Editorial Information

Feminist Africa is a continental gender studies journal produced by the community of feminist scholars in Africa. It provides a platform for intellectual and activist research, dialogue and strategy. Feminist Africa attends to the complex and diverse dynamics of creativity and resistance that have emerged in postcolonial Africa, and the manner in which these are shaped by the shifting global geopolitical configurations of power. It is currently based at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana

Editorial policy

Feminist Africa is guided by a profound commitment to transforming gender hierarchies in Africa, and seeks to redress injustice and inequality in its editorial policy, content and design, and by its open-access and by prioritizing the work and interests of feminists based on the African continent. The journal primarily serves gender researchers, students, educators, women’s organisations and feminist activists throughout Africa. It is committed to the strategic and political need to prioritise African women’s intellectual work, which has been marginalised both within and beyond the continent for a host of structural reasons.

Founded in 2002, two issues are produced per annum, in accordance with themes specified in calls for contributions.

For more information and open access to all contents please visit: http://feministafrica.net/

The editorial and production team can be contacted at contact@feministafrica.net

 

Manuscript Submissions

All contributions must register the centrality of gender analysis and politics to past, present and on-going processes of social, political and cultural change in Africa.

Contributions must be previously unpublished and not concurrently under consideration elsewhere.

We welcome the following kinds of contributions:

Features  5,000-6,000 words. These are academic articles, written with due reference to African debates and to existing work and publications in the content area, particularly citing the work of colleagues in the African feminist and broader African intellectual communities. Features should include an abstract of up to 200 words.

All features are subject to double-blind peer-review by at least two reviewers.

Standpoints  1,500-2,000 words. These are opinion pieces, intended to initiate, stimulate and form part of debates on contemporary issues, crises, challenges and mobilizations of women in the African region and beyond.

Conversations 2,000-4,000 words. These are edited interviews with key activists, intellectuals, creative writers, artists and others whose lives and experiences are shared to inspire, educate and inform the African feminist intellectual community.

Profiles            1,500-2,000 words. These pieces document informative and inspiring examples of activism, movement building, institutional, political or policy gains and challenges, political resistance, in and beyond Africa, usually in the form of case studies.

Reviews  1,500 words. These introduce and review new publications and research, creative arts and films, and key cultural events, prioritizing the work of African feminists and work that engages with gender issues in Africa. Reviews are not bound to the thematic focus of an issue.

Submissions process

All contributions must be in English. Contributions should be submitted in an editable format and as an email attachment to: editorial@feministafrica.net

All submissions must be accompanied by a cover page with the following information: article title, authors’ names, authors’ institutional affiliation, email address and a biographical note of up to four lines.

For feature articles, to facilitate blind peer review, the cover page should be attached as a separate document and the content of the article should not include information that can identify the authors (e.g. names, institutions acknowledgments) and should make any references to the authors’ past work anonymous.

Style guide

Please note that any submissions that do not utilise the House Style cannot be published.

 

General

• All submissions to Feminist Africa to be written in Times Roman font, 12-point size, and to have at least one-and-a-half line spacing.
• British (not American) spelling to be used
• Footnotes should be kept to a minimum, and should not be used for referencing or citation purposes. Use primarily to provide explanations that would otherwise disrupt the flow of the argument. It’s also appropriate to put acknowledgements in a
• When using acronyms, write out in full on first reference, followed by the acronym itself in brackets. Then use the acronym alone.
• References to titled works (book, film, journal, television programme) should be italicised not underlined or placed in inverted commas (e.g. Butterfly Burning, Re- thinking Sexualities in Africa, Journal of Southern African Studies, Generations). Articles in journals or newspapers or conference papers are placed in inverted
• Use double, not single quotation
• Numbers one to ten to be written out as words; numbers after that to be given in Arabic numerals (33 MPs; 401 districts, ) The exception to this rule is when numbers start a sentence: “Twenty-seven villagers died in the attack.”
• Note the correct form of the words per cent (two words) and percentage. Use words with words, and symbols with numbers: “Studies show that seven per cent of adults in refugee camps cannot read”; but “Maternal mortality in Dafur is as high as 24%”. The exception to this rule is fractions: “Research reveals that 4,5% of farmers joined the ”
• Use commas for numbers: 12,158 women; a growth rate of 6,7%, not 6.7%. Ø
• Currencies: US$1 000, ZAR45 000 (no space between currency unit and number) Ø

Dates:

• Write out years in full, and don’t use an apostrophe: 1980s, not ’80s or 1980’s

Citations

This is the most important part of the style guide. All contributions must include complete and accurate citations, and must use the Harvard referencing system. Contributions with incomplete or incorrect citations will be returned to authors to correct.

The Harvard system (also known as the author-date reference style) involves inserting sources into the text in an abbreviated form, supplying full bibliographic details later in the references. Make sure you cite the surname of the author or editor, date and, if you have cited directly from the text, include the exact page number.

Kaufman (1987) advances the notion that elderly people maintain a sense of continuity with their past lives.

Civil disobedience must be non-violent (Gandhi, 1934: 76).

Note carefully where the spaces and punctuation marks fall!

Semicolons should be used when referencing multiple texts or examples:

Some works that analyse the process of mediation in Africa argue against power- broking (Nathan, 1998; Lamb and du Pisani, 2000).

Note that where there are two authors, you should use the word “and” and not the ampersand (“&”). Or you could write:

The study by Basford and Slevin (1995) showed a rise….

When an author has published more than one cited source in the same year, these are distinguished by adding a lower case letter after the year:

Burnard (1992a) wrote about communication for health care professionals. She also predicted problems of childhood obesity (1992b).

