Ki, an online journal overseen by the Editorial Board of Qui Parle, seeks to explore the whatness of the critical. We aim to publish work that is critical in the most expansive sense of the word: sharp, brief, politically oriented pieces that fall outside or trouble the bounds of scholarship and its conventions. Meaning what in Punjabi, Ki signals at once a line of inquiry (what is criticality, exactly? what is it capable of?), a playful provocation (what does scholarship look like, anyway?), and a political investment in the enormous breadth of critical thought in all arenas of knowledge production. We are interested in work from the academy and also from everyday conversations, from art practices, classrooms, and activist spaces. Poetry, fiction, autotheory, flash scholarship, fieldnotes, glossaries, myths, visual and sonic arts, forms of expression without easy names: these are all of critical import, and we enthusiastically welcome them here.

Masthead

Editor in Chief
Naima Karczmar

Naima is a PhD candidate in English and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, where she works on racial epistemologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She serves on the editorial board for Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences as well as Ki. She has been a finalist for the Glimmer Train Short Story Award and the Disquiet International Literary Prize in nonfiction. Her creative work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, the Michigan Quarterly Review, Autofocus, The Iowa Review, and other people’s living rooms. She is particularly enthusiastic about publishing formally innovative and theoretically oriented prose.

Managing Editor
Be Schierenberg

Be is a PhD candidate in German and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies at UC Berkeley. They work as a writer, editor and translator and serve on the boards of Qui Parle, TRANSIT, and Ki. Here, they are looking forward to contributions that explore the affordances of trans-genre, online publication.

Editor
Justin Greene

Justin is a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the publication, editing, and translation of leftist magazines in São Paulo, Brazil. In addition to his editorial work for Ki and Qui Parle, he is a poetry editorial advisor for Anthropology and Humanism, and previously organized Entropy’s Where to Submit list. His poetry can be found in DIAGRAM, Zoeglossia, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere; his prose and translations appear or are forthcoming in Anthropology News, Ki, and Revista Rosa. He is especially excited about interventions in poetics and poetic forms, messes, and things he can’t begin to imagine.

Editor
Lou Silhol-Macher

Lou is a PhD candidate in German and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also an editor for Qui Parle. Her research and writing focus on aesthetics of formlessness in visual arts. As an editor, she appreciates experimental work that considers, questions, or refuses art as theory—it is a wide spectrum.

Editor Emerita
Mehak Khan

Mehak is Assistant Professor of Global Anglophone Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her research interests span different modes of contemporary culture from the novel to social media. Her writing is forthcoming in Philological Encounters, Critical Pakistan Studies, and other venues. She holds a Ph.D in English with a designated emphasis in Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was co-editor in chief of Qui Parle and an editor for Ki. Her current research is on theories and modes of strangeness that coalesce around the concept of "ajeeb" aesthetics - a framework that folds in affect theory, queer theory, and aesthetic theory.  She writes fiction and nonfiction, and is a founding editor ofTasavvur, a magazine for speculative South Asian fiction.

Editor Emerita
Yvonne Lin

Yvonne is a PhD student in Chinese literature and media at UC Berkeley and an editor of Qui Parle. Her research explores the mediation of memory in postsocialist vernacular culture, and she loves a good ruin. She co-edited susurrus, a zine of translations, and her writing has appeared in Ghost City Review. She is interested in works that play with medium, form, and language/s.

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