The Asian American / Asian Research Institute is currently accepting proposals, abstracts, and finished submissions for our academic journal, CUNY FORUM Volume 14, and Volume 15, scheduled for print in 2027/2028. Submission deadline ongoing.
Established in 2013, CUNY FORUM is a leading contemporary East Coast print and online independent journal dedicated to covering timely topics within Asian American and Asian Studies. Recent issues have included the only Asian American publication to devote over 200 pages to exploring how COVID-19 impacted communities in both Asia and the Americas; a history of LGBTQ+ activism in New York; and provocative literary and cultural contributions by scholars, artists, and activists from diverse backgrounds, including Guyanese, Chinese, Japanese, Taiwanese, Burmese, Malaysian, Bangladeshi, Filipino, Korean, Caribbean, Vietnamese, Khmer and other East, South, and Southeast Asian and Pacific communities.
Challenge & Call
In a divisive world of ecological, technological, and spiritual crisis, CUNY FORUM seeks and challenges scholars, activists, artists and cultural workers in Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies to reimagine the future through new and alternative literatures, technologies, and environmental and spiritual reclamations.
We call for new thinking about the world not through traditional reaction to the powers that be—but rather through bold attempts to navigate our own paths, on land, sea, and space. Technology, literature, media and culture are some of the tools utilized to create the future we envision.
Our ongoing (2026-2028) call for proposals and papers is inclusive: from exploring concepts of Zomia studies (lowlands, highlands and border cultures) to environmentalism, technology, and resistance in the Pacific. In culture and literature, science and speculative fiction from South and Southeast Asia and Asians in the America point to our emergent futures across diverse regions. Asian and Pacific futurisms suggests that envisaging a future community identity can help to overcome histories of colonialism, enslavement, and displacement.
Pacific, or Pasifika Futurism focuses on oceanic peoples, cultures and perspectives including the concept of “the ocean in space,” or as Taiwan scholar Hsinya Huang points out, viewing indigenous carved tatala wooden boats from Lanyu (Orchid Island) as “traveling islands.”
Examining both the local and global pathways of arts, technology, literature, migration, settlement and social movements can provide us with bolder, strategic, and speculative insights across borders.
Call For Submissions
CUNY FORUM invites a broad array of research, literary, journalistic and community-based accounts, and visual-graphic and cultural works for review. We are accepting submissions in the following categories:
- Original social science and historical research
- Research summaries / practitioners’ essays
- Original essays
- Literary works
- Reviews of literature and media
- Graphic artworks
All submissions are reviewed by a combination of the FORUM’s editors and editorial advisors. Original research is subject to additional outside blind review.
Articles for publication consideration should be sent as a Word document electronically to: cunyforum@aaari.info
