Call for Papers: Special Issue - A Woman's Labour

`Exchanges is pleased to announce the Call for Papers for our latest special issue, A Woman's Labour. You will find all the details below, including where to submit expressions of interest, author guidelines, and various deadlines.

We look forward to receiving your enquiries and submissions regarding this very exciting collaboration between Exchanges and the interdisciplinary collective A Woman's Labour! 

 

EXCHANGES CALL FOR PAPERS – SPECIAL ISSUE

‘A Woman’s Labour: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Work, Health, and Care’

This special issue is being guest-edited by lead editor Dr Liana Psarologaki of Buckinghamshire New University (BNU), along with Dr Aikaterini Argyrou (Nyenrode Business University), Prof Adetoro Adegoke (BNU), Prof Hon Amy Bonsal (Women in Academia Support Network), Prof Sarah Williams (BNU), and Elizabeth Bridgen (BNU). 

The Issue

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal invites submissions for our latest special issue, ‘A Woman’s Labour’. This issue will offer a broad and diverse field of critical engagement, interpretation, and evaluation underpinned by theory and/or practice that relates to the labour of women, considering various social-, spatial- and health-related inequalities in an interdisciplinary, reflective, and inclusive way.

Context and Background

This special issue emerges from the work of the interdisciplinary collective A Woman’s Labour, which brings together scholars, practitioners, and experts by experience to interrogate the multiple meanings of labour across contexts and disciplines and to foreground how labour is gendered and unevenly valued. The issue builds on dialogue, initiated at the collective’s public launch in London in September 2025, to capture and expand interdisciplinary exchanges, offering a space for critical and situated explorations to the question of a woman’s labour.

Labour comprises different processes, acts, and practices, many often related to gender. Some of these are literally gender-specific, such as the labour of giving birth, while others are implied, such as the labour involved in the struggle against socio-economic and spatial inequalities, which often disproportionately affect women. Labour can refer to formal work environments and the roles of policy and advocacy in workers’ experiences (i.e., the ‘labour movement’). It also includes experiences of precarious and hidden labour, such as domestic work, care duties, and their complex dynamics. These situated experiences and their environments often reveal underexplored issues related to imbalanced hierarchies of labour, especially in the case of illness.

In her book Ill Feelings, Alice Hatrick describes her lived experience of chronic fatigue syndrome by radically redefining personal and social narratives around wellbeing and the pains of ill health for women. Hatrick translates the microcosm of her own body into an ecology of women’s hidden and unjust labour, where macrophages, the specialist cells that find and destroy bacteria, become the body’s version of ‘feminized labour: enveloping, housekeeping, and other kinds of low-paid domestic and care work’. [i]

Like Hatrick’s book, this special issue will highlight practices of radical care and sustainable resilience that emerge from women’s experiences of work, health, and emotional, physical, and social wellbeing, turning towards regenerative and restorative futures across geographies and disciplines.

Submissions

Submissions can take the form of research articles, including theoretical critiques and/or the development of emerging theory and data-driven investigations (subject to peer review), creative and experimental practice-led scholarship, evaluations of lived experiences underpinned by an engagement with theory (a.k.a. ‘Critical Reflections’), and interviews with subjects working at the intersection of gender and labour (‘Conversations’).

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Embodied labour at the intersection of aesthetics, cultural studies, and health
• Anticolonial, decolonial, and postcolonial studies of labour including alternate materialities, hidden archives, and indigenous practices
• Ecofeminist and posthuman studies, the body as worksite, and nature-culture entanglement
• Legal, political, and social care matters using labour as intersectional value
• Care as social infrastructure from intimacy to systems, including studies on and within domestic space, and urban and social anthropology
• Ethics of reproductive labour within medical humanities and the governance of reproduction between biology and the capital

We welcome contributions from scholars and practitioners working within the above themes, scope, and perspectives, regardless of their background or career stage. We particularly invite submissions that use interdisciplinary and integrative approaches to examine the topics including systems thinking, travelling concepts, and object-centred methodologies.

To be considered as a contributor to the issue, please submit an abstract of up to 250 words, including your name and institutional affiliation, via web form by Monday, 8 June 2026, at the following link:

Expressions of Interest: A Woman’s Labour

Please include ‘Exchanges Special Issue: A Woman’s Labour’ in the subject line. Should your contribution be accepted, you will be asked to submit your full paper for consideration by Monday, 5 October 2026.

Please be sure to review Exchanges submissions and author guidelines before submission. These can be found at:

https://exchanges.warwick.ac.uk/index.php/exchanges/about/submissions

Contact

For general queries, contact Exchanges Managing Editor-in-Chief, Dr Michelle Devereaux, at exchangesjournal@warwick.ac.uk.

 

[i] Hatrick, A., 2021. Ill Feelings. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 249.