Our Ethos

As an anti-hierarchical collective, AGITATE! strives for equity, transparency, and plurality in our creative, editorial, and publishing processes. Alongside our submission guidelines, this statement seeks to demystify the black box of publishing and provide a bigger picture of our vision and goals for AGITATE!.

An online, open access, peer-reviewed journal, AGITATE! is a platform for knowledges that seek to unsettle the dominant politics and practices of experts. AGITATE! explores the possibilities and challenges of interweaving scholarship, creative writing, art, journalism, and activism. We invite contributors from diverse locations to engage the anti-disciplinary space of AGITATE! to catalyze new conversations, visions, and narrative practices in multiple genres and languages, in order to advance struggles for sociopolitical and epistemic justice. We encourage work that is cognizant of and intentional about the simultaneous ethics, aesthetics, poetics, and politics of transformative knowledge-making and pedagogies. We welcome the submission of essays, creative non/fiction, artwork, poetry, translations, musings, and meditations on political struggles in named and unnamed forms. By evolving an open process of co-creation, AGITATE! challenges the traditional divides between process and product, and between author, artist, reviewer, and editor.

Core principles that drive our work are:

  • Commitment to publishing work and fostering collaborations across multiple sites, genres and languages, that are often rendered unequal by prevailing structures
  • Commitment to including marginalized or less heard voices that are not professionally trained in academia, arts, or activism, but whose commitments align with and advance  the vision of AGITATE!
  • Commitment to building collaborations and coalitions with other organizations that unsettle dominant knowledge practices and develop accessible resources that amplify collective knowledge production in search of justice
  • Commitment to autonomy
  • Commitment to transparency
  • Commitment to intellectual, artistic, and academic freedom
  • Commitment to open access, freely accessible content rooted in a creative commons publishing practices as well as granting explicit control and copyrights to contributors
  • Commitment to blurring the imposed compartmentalization of academia, activism, and the arts.