Microblog Submission Guidelines
We ask that Members submit two microblogs each year.
In this invitation, we respect that contributors are writing from within complex systems, where creating the conditions to dwell with an idea can be difficult. Accordingly, we offer the microblogs as a snippet, shard or moment, which we recognize will be part of ongoing intensities and relations.
We invite a variety of authorship collectives for microblogs:
We hope members will create microblogs in the company of their many interdisciplinary collaborators. These may be sole authored, co-authored, and always in conversation with more-than-human worlds. Our invitation extends to students, educators, artists, early and established?? career scholars, pedagogists, and knowledge holders. We want to pursue a rhythm, with posts acting as an opportunity to publicly appear within the work of the Collective. We see thinking and writing as a braiding together in continual process – a process that generates microblogs but does not produce for the sake of neoliberalist demands.
Microblogs work, in situated and speculative ways, with worlding, commoning, and inheriting.
An expanded discussion of these concepts can be found here. In particular, we position microblogs alongside these three practices of responding to our worlds:
Worlding: Microblogs do not stand alone. They are part of the larger microblog project toward building more livable worlds. Microblogs are in dialogue with and respond to existing microblogs and the lineages they propose. Consider how one microblog might sit diffractively with others – are there links? shared concepts? collective questions? what becomes of their affinities? their disjunctures? how? why?
Commoning: Microblogs- as projects anchored in multiplicity and in their specificity – share situated modes of living with and, in the same beat, are oriented toward inventing modes of living with. Microblogs know that to write, even ‘alone’, is never to think in solitude; they ask us to pay attention to relations and to tensions. A tension that threads through this work is that of individuation: we work for microblogs to resist individualizing while we recognize that to type out a microblog can readily become a human-centered task. We work to face this tension, imagining how to write within a commons.
Inheriting: Microblogs grapple with pastpresents, both in who they think with and in how they meet complex worlds. Ongoingness is an important intention of microblogs. This proposition purposefully agitates Euro-Western delineations of chronology that sever past from present from future. A radical hope for microblogs is noticing the always-already, where to inherit within a particular context is about answering for our accountabilities in place while risking relations that care for crafting more livable futures together.
Guidelines for Creating a Microblog:
Microblogs begin with a question that is no more than 200 characters long (so that it is tweet-able)
Microblogs are no longer than 150 words, not including the reference list.
We are intentional in sticking to this 150 word limit because short microblogs are a starting point for engaging with worlding, commoning, and inheriting. The brevity of the microblogs asks readers to attend carefully and to respond with the provocations a microblog offers. Microblogs cultivate a space for thinking-with, for drawing a reader into the collective that actively engages, differently, with each microblog.
Microblogs should be ‘tagged’ with at least one of the organizing concepts (worlding, commoning, inheriting). Please also identify any relevant connections to the inquiry categories that organized microblogs in a previous iteration of the website (relations with place, relations with materials, relations with other species, feminist common worlding)
Microblogs include one image
Microblogs might include a link to any of your social media accounts (Twitter, website)
Where possible, microblogs should contain links to other microblogs or to other projects shared on the Common Worlds website. Links to external resources (hashtags, multimedia, articles, publications) are also encouraged
Microblogs will be reviewed and you might be asked to complete revisions before your shared in the website
Reviews will be non-blind: the reviewer and the author will know of one another and reviews will take place via email correspondence
Turn around for reviews will be approximately two to three weeks. There may be some conversation between the author and reviewer if helpful
Reviewers will be members of the Microblog Committee. This includes Kelly Boucher, Cory Jobb, Randa Khattar, Nicole Land, Sandra Wooltorton, Catherine Hamm, and Diti Bhattacharya
Reviewers will consider and share feedback on three main points:
How does this microblog connect to the work of the Common Worlds Research Collective through rich storytelling, care-ful attunements, and embodied and emplaced responses to complex common worlds? How does this microblog take up political and pedagogical intentions shared within the Common Worlds Research Collective?
How does this microblog take up one particular concept that the Common Worlds Research Collective is working with – commoning, worlding, or inheriting – in a meaningful (connections, critical, speculative, lived) way?
How does this microblog set something in motion? What provocations or questions does it advance toward commoning, worlding, and inheriting otherwise?
Microblogs should be submitted to Nicole at nland@ryerson.ca for review by members of the Microblog Committee.