions.

The British Association for Islamic Studies (BRAIS) and De Gruyter are delighted to announce the sixth round of the BRAIS-De Gruyter Prize in the Study of Islam and the Muslim World. This international prize will be awarded annually to the best doctoral thesis or unpublished first monograph based on a doctoral thesis. English-language submissions on any aspect of the academic study of Islam and the Muslim world, past and present, including Muslim-minority societies are accepted. Applicants can be based in any country, and manuscripts will be assessed on the basis of scholarly quality and originality.

The award includes publication of the winning manuscript and a prize of £1,000, and it will be officially presented at the Annual Conference of BRAIS. The selection process will be undertaken by a seven-member prize committee comprising established academics from across the field.

Deadline: 5.00 pm GMT, 31 December 2020

For more details, including rules and regulations, contact, the past Prize winners, and the Prize committee members, please visit: http://www.brais.ac.uk/prize/2021

Call for Papers: Special Journal Issue: “Religion and Public Health Threats in the 21st Century”

Special Issue on Religion and Public Health in the journal Religions is seeking papers. The call for papers can be found here: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions/special_issues/Religion_Century. Submission deadline for completed papers is June 1, 2021, but we encourage early submissions. Religions is an open access journal, but a 50% discount on publication fee (final cost approx. 500CHF) will be offered to selected good quality papers. If you don’t have funding support and have concerns about the fees, please state so in your cover letter. In addition to the Special Issue online, accepted papers (if 10 or more) will be published in printed book format. Please direct any inquiries to Magdalena Szaflarski, PhD, Guest Editor, at szaflam@uab.edu.

Call for Papers: Special Issue on “Religious Communities in Exile and Diaspora”

The open access journal Religions is preparing a special issue on “Religious Communities in Exile and Diaspora”.  Dr. Ellen Posman (Baldwin Wallace University) is Guest Editor.

Religions is an international, open-access scholarly journal. It is indexed in A&HCI (Web of Science), ATLA Religion Database and in SCOPUS,  which gave it a Citescore of 0.50 and listed it among the top 9% of the 462 religious studies journals SCOPUS surveyed in 2018.

Papers may be submitted from now until 28 February 2021, as papers will be published on an ongoing basis. Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

If you would like to contribute, please email Dr. Posman by 12/31/2020 with a title and
abstract (email: eposman@bw.edu, subject: Religions abstract).

Call for Papers: Review of Religious Research

Review of Religious Research (RRR) publishes empirical social-science research on religion, primarily in sociology and social psychology, and scholarly literature reviews of religious research in these fields.

In keeping with its mission, the Religious Research Association (RRA), which sponsors RRR, encourages research that has practical implications for denominations and religious bodies.

RRR provides a forum for applied and academic research across multiple disciplines and approaches, including research on the following topical areas: Clergy; Church programs; Comparative analyses of religious denominations and institutions; Denominational and congregational growth, decline, and vitality; Denominational and congregational conflict, competition, and cooperation; Ethnicity/race and religion; Generational and personal religious change; New religious movements; Personal spiritual and religious beliefs and practices; Religion and attitudes; Religion and family; Religion and gender, Religion and social behavior; Religion and well-being; and Research methodology.

Four types of articles are included in this Call for Papers:

  • Original Research Articles
  • Research Notes
  • Review Articles, and
  • Applied Research Abstracts.

Original Research Article: This type of article must be a scholarly and methodologically sophisticated empirical study that provides a comprehensive literature review of the relevant topics related to the research question, and it should have a strong theoretical foundation. The final section of the manuscript should be labeled Conclusions and Implications. A 250-350 word structured Abstract is also required, which contains the following five section headings: Background, Purpose, Methods, Results, and Conclusions and Implications, especially implications for religious organizations and/or practitioners when appropriate. Submitted manuscripts should be double-spaced and be no more than 10,000 words, excluding the title page, abstract, tables, figure captions, and references.

