Volume 23 Call for Papers: Grains

Grain is fundamental: many recipes begin with a cup of flour, a little rice, or a cereal for a base. The history of human agriculture often begins with cultivating these basics. We might understand political evolution by considering the interplay between the granular and the completed recipe, or big picture. In a way that mirrors human history, political evolutions begin with microcosmic interactions: an entire movement might begin with people breaking bread together, organizing at their kitchen tables. Essentials and luxuries root back to grains. Depending on what grain people work with, it’s an international dialect of sorts. There is cultural specificity and a sort of culinary lingua franca. In a time when the working class is being denied bread and cannot even dream of roses, recognizing the instrumentality of grains is crucial. In this moment and throughout history, oppressive forces leverage, or even weaponize, starvation, scarcity, and access to basic needs, as a means to control, coerce, and sow discord amongst the oppressed.

There may be utility in interrogating the substance of grains: is what is “grainy”? Tactile, visual, or something greater? What looks grainy is unclear, and obfuscating, but a viewer can still discern a shape through visual grain. Grain has a tactility to it: grainy matter can be coarse. Grains can indicate movement too; they can capture blur and flow. Wood grain visualizes the growth of the wood; there are knots, sticking points, and the grain indicates a way of emerging around the problems.
Closely inspecting grains is revealing: grains indicate the ability of an organism to evolve, and point to something’s situational adaptability. Wood grain can reveal the story of a tree’s evolution. Meanwhile, for humans to “go against the grain” is to resist and disrupt dominant cultural narratives and flows. There is a form of solidarity that is built through sharing food, and grains in particular. Grain is a source for vitality in communities and in our bodies. We can think of grains as storying people's relationships to the fundamentals of life and the bare necessities.

In the face of so much planetary change, it can be hard to comprehend the parts of the overwhelming whole. We want writing and creating that envisions what this looks or feels like. Things that are unclear or blurry clarify later. We invite both scholarly and creative work, including essays, poetry, photographs, visual submissions, video, audio, mixed formats, book reviews, and more that resists the grain and/or emerges alongside it. Small or large scale investigations, peeking at the microscope, digesting the whole, tasting a part,

UnderCurrents Journal of Critical Environmental Studies is inviting submissions that consider:

• Graininess and granularity in perspective and scale
• Grains in circulation (economically, socially, ideologically)
• How do grains sustain bodies, movements, networks, relationships?
• The composite parts that build into gestalts
• Grains as a way of shifting perception on an issue or topic
• How could grain(s) operate as a method? Could they operate as a theory of change?
• The various states of grains
• Corn, maize and (de)coloniality
• Cereals, rices and other grains themselves and their relations

All are welcome to submit; we especially encourage submissions from applicants who are Indigenous, Black, racialized, women, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled, poor, and/or otherwise on the margins. 

The deadline for submissions is Friday, January 30th, 2026 at 11:59PM.