Submission Guidelines
Borderlines aims to produce content that is not only thoughtful but also well-written and accessible to a multidisciplinary audience. Therefore, clear, well-articulated, jargon-free prose will be highly valued when submissions are evaluated. 300-word pitches should be sent to journalborderlines@gmail.com or through the contact us form below. The best way to see the type of content we are willing to publish is to check out what we have run in the past.
Please follow the guidelines given here when submitting your piece for publication on Borderlines. We are looking for short essays that comment on scholarly happenings and controversies, review recent publications, conferences, or events, or share tantalizing snippets from new research. Borderlines is associated with the journal, Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East but it is not a digital extension of it. Publication on the Borderlines does not constitute publication in CSSAAME. The editors of Borderlines reserve the right to make editorial revisions in articles and reviews.
Please also note that we are not interested in singular book, film or exhibition reviews. We are interested in sets of commentaries on a single book by several authors. Commentaries should not be reviews but be reflections by the commentators about their own work in discussion with the book in question.
We are not interested in commentary about current events. Rather, we are interested in pieces that use current events or presentations as the occasion for scholarly reflection, or which contextualize current problematics by situating them in broader perspective.
We are happy to host podcasts and videos on our Youtube Channel. We urge you to add a brief introduction to the podcast after consultation with the editors, and also provide us with either a full transcript or a synopsis of the content. Many of our readers and followers are from places with limited or slow internet connectivity, and some associated write up will always help them to decide whether they want to check out the video/podcast or not.
We are interested in translation (with a brief introduction) of local language manuscripts and documents, or reflections about the relationship between knowledge and archive. We are also interested in interviews with lesser known figures (scholars, artists, activists). For Borderlines’ interview style, please see Fadi Bardawil’s interview of Talal Asad in CSSAAME.
We encourage submissions in non-European languages.
Style Sheet: contributor’s Guide
Please ensure that your final submission is as a .doc or a .docx file.
Images must be submitted as separate files in .jpeg format, with position of images noted in the text in [bold with caption and permissions] and not in a separate comment box. Images should be procured with permission from the photographer and publisher, or should have Creative Commons License 2.0.
Citations: Be sure to cite whatever you would normally cite in a paper or article. For published articles, books, and primary sources in the public domain, hyperlink a work’s title to Google Books, World Cat, Goodreads, the appropriate JStor link or a similar website that provides further details for readers to find that work. To the greatest extent possible, book titles should be linked to the official page maintained by the publishers. Please reserve endnotes only for primary sources.
For podcasts, audio files should be less than 40 MB, and bitrate of 128 or less. Videos will be uploaded on our YouTube Channel. We reserve our right to decide on the suitable format for any submission.
Other stylistic concerns: Place all periods and commas within quotation marks; other punctuation should e included within quotation marks only if it is part of the quotation cited. Long format quotations (more than six lines) should be free of external quotation marks and indented once, followed by an unbroken space both before and after the given passage. In general, a word should be transliterated only if there is no acceptable English equivalent. If no such equivalent is available, authors should follow the ALA-LC romanization tables for the respective language (www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/roman.html) when possible. Translated Arabic and Persian text includes no diacritical marks except for ayn and hamza. Spelling, punctuation, use of decimals, and other conventions should follow American standards.
Contributors’ Responsibilities: All contributors are expected to abide by the academic standards of print journals, including all measures against plagiarism and observation of copyright and are responsible for securing permissions for any images or multimedia for which they do not hold the copyright or are not in the public domain.