CALL FOR PAPER SUBMISSIONS
2026 JOURNAL OF EMERGING DANCE SCHOLARSHIP:
AN INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION OF THE WORLD DANCE ALLIANCE
SUBMISSION DEADLINE: August 15, 2026 PUBLICATION DATE: January 20, 2027
Guest Editors:
Akhila Vimal C., Fulbright-Nehru Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA
A.P. Rajaram, Assistant Professor, IIT-Bombay, Mumbai, India
Debanjali Biswas, TaPRA Fellow, Showtown History Centre, UK
The World Dance Alliance (WDA) announces a call for original scholarly articles and performance reviews for Volume 8 of the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship (JEDS), from emerging scholars in the discipline of dance. Authors must be currently pursuing a graduate degree (M.A., M.F.A., Ph.D., or equivalent) or be within five years of having graduated (the degree does not need to be in dance, but the article must be focused on dance as an evolving discipline).
Manuscripts should contribute innovative scholarship into contemporary or historical dance, research methodologies, critical choreographic analysis, ethnographic studies, pedagogical practices, or other topics opening insights into the field of dance studies. Research should be original and supported by outside resources. Research engaging participants must show compliance with Institutional Human Participants Review procedures.
Co-Evolve · Co-Habit · Collaborate
Relational Aesthetics and Shared Practices in Dance
Dance unfolds through relationships. Bodies move with other bodies, with spaces, with histories, and with environments. These encounters shape how movement emerges, how knowledge circulates, and how communities form around dance practice.
This guest-edited issue of the Journal of Emerging Dance Scholarship (JEDS) explores three interconnected ideas: co-evolution, co-habitation, and collaboration as ways of thinking about relational processes in dance.
Co-evolution draws attention to the ways dance practices transform through interaction with cultural traditions, social contexts, and artistic experimentation. Co-habitation invites reflection on how dancers share spaces with audiences, landscapes, technologies, and other bodies. Collaboration foregrounds collective modes of creation where authorship and meaning are negotiated through dialogue and shared practice.
Taken together, these ideas open space to consider how dance generates new forms of intimacy, attention, and aesthetic experience. When movement practices evolve together across different bodies and contexts, they can produce unexpected ways of sensing, relating, and composing choreography.
Within this relational framework, the issue also welcomes reflections on diverse embodiments and shifting aesthetic norms, including practices that rethink assumptions about virtuosity, technique, presence, and accessibility. Rather than positioning access as a separate topic, the issue invites contributions that consider how evolving relationships between bodies, spaces, and communities reshape what dance can look like, feel like, and mean.
By foregrounding relational processes, this issue aims to bring together emerging scholars and artist-researchers who examine dance not only as performance but as an ongoing practice of living, creating, and thinking together.
Scope of the Issue
Possible areas of contribution include:
Collaborative choreographic processes
Community-based and participatory dance practices
Interdisciplinary collaborations between dance and other fields
Dance and ecological or spatial relationships
Cultural exchange and co-creation across traditions
Collective authorship and relational modes of choreography
Emerging aesthetic frameworks shaped by diverse embodiments
Rethinking technique, virtuosity, and presence in contemporary dance
Practices that expand notions of access, participation, and spectatorship
Practice-as-research methodologies grounded in relational processes
Digital or technological collaborations in dance
Types of Contributions:
The issue will welcome:
Research articles
Practice-based research essays
Reflective artist writings or short research notes
Book reviews engaging recent publications in dance and performance studies
Performance or exhibition reviews related to the theme
Relevance
As dance scholarship continues to expand across disciplines and contexts, relational approaches offer new ways of understanding how movement practices develop, circulate, and generate knowledge. By focusing on co-evolution, co-habitation, and collaboration, this issue seeks to highlight research that examines dance as a dynamic field shaped by shared processes and encounters. The issue aligns with JEDS’ commitment to supporting emerging scholars and innovative research approaches, particularly those that bridge artistic practice and critical inquiry.