***Note to Authors: please make sure your contact address information is clearly visible on the outside of all packages you are sending to Editors.***

REFEREEING GUIDELINES AND EDITORIAL NOTES

Please read these notes carefully. They deal with legal and other matters.

Critical Arts is:

i) Is subscribed to by over 13 000 university and other libraries in South Africa, Africa, the USA and Europe via Routledge and UNISA Press; 

ii) It is available online via Routledge. 1980-1992 back copies are available at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/

iii) Critical Arts has been published by UNISA Press since 2005, and from 2007 an international edition is published by Routledge.   Routledge took over the electronic subscriptions managed by EBSCO, Gale, SABINET and AJOL as from January 2007.

Critical Arts has been publishing since 1980. A number of integrated theoretical trajectories and ongoing debates have emerged during the intervening period. Submitting authors are requested to familiarise themselves with these themes. For example, Critical Arts prefers analyses which interrogate essentialist ideas rather than simply assuming them. We prefer it if current authors address and critically engage discussions previously published in the Journal, in their own analyses. 

Critical Arts publishes the work of established scholars and is also geared to opening spaces for new, young and dynamic authors, whose emerging work is of critical and theoretical significance. Amongst our authors (and in the book series) are MA and Ph.D. students whose work is often theoretically refreshing, conceptually innovative and critically challenging. Critical Arts provides a platform for such students who need to find their niche within the research and publishing community.

Critical Arts receives many submissions which are inappropriate to its preferred interpretation of cultural and media studies within the South-North axis (e.g. orthodox journalism and communication studies and studies which assume the notion of `mass' communication). Where appropriate the Editor-in-Chief will reroute such submissions to more paradigmatically appropriate publications. We hope that this facilitation by us will help such authors' to get some experience in this regard and obtain eventual publication in a journal better suited to such submissions. (Critical Arts however takes no responsibility for outcomes or negotiations relating to rerouted articles. This is simply a courtesy on our part).

All articles submitted to Critical Arts are refereed. This includes guest edited theme issues. 

About 80% of articles submitted to, and refereed by Critical Arts, require minor to major revisions. We request that our referees and editorial consultants write helpful, anonymous reports, which can be sent on directly to our authors to assist them in revision in Critical Arts or for submission elsewhere if not appropriate for Critical Arts. The referee reports will indicate whether or not a paper is publishable, and the editors will then, where necessary, work further with authors on conceptualisation, any additional modifications and on other issues which may need addressing. This may require revisions -- conceptual, stylistic, factual -- over and above those initially identified by the referees. Authors thus need to be prepared and available to engage in such extra liaison and remain in touch with the journal's editors throughout the production process. (Papers accepted from authors who have disappeared or failed to sign the publishing contact will be pulled.) We ask authors to help us to ensure timeous publication by fulfilling their own responsibilities in this partnership. Our objective is to ensure the best possible outcome, articles which have a potentially high international impact. 

Author Details

• Last name
• First name
• Middle Initial
• Username
• Title
• Suffix
• Affliation
• Address (including state/ county/province, postal code and country)
• Telephone
• 2nd Telephone Number
• Fax
• Email

Submissions submitted by e-mail or hard copy lacking this information will not be processed.

Submission Guidelines:

                  Organisation as author           (UNDP 2003, 14)

      Chambers, R. ed. 1983. Rural development: Putting the last first. London: Longman.

a) Is the article adequately referenced?   Are the references accurate? 

b) If submission is not initially in the Chicago referencing style we will evaluate the paper anyway, and we'll ask for a resubmission in Chicago if the article is accepted. 

c) Critical Arts sometimes is sent unmodified conference papers for publication as main research articles. Critical Arts does not publish conference papers, but it does publish commentary, debates and extended book reviews. We will also consider conference papers which have been obviously revised for publication. 

d) All submissions are required to be submitted with short abstracts and five or six key words. Does the abstract accurately reflect the substance of the article? Is the abstract suitable for inclusion in an index?

e) Critical Arts is sometimes sent articles which have been previously published elsewhere with a request that particular articles be considered for republication in specific theme issues.  This status does not itself automatically merit reprinting in Critical Arts. (Sometimes a theme issue is well served by republishing such an article.) We have sometimes found bibliographic and other errors in such publications, not to mention conceptual and other difficulties which may require revision and updating. To safeguard both the authors and Critical Arts' interests, such submissions (if considered by the Editor) will be automatically sent on to our consultants and referees for evaluation.

f) Paragraphs or sentences which start with the name of a source are discouraged. Critical Arts' preference is that the sources be placed in brackets at the end of sentences, thus foregrounding the author's argument over the name of the source, who is then referenced in the normal Chicago style. We believe that restructuring sentences thus makes for easier reading as it is the argument which is emphasised.

g) For further information on Critical Arts' achievements and scope of interest, including a bibliography since 1980, please consult Denzin, N. ed. 2000. Cultural Studies: A Research Annual. Offprints are available from the journal. Please e-mail:   tomasell@ukzn.ac.za or criticalarts@ukzn.ac.za

h) PLEASE READ THE ABOVE GUIDELINES AND KEEP THEM HANDY. Accepted submissions which do not adhere to them (especially with regard to referencing) will not be published until the author has done the corrections. If you move abode please keep in touch with us so that you can correct the galleys and answer any queries raised during typesetting. Authors who fail to internalise the above guidelines often delay publication, and they are also ironically the ones who complain the loudest when this happens. Please help us to keep the journal appearing on time by adhering to the basic procedures listed above.

i) The reviewing process can take anything between a month and much longer. The international norm is four to six months. We ask our referees for reports within a month of being sent them, but often reviewers are slow to respond for all sorts of reasons. Please be patient during this process. 

j) Page charges are applicable. These are calculated for 2008 at R180 per page. Please ensure that your Research Office is notified that it will receive an account from us.

k) For South African-based authors only: Critical Arts is accredited with the South African Department of Education.

Keyan Tomaselli

Editor-in-Chief