Money on the left: History, Theory, Practice – Call for Papers

We are pleased to invite contributions to Money on the Left: History, Theory, Practice. Money on the Left publishes peer-reviewed articles about monetary arrangements, knowledges, and cultures with the aim of promoting ecosocial justice. This open-access journal understands money creation as a situated political problem that constitutes societies. It moves away from claims that money is a scarce instrument of barter, an inherent (if necessary) evil, or the infamous commodity-form and toward actualizing money’s unrealized potentials to shape collective life in emancipatory ways. 

How we imagine money shapes and is shaped by cultural and institutional forms. From this premise, we affirm money’s public possibilities in the hope of replacing austere political and aesthetic patterns of governance, coordination, and ideation with alternatives that are capacious, equitable, and just. Thus, we advance understandings of monetary history, theory, and practice that foreground intersectional, ecological, and ethical responsibility, and foster democratic forms of monetary agency.

We seek submissions from across the humanities and social sciences and we are especially keen to hear from authors from under-represented groups (both within the academy in general and within economic discourse in particular). Moreover, we welcome contributions from established scholars, graduate students, and independent researchers and – in keeping with our commitment to interdisciplinarity – from authors adopting a range (or a combination) of methodological, analytical, discursive, and stylistic approaches. While we accept manuscripts primarily in English, please contact us to explore the options for submissions in other languages.

Possible topics for Money on the Left articles include, but are by no means limited to:

• Contemporary politics and provisioning: critiquing political language and rhetorical framing (public spending as funded by ‘taxpayer money’ or the ‘government credit card/checkbook’); studying political and resource implications of a Job Guarantee and Green New Deal (food, housing, energy, the ‘cost of living’); contesting the orthodox conceptions of loanable funds banking, pricing, and ‘inflation’
• Ecology and environment: addressing the imaginative/conceptual/rhetorical barriers to a Green New Deal and a just transition from ecologically harmful industries and practices
• History: uncovering overlooked histories of monetary practice, monetary politics, social movements, and economic thought
• Legal studies: developing the constitutional theory of money, coordination rights theory, vulnerability theory, and critical finance
• Aesthetics, art and design: complicating theories of sensation and sensuous form; exploring how artistic representations of money and finance shape collective life; scrutinizing design and symbolism in monetary systems, technics, and tokens  
• Heterodox economics: theorizing monetary power, capacity and agency, the hierarchy of money and the ‘finance franchise’ from the perspectives of Modern Monetary Theory/neo-chartalism, post-Keynesian, institutional, ecological, and feminist economics
• Global studies: examining monetary agency in pre- and postcolonial contexts; challenging anglo-/euro-/western-/northern-centric biases within political economic discourses; reviving cultural representations of money and monetary agency in pre- and postcolonial texts and contexts
• Feminist studies, gender studies, and queer theory: investigating historically and culturally gendered assumptions and language about work, productivity, budgeting, and ‘fiscal responsibility’; researching queer politics, performativity, community, and care 
• Critical theory: revealing new analyses of key thinkers, fresh combinations of theoretical texts and approaches, tensions and convergences between theoretical frameworks 
• Literary studies: voicing fresh interpretations of literary works from a constitutional theory or MMT perspective; discovering conjunctions between literary and monetary form; reading literary narratives that thematize or foreground money; analyzing the literal and figurative languages of money
• Media and communication studies: understanding money as a medium; rethinking monetary history conceived as a history of mediation from early writing to the digital age
• Film, video, and television: evaluating cinematic, videographic, and televisual engagements with money, finance, corporations, markets, care, community, cooperation

This list is intended to be indicative but by no means exhaustive. Please feel free to contact journal@moneyontheleft.org to explore ideas and possibilities prior to the submission of your manuscript.

Unless otherwise indicated, submissions to Money on the Left will undergo anonymous peer-review prior to publication. Before submitting a manuscript for review, please ensure that it satisfies the following criteria:

1. The manuscript should include (1) a title; (2) an abstract or a summary of the argument not to exceed 300 words; and (3) a bibliography or works cited page.
2. The manuscript should adhere to an established style guide. Use of Chicago Style (17th edition) with endnotes is strongly preferred, and will help to streamline the review and publication processes. 
3. The manuscript should not include copyrighted material, unless the author(s) are able to demonstrate that they have previously received written permission from the copyright holder to use said material.

Manuscripts should be submitted via email to journal@moneyontheleft.org, and should be accompanied by a note to the editors that clearly indicates that the manuscript (1) is not currently under review with another journal; and (2) has not been published elsewhere. 

Money on the Left is published under a Creative Commons license. Authors retain full copyright ownership of work published in the Money on the Left journal.

To find out more about our project, explore the extensive archive of interviews on the Money on the Left podcast, where we also discuss and share the work published in our journal.