2025 NCBS Annual Report
CALL FOR PAPERS
You are cordially invited to contribute an article or essay to the National Council for Black Studies Annual Report on the State of Affairs for Africana Communities in 2024 and beyond. The report is scheduled to be released in Spring 2025.
This report will include short APA-style essays (between 2,000 and 2,500 words, or 8–10 double-spaced pages, including references) on new, emerging, and ongoing current issues and innovations of importance to Africana communities in the U.S. and anywhere in the global African world. Our mission is to create a space for our discipline to offer historical context, future projections, solutions, and culturally grounded analyses of current needs, concerns, innovations, and ideas of people of African ancestry anywhere in the world. The theme of this call for papers is refocusing and reaffirming Black studies’ community relevance, particularly in the following areas: 1) Black community approaches to food security, 2) artificial intelligence and its impact on Black families and communities, 3) the visions and works of the founding activist scholars of the discipline of Black studies, 4) Pan-Africanism at the close of the International Decade for People of African Descent, 5) agency and policy analysis in the climate of resurgent reactionism to Black agency, and 6) how to establish disciplinary identity and defining goals in the midst of a diversity of identities and interests within the discipline. For this issue, we are especially seeking essays that engage agentic and culturally grounded methods and approaches to resistance and solutions across the African world. It is important that essays in this report specifically highlight strategies used by African collectives in specific locales of the world to counter oppression, which can be utilized throughout the African world.
In addition, we invite you to submit essays on other topics in the areas described below. Every subject engaged by essay authors in this publication must explicitly center its relevance to African/Black people and their agency, utilize Black studies approaches to knowledge production, and establish the topic’s relevance to the discipline of Black studies. We encourage authors who find themselves unable to do this in their work (in whole or in part) to submit their work to a more appropriate publication outlet.
Area A: General Essays on the African/Black World
This section of the report will include essays on key issues, innovations, challenges, and solutions for communities of people of African descent anywhere in the (international) African world.
Area B: Essays on Community and Engagement
This section of the report will consist of essays highlighting institutions, programs, organizations, and efforts delivering critical services, effective activism, and other means of advancing communities of Africana people.
Area C: Essays on the Current State of the Discipline
This section of the report will consist of essays providing clarification, insight, and/or future projections or forethought on the state of the discipline during the calendar year. They should highlight emerging challenges, victories, or advancements, upcoming critical issues, and/or potential solutions.
Area D: Voices of Black Youth
This special section of the report will feature essays from Black high school students discussing emerging issues and concerns. Teachers will be surveyed to identify Black youth who are emerging leaders with ideas about issues of critical relevance to Black communities. Teachers are invited to mentor students and support them in this process.
The deadline for complete papers is November 1, 2024. Please review the submission guidelines and send any inquiries and submissions to the National Council of Black Studies at the following email address: annualrep@ncbsonline.org
Decisions on publication will be made by March 1, 2025, at the latest.
NCBS Annual Report Code of Ethics for Manuscripts
The Annual Report committee will not publish any articles which contain insulting or defamatory language, personal attacks, slander, vendettas, clearly unfair criticism, or purposeful misrepresentation which clearly violates our ethical and professional standards and could potentially place NCBS at risk of liability. We also recognize that this kind of language may be included in manuscripts in error, without ill-intent, or due to inexperience. In the event that we receive articles containing or approaching this manner of content or which may indicate professional jealousy or long standing personal disputes, authors will be given the opportunity to edit their work to ensure that arguments don’t contain this kind of language. Moreover, they will be encouraged to ensure that their arguments are professional, based on a clear logical rationale, and supported by research.
Click here for submission guidelines.
Report Editors
Dr. Valerie Grimm
Director Undergraduate Studies and Professor African American and African Diaspora Studies,
Indiana University-Bloomington
Dr. Maulana Karenga
Professor and Chair, Department of Africana Studies, University of California-Long Beach
Dr. Serie McDougal, III
Professor, Department of Pan-African Studies, California State Los Angeles
Dr. James Stewart
Emeritus Professor, Penn State University
Dr. Michael Tillotson
Associate Professor, Department of Africana Studies, State University of New York at Cortland