Research Note: This type of article must also be a scholarly and methodologically sophisticated empirical study, but its research question does not have to be theory based, and its literature review should be shorter and more focused. The final section of the manuscript should be labeled Conclusions and Implications. A 250-350 word structured Abstract is also required, which contains the following five section headings: Background, Purpose, Methods, Results, and Conclusions and Implications, especially implications for religious organizations and/or practitioners when appropriate. Submitted manuscripts should be double-spaced and be no more than 7,500 words, excluding the title page, abstract, tables, figure captions, and references.

Review Article: Authors should send an email directly to the RRR Editor-in-Chief (kjflannelly@gmail.com) describing the nature and scope of a proposed literature review to see if it is suitable for publication in RRR before they submit it. The final section of the manuscript should be labeled Conclusions and Implications. A 250-350 word structured Abstract is also required, which contains the following five section headings: Background, Purpose, Methods, Results, and Conclusions and Implications, especially implications for religious organizations and/or practitioners when appropriate. The manuscript should also contain a methodology section that explains how the literature search was conducted and how articles were selected for inclusion in the review. Submitted manuscripts should be double-spaced and be no more than 10,000 words, excluding the title page, abstract, tables, figure captions, and references.

Applied Research Abstract: This type of article consists of a 350-550 word summary (without any references) of an applied research study in the form of a structured abstract with the following five section headings: Background, Purpose, Methods, Results, and Conclusions and Implications, followed by 3-4 keywords. The author(s) may include a footnote that states: (a) whether a complete report exists and how it can be obtained; (b) whether the raw data are available in electronic form and how they can be obtained if the authors wish to make them available to other researchers; and/or (c) whether the authors would like to collaborate with other researchers to further analyze the data and write a full report for possible journal publication as a peer-reviewed manuscript.

GUIDELINES

  • Statistical Methodology – Original Research Articles/Research Notes: Quantitative studies should use the most appropriate statistical procedures needed to answer the research question, which include adequate statistical controls (e.g., using demographic variables as covariates that are known to be associated with the religious variables in the study).
  • Sampling Methodology – Original Research Articles/Research Notes: Both quantitative and qualitative studies should meet sociological standards of representativeness (RRR does not publish studies based solely on convenience sampling). Therefore, qualitative studies published in RRR must employ more systematic and representative approaches to sampling than most qualitative studies do. Convenience sampling can only be employed during the last step in the sampling process, usually after (a) drawing random samples from national or regional surveys, or datasets maintained by religious or other kinds of organizations, or (b) sampling congregations from different cities, states, or regions, or (c) selecting church programs, denominations, congregations, or other social groups that meet specified inclusion criteria.

Editorial Decision-making Process

All four types of manuscripts are initially read by the Editor-in-Chief to determine if they are generally appropriate for publication in RRR based on the guidelines described in this Call for Papers. All manuscripts that are deemed to be appropriate, except Applied Research Abstracts, then undergo blind peer-review by two or more qualified researchers. The Editor-in-Chief is solely responsible for publication decisions about Applied Research Abstracts. Editorial decisions are based on whether a manuscript: (a) poses a clear and valid research question; (b) makes a meaningful contribution to the field; (c) provides appropriate evidence or reasoning for its conclusions; (d) is written in an intelligible fashion in standard English; and (e) conforms to the guidelines described herein.

Your manuscript should be submitted at https://www.editorialmanager.com/rorr/default.aspx

After you login and select “New Manuscript Submission,” you need to select the appropriate type of article and follow the rest of the directions.

Manuscript Submission and Processing Fee: Authors who are not RRA members are required to pay a $35 manuscript processing fee before their manuscript undergoes peer-review. This fee can be paid by joining the RRA, whose annual membership is $35.

  • Authors must submit a cover letter with their submission that covers: (a) RRA membership and this fee; (b) the topical areas with which the manuscript fits; (c) and some other items about the manuscript.
  • Please see the “Cover Letter” and “Fee” sections of the RRR “Instructions for Authors” for more details (https://www.springer.com/journal/13644/submission-guidelines#Instructions%20for%20authors ), including examples of cover letters.