To engage in a conversation across genres as well as disciplines, Ki is seeking contributions to our forthcoming issue that speak to the question of form. This special issue on the outsides and insides of form in all its fraught impositions of fixity will be in explicit conversation with Qui Parle’s upcoming special issue, “Form and Its Discontents.”
Taken from Bataille, who was, like us, writing and thinking in an increasingly fascist political climate, the term “informe” means that which is de-classed, unclassified, in defiance of the shape or coherence necessary to claim a right to be in the world. Beyond Bataille, we might hear in the issue title “(in)forme” evocations of the informal, of information and the informative, or think of forms that are in. We might also think of the relation between form and matter, or form and medium. In this sense, the “outside” of form might actually be the thing it seeks to contain, its substance.
As ever, we are looking for art, lyric, criticism, sound, and any number of things in between that speak to our central object of inquiry. We are particularly interested in contributions that play with or defy the exigencies of form, as well as those that inhabit a given form in unexpected ways. As a web journal, Ki can serve as a home to almost any shape that might be taken by critical thought, including soundscapes, films, and multimedia poetics
Submission Guidelines
Ki is an online journal overseen by the Editorial Board of Qui Parle that 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. We are interested in experimental academic writing, autotheory, lyric essays, poetry, multimedia works, and any number of things we haven’t thought of. Above all, submissions should be thoughtful and challenging. For a sense of the kind of experimental work we are looking for, we encourage you to read through Issues 1, 2, and 3 of Ki and the “Breath” dossier published in Volume 30 Issue 1 of Qui Parle.Please note that, while we celebrate creative work in all its infinite forms, we are unlikely to publish pieces that adhere strictly to genre conventions (e.g. fiction and poetry that does not engage critical, political, or theoretical thought and practice)
Submissions should be sent to kiwebjournal@gmail.com on or before June 15th, 2025.
Prose submissions—fiction, nonfiction, reviews, etc.—should be 1,500 words or less. If you have citational material, this will not factor into the word count. Please send only one prose submission at a time.
Poetry submissions should comprise no more than 5 poems in a single document. We encourage sending a .pdf in order to preserve formatting.
For visual media, please send up to 5 images. For audio, use .mp3, .mp4, or .wav. For audiovisual/interactive media, feel free to send a link. All audio, visual, and audiovisual media should include an artist statement and alt text.
Simultaneous submissions are welcome; please notify us should any work submitted be accepted for publication elsewhere. Questions should be directed to Be Schierenberg (bereniceschierenberg@berkeley.edu) or Naima Karczmar (naima_karczmar@berkeley.edu).