Advanced Search
Southern Spaces
A journal about real and imagined spaces and places of the US South and their global connections

Call for Submissions: Public Health and/in the US and Global South

Miami University (Ohio)
Published December 17, 2014

Series editor: Mary E. Frederickson, Emory University.
Submission deadline: March 31, 2015.
Questions: Contact managing editor Jesse P. Karlsberg.

Harris and Ewing, Travelling syphilis laboratory, Washington, DC, 1937. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
From Aiko Takeuchi-Demirci, "The Color of Democracy: A Japanese Public Health Official's Reconnaissance Trip to the US South."

Southern Spaces, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed online journal that publishes innovative scholarship on regions, places, and cultures of the US South and their global connections invites scholars, critics, writers, health care providers, public health practitioners, and patients to submit essays, photo essays, original documentaries, and digital projects for a forthcoming series titled Public Health and/in the US and Global South. Southern Spaces publications analyze and explore real and imagined places in the US South; make connections and comparisons between southern regions or locales and places in the wider world; and challenge conventional ways of understanding the people, places, and cultures found in and across the South.

This 2015–2016 series will examine the relationship between public health and specific geographies—both real and imagined—in and across the US and global South. The journal welcomes projects relating to any time period or genre. Interdisciplinary frameworks, critical approaches to space and place, and work that foregrounds a transnational approach to public health are especially encouraged. Where possible, proposals should include media—sound, video, maps, images.

Details from Toxic Release Mapping, Petrochemical America, page 150–151. Illustration by Kate Orff. Courtesy of author.
From Gwen Ottinger, Ellen Griffith Spears, and Kate Orff, "Petrochemical America, Petrochemical Addiction."

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following themes framed in relationship to the US and/or global South:

  • The relationship between health and migration,
  • Public health and its material culture(s)
  • Intersections of public health with place, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class
  • Campaigns for immunization, safe food, clean water, and disease eradication
  • Forms of healing (religious, spiritual, nutritional, and medicinal)
  • Historically Black Medical Schools
  • Disease specific analyses: sickle cell anemia, malaria, pellagra, hookworm, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, alcoholism, Ebola, HIV/AIDS
  • Disability studies
  • Local, state, and federal public health programs and institutions: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Public Health Service (PHS), Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA)
  • Drug testing, DNA analysis, and genetic screening programs
  • Prisoners and public health
  • Health insurance: Medicare, Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Affordable Care Act
  • Public health and racial segregation
  • Labor and public health, corporate medical policies, work-related health issues
  • Rural poverty and well-being
  • Mental health
  • Food deserts and place-based food insecurity
  • Health-focused writing: fiction, memoir, and (auto)-biography
  • Domestic violence
  • Gun control and public health
  • Eugenics
  • Maternal and child morbidity and mortality

In addition to essays, photo essays, and short videos, this series will feature peer-reviewed digital projects. Please contact the journal if you have any questions about the submission process or other aspects of digital project publishing. Southern Spaces editors are committed to assisting scholars at all levels of technological proficiency and support journal authors in selecting and producing multi-media materials to accompany their scholarship.

From Christie Herring's Bodies and Souls.
From Christie Herring, Bodies and Souls.

While the journal will accept full essays during this initial call, the editorial staff encourages interested authors to submit proposals (350–700 words) at this stage. Selected proposal authors will be asked to submit a full essay for internal and eventual peer review. See the Southern Spaces submissions guidelines for style and formatting. All proposals should be submitted to seditor@emory.edu by March 31, 2015.

The following pieces provide examples of the critical, interdisciplinary, and multimedia engagement with public health in the US and global South that this series seeks to expand:

https://doi.org/10.18737/M7JG8C