If there are more than two authors, then write: Bennett et al. (2005) concluded that….

References can be placed after the mention in the text, or at the end of a phrase or sentence. Smooth flow and clarity of meaning take precedence over consistency here. For example:

Feminist theories are becoming increasingly diverse and sophisticated. There is the separatist school (MacKinnon, 1987; Dworkin, 1992); there are those who argue that gender has become the crux of the debate (Butler, 1999); and there is a rising tide of scholarship from the developing world that situates women’s struggles in specific cultural contexts (Spivak, 1988; Mama, 1997; Green, 2000).

Secondary referencing is when one author refers to the work of another and the primary source is not available. You should cite the primary source and the source as follows:

Merleau-Ponty (1962, cited by Munhall, 1989) suggests that key concepts relating to this are embedded in individual experience.

The final list of references supplied at the end of the piece must be given in full and in alphabetical order. Give as much information as possible; the idea is to make it easy for readers to find your sources. References should be listed in alphabetical order of author’s or editor’s surnames. If more than one item by the same author has been published during a specific year, use lower case letters after the year (1999a, 1999b etc.) As a general rule, use the following formula: authors or editors, date, title of book or article, journal title (if necessary), place, publisher, pages (if necessary). The title of the publication should be in italics, followed by the place of publication and the publisher’s name.

Some examples – please note the use of punctuation!

http://www.isa-sociology.org/publ/sociopedia-isa_harvard-style-guidelines.pdf A book by a single author:

Stiglitz, Joseph. 2002. Globalisation and its discontents. London: Allen Lane.

A book by two authors:

Aggleton, Pearl and Chalmers, Harriet. 2000. Nursing models and nursing practice. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

A book by more than two authors:

Chomsky, Noam et al. 2000. Monkeywrenching the new world order: global capitalism and its discontents. Edinburgh: AK Press.

A book by a corporate author (such as a government department, NGO or other organisation): UWONET. 1998. Structural Adjustment in Uganda. Kampala: Uganda Women's Network.

An authored publication issued by a corporate body:

Sengendo, James and Sekatawa, Emmanuel. 1999. A Cultural Approach to HIV/AIDS

Prevention and Care. Issue 1, Special Series of Cultural Policies for Development Unit, Paris: UNESCO.

An edited book:

Hennessy, Rosemary and Ingraham, Chrys. eds. 1997. Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women's Lives. New York and London: Routledge.

Second edition of a book:

Lofland, John and Lofland, Lyn. 1984. Analyzing Social Settings. 2nd ed. Belmont, California: Wordsworth Publishing Co.

An article in a journal:

Cassim, Rashad. 1989. “Gender, Adjustment and Globalisation”, World Development 23: 11. (Note that abbreviations such as Vol. and No. have fallen away.)

A chapter in a book:

Rabinow, Paul. ed. 1984. “Foucault, Michel, `Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'”, The Foucault Reader. New York: Random House.

Musisi, Nakanyike. 2002. “The Politics of Perception or Perception as Politics? Colonial and Missionary Representations of Baganda Women, 1900-1945”, in Allman, J., Geiger, S. and Musisi, N. eds. Women in African Colonial Histories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Two references by the same author:

Mama, Amina. 1996. “Women's Studies and Studies of Women in Africa during the 1990s”,

CODESRIA Working Paper Series 5/96. Dakar: CODESRIA.

Mama, Amina. 1997. “Shedding the Masks and Tearing the Veils: Cultural Studies for a Post-Colonial Africa”, in Imam, A., Mama, A. and Sow, F. eds. Engendering African Social Sciences. Dakar: CODESRIA.

An article in a newspaper:

Leadbetter, C. 2002. “Why globalisation is a good thing.” The Times, 26 June.

An unpublished thesis or dissertation:

Kisekka, M. N. 1973. “Heterosexual Relationships in Uganda”. Unpublished Ph.D

dissertation, University of Missouri.

 

Material sourced on the web:

Thornton, Robert. 2003. “Flows of ‘sexual substance’ and representation of the body in South Africa”, Seminar Series On the Subject of Sex. WISER and the Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand. Paper available at http://wiserweb.wits.ac.za/PDF%20Files/sex%20-%20thornton.PDF.

University of Reading. 2000. Education: a brief guide to internet resources. Available at

<http://www.reading.ac.uk/libweb/Lib/Subj/Ir/ireduc.html.

 

Undated material:

Waalabyeki, Magoba. No date. Ssenga N'Omuganda 1 - 5. Unpublished mimeos.

Published conference proceedings with author or editor(s):

Banks, S. et al. 1998. Networked Lifelong Learning: innovative approaches to education and

training through the Internet: Proceedings of the 1998 International Conference held at the University of Sheffield. Sheffield: University of Sheffield.

Paper from published conference proceedings with author or editor(s):

Proctor, P. 1998. “The tutorial: combining asynchronous and synchronous learning.” In Banks, S. et al. Networked Lifelong Learning: innovative approaches to education and training through the Internet: Proceedings of the 1998 International Conference held at the University of Sheffield. Sheffield, University of Sheffield.

A personal interview or comment:

Garuba, Harry. Personal communication, Cape Town, 16 September 2001.

(Special challenges are created when citing interviews, especially when these are given by sources that need to be kept confidential. The rule here is to be candid without compromising anybody. Where possible, give the name of the person interviewed, and the place and date where the interview took place. If identities need to be protected, then you will need to agree on a common policy. One way of dealing with the problem is to clearly state in a footnote that certain information has come from confidential sources.)