The Journal of Festive Studies

The Journal of Festive Studies, a new peer-reviewed journal published on H-Celebration, invites submissions for its first issue, scheduled for March 2018.

The journal’s stated aim is to draw together all academics who share an interest in festivities, including but not limited to holiday celebrations, family rituals, carnivals, religious feasts, processions and parades, and civic commemorations.

The editors in chief -- Dr. Ellen Litwicki, Professor of History at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Aurélie Godet, Associate Professor of US History at Paris Diderot University -- welcome submissions of original research and analysis from both established and emerging scholars worldwide. Besides traditional academic essays, authors may submit video and photo essays, archival notes, opinion pieces, as well as contributions that incorporate digital media such as visualizations and interactive timelines and maps. Academic essays should be between 6,000 and 12,000 words; other pieces should be between 2,000 and 5,000 words. When submitting, please indicate whether the work is to be peer-reviewed as an article or whether you would like to offer something in a different format.

For its first issue, the journal will look at festive studies as an emerging academic sub-field since the late 1960s and seeks submissions that consider some of the methods and theories that scholars have relied on to apprehend festive practices across the world. The specific contributions of the historical, geographical, sociological, anthropological, folkloristic, ethnological, psychological, and economic disciplines to the study of festivities may be explored (this list is by no mean exhaustive). More importantly, authors should offer guidelines on how to successfully integrate them. How can one reconcile, for instance, the discourse of “festival tourism,” dominated by the positivistic, quantitative research paradigm of consumer behavior approaches, with a more classical discourse, mostly flowing from cultural anthropology and sociology, concerning the roles, meanings and impacts of festivals in society and culture?

Contributors may also choose to focus on some of the methodological issues faced by scholars doing qualitative research on festivities across the globe. For example, the practice of participant observation -- one of the main data-collection strategies used by scholars of festivities -- raises significant ethical and epistemological concerns, as affective involvement with the observed inevitably develops and may range from sympathetic identification to projective distortion.

Finally, authors may reflect on whether conclusions about festivities can be derived from the thousands of case studies that are produced every year by scholars, government agents, city officials, and various stakeholders. Can cross-cultural, interdisciplinary theoretical paradigms still be expected to emerge from this growing literature?

All texts should be sent by November 1 2017 to submissions-festive-studies@mail.h-net.msu.edu along with the author’s bio and an abstract of c. 250 words. Please contact Ellen Litwkicki (ellen.litwicki@fredonia.edu) and Aurélie Godet (augodet@yahoo.com) with any questions. Please consult the guidelines for authors in advance of submission.