[Commlist] Call for Articles: Low Theory/Radical Praxis

    Call for Articles: Low Theory/Radical Praxis

The late David Graeber (2004 
<https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/F/bo3640795.html>), 
reflecting on the position of anarchism in the academy, once suggested 
that “what anarchism needs is what might be called Low Theory: a way of 
grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a 
transformative project.” In the spirit of Graeber’s proposition, this 
special collection explores how various forms of politicised 
praxis—including but not limited to organising, activist or creative 
practices—can be understood as forms of thought and knowledge production 
on their own terms.
Graeber’s notion of low theory was subsequently repurposed, most 
famously by Jack Halberstam (2011 
<https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-queer-art-of-failure>) and McKenzie Wark 
(2015 <https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/61-molecular-red>). For 
Halberstam, low theory is “theoretical knowledge that works at many 
levels at once ... that revels in the detours, twists, and turns through 
knowing and confusion, and that seeks not to explain but to involve.” 
For Wark, who has used the concept across numerous works, low theory 
entails “a kind of comradely practice, where each kind of labor or 
science produces its own specific worldview … and where none claims to 
be the master discourse with authority over them all.”
Building on these lines of thought, this collection invites 
reconsiderations of the possible meanings of the /low /in “low theory” 
and reflections on how these meanings speak to notions of praxis as 
thought and knowledge-production. How, for example, might low theory be 
understood in relation to formulations of the undercommons, the 
minoritarian or the molecular? How can the practice of low theory 
interrogate and unsettle the politics of methodology, and how can 
methodologies informed by the commitments of low theory facilitate new 
forms of inquiry into the constitution of the present?
/Low Theory/Radical Praxis/ additionally invites engagements with 
militant research, understood as “the place where academia and activism 
meet in the search for new-ways [sic] of acting that lead to new ways of 
thinking” (Bookchin et al. 2013 
<https://bookchin.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/MRH_Web.pdf>), and with 
Linda Tuwihai Smith’s (1999/2021 
<https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/decolonizing-methodologies-9781786998125/>) 
influential call for an understanding of “research as a significant site 
of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and 
the interests and ways of resisting of the Other”. These interventions, 
as well as proposals for art practice as research (Borgdorff 2012 
<https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/32887>), spell out the 
necessity of accounting for a thinking-with-practice at the intersection 
of, on the one hand, research and theory and, on the other, political, 
social and embodied action.
This collection seeks out explorations that consider the multiple 
correspondences, crossings and currents between low theory and radical 
praxis, for example through:

  * theory that is grounded, concrete, operating “from below,”
    “movement-relevant” (Bevington & Dixon 2005
    <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14742830500329838>);
    theory that strives to be tactically or strategically/useful/;
  * social, activist, artistic and embodied practices as forms of
    thought and knowledge production, and as challenges to established
    epistemologies;
  * theory that is covert, furtive, underground; theory that operates
    from, or carves out, an undercommons (Harney & Moten 2013
 <https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf>);
    research, theory and politics approached through their
    extra-linguistic aspects—thinking through the body, the senses, the
    collective, etc.;
  * theory that is minoritarian, molecular, or simply small in scale;
    militant research and emergent forms of grassroots knowledge;
    research and practice that mobilises marginalised and/or
    counter-hegemonic epistemologies and cosmologies as a form of
    resistance;
  * theory that seeks to bring low the hitherto elevated—theories of
    “fallism” (Frank & Ristic 2020
    <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13604813.2020.1784578>),
    irreverence, plagiarism and idea-thievery (Guattari 2009
    <https://mitpress.mit.edu/9781584350736/soft-subversions/>).


Please send abstracts of *300–500 words* to (f.hines /at/ staff.newman.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(f.hines /at/ staff.newman.ac.uk)> and (m.kispert /at/ westminster.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(m.kispert /at/ westminster.ac.uk)><mailto:(m.kispert /at/ westminster.ac.uk)>by* 31st 
October 2025*. Full articles of around 8,000 words will be required by 
*31st March 2026*. Submissions will then undergo a double-anonymous peer 
review process.
The special collection, edited by Frankie Hines and Matthias Kispert, is 
to be published in the /Open Library of Humanities/ Journal 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/> (/OLHJ/) (ISSN 2056-6700). The /OLHJ/ is 
an internationally-recognised diamond open access journal with a strong 
emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering 
board. Unlike some open-access publications, the /OLHJ/ has no 
author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an 
international consortium of libraries.
To learn more about the Open Library of Humanities please visit: 
https://www.openlibhums.org/ 
<https://www.openlibhums.org/><https://www.openlibhums.org/>
Online version of this call: https://olh.openlibhums.org/news/860/ 
<https://olh.openlibhums.org/news/860/>

*Bibliography*
Bookchin, Natalie; Brown, Pamela; Ebrahimian, Suzahn; colectivo Enmedio; 
Juhasz, Alexandra; Martin, Leónidas; MTL; Mirzoeff, Nicholas; Ross, 
Andrew; Saab, A. Joan and Sitrin, Marina (2013), /Militant Research 
Handbook/, New York: New York University Press.
Borgdorff, Henk (2012), /The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on 
Artistic Research and Academia/, Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Graeber, David (2004), /Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology/, 
Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.
Halberstam, Jack (2011), /The Queer Art of Failure/, Durham, NC: Duke 
University Press.
Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred (2013), /The Undercommons: Fugitive 
Planning & Black Study/, Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai (2021), /Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and 
Indigenous Peoples/, 3rd edn., London: Bloomsbury.
Wark, McKenzie (2015), /Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene/, 
London: Verso.



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