From its emphasis as a nexus of action in the early environmental movement to Walter Mignolo’s use of “local histories” to critique colonial epistemologies (2000), the concept of the local has come to embrace place-based identities, neighborhood activism, community archiving, and microhistories. Theorizing the local provokes master histories that rely on center-periphery narratives, resulting in greater attention to the contingencies of neighborhoods, ecological regions, and cultural specificities. Such challenges may come from the Global South or the marginalized spaces of the so-called West, producing new forms of interrogation (Chakrabarty 2000; Crane 2011; Quayson 2014, 2025). Indigenous writers such as Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) and the Yol艐u Gay’wu Group of Women (2019) also foreground the unassimilable qualities of place through emphasizing the body of the land within webs of relatedness, while restitution claims interrogate the meanings of architectural interventions and object display. In architectural history, local sites and small spaces have been mobilized to produce new ways of reading both urban and rural environments. For example, Arijit Sen’s community-engaged fieldwork methods challenge narratives that marginalize neighborhoods in Milwaukee affected by disinvestment, while Swati Chattopadhyay examines how small spaces allow us to rethink empire (2023).
The editors of react/review––a peer review, open-access digital journal dedicated to research by emerging scholars––seek articles, reviews, and research spotlight essays for Volume 6 that consider the themes of local placemaking, the vernacular, and their imaginaries. How have makers imagined and engaged with the materials and landscapes of their community? How have community-engaged or non-professional projects produced narratives and aesthetics of the local? How might histories of the local resist generalization while also avoiding the insularity of “regional studies”? How might scholars develop methodologies for reading specific locales that can serve as models for understanding other places, such as Ato Quayson’s urban studies class using Accra to build a method for analyzing African and global cities (Quayson 2014, 2025)?
Though local histories have been excavated for nationalist and state-building purposes, this volume seeks instead to center histories of and critical approaches to local placemaking and its imaginaries. We are particularly interested in examples and sites outside of canonical histories, rather than the way that locales and vernacular practices have been appropriated into professional practice.
We invite scholarship on any historical period and geographical focus that engages with the volume’s theme. The journal is open to all submissions from fields related to art history, architectural history, urban studies, museum studies, and visual studies, but we prioritize articles by advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career contingent scholars.
The journal is currently open to submissions for all categories (see descriptions below). For feature and spotlight articles, please submit a manuscript and 150-word bio to the journal’s page on eScholarship using the submit function, located at: . Please remove any identifying information from manuscripts, as submissions will be evaluated through a double-blind review process.
Questions can be directed to the journal co-managing editors, Megan J. Sheard & Taylor Van Doorne, at reactreviewjournal@gmail.com.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Placemaking and place as method
Local imaginaries
Vernacular and folk art
Community-engaged fieldwork
Settler placemaking
Cultural landscapes and Indigenous spatial imaginaries
Mapping and counter-mapping
Regional museum collections
Writing local and microhistories
Amateur/non-professional architectural and artistic practice
Regional construction practices
Place-specific materialities
Article categories available to open submission:
Feature articles (3,500-4,500 words): Features are research essays focusing on the theme of the call for papers. Feature articles are accompanied by brief responses from members of the editorial staff in order to create a conversation and make connections across research specialties.
Spotlight articles (2,000-2,500 words): Spotlight articles are open-ended pieces that discuss new research findings, speculate on pressing research questions, or address methodological issues encountered in fieldwork or archival work. They differ from the more formal feature writing in that spotlight pieces are more exploratory and flexible in nature. Spotlight articles provide space for researchers to share works-in-progress, make connections between research and current events, or reflect on methodologies or the experience of conducting research or fieldwork. This section is also open to interviews or new translations of art and architecture related texts accompanied by a brief translator note.
Book/exhibition reviews (750-1,000 words): Reviews on recent exhibitions, public art projects, or publications should touch on the theme of the current issue. To pitch a review, please send a ~150-word pitch and CV to co-managing editors, Megan J. Sheard & Taylor Van Doorne, at reactreviewjournal@gmail.com by August 29, 2025.
Bibliography
Dipesh Chakrabarty. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Swati Chattopadhyay. Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023.
Sheila Crane. Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Gay’wu Group of Women. Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country through Songlines. Crows Nest NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2019.
Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass. First edition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Walter Mignolo. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Ato Quayson. Oxford Street, Accra: City Life and the Itineraries of Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Arijit Sen. “The Field School,” Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Collaborative Program, UW Milwaukee and Madison, accessed 20 June, 2025, .
“5/15 "Urban Experiential Learning: Concepts and Pedagogical Methods"—A Seminar with Prof. Ato Quayson (English, Stanford),” UC Santa Barbara Graduate Center for Literary Research, May 19, 2025, .
