We invite critical and creative submissions from a global cross-section of women writers on the politics of water for a forthcoming special issue of International Feminist Journal of Politics (IFjP), published by Routledge/Taylor and Francis. Dr. Nandita Ghosh and Paola Corso will serve as guest editors for this special issue of IFjP. "The Politics of Water: A Confluence of Women's Voices" will combine testimonial accounts, critical essays, short fiction, and poetry on the physical nature of women's struggle over water as a resource and material reality.

These struggles often place at risk women's bodies in national, racial, ethnic, and class conflicts. For example, a 2004 Consumers International report notes the following: Poor rural women in developing countries may spend eight hours a day collecting water, carrying up to 20 kilos of water on their heads each journey. One in 10 school-age girls in Africa do not attend school during menstruation or drop out at puberty because of the absence of clean and private sanitation facilities in schools. Every day 6,000 girls and boys die from diseases linked to unsafe water and women are the main caretakers for sick children and adults. A woman in a slum in Kenya pays at least five times more for one liter of water than a woman in the United States. Women activists opposing dam projects in India brave the rising waters in protest.

As debates become more acrid in tone in the 21st Century over the role of water in our increasingly fragile environment, such concerns are sure to become more anxiety prone for rural women of the South who often manage water resources for their communities. This special issue is a response to such debates and concerns.

All submissions must focus on gender thematics in any discussion concerning the politics of water, but the editors are open to work drawing from various disciplines including water resources social studies, women's studies, cultural studies, literary studies, environmental studies history, mythology, geography, political science, sociology, anthropology, biology, and others. Please see the journal’s Notes for Contributors for further details concerning accompanying materials, format, and house style. All submissions must be written in English.

Guidelines for critical essays: Essays should not exceed 3,000 words. Submissions should be sent as follows: Dr. Nandita Ghosh, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Communications, Philosophy, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ 07940 nan_dita@excite.com, nghosh@fdu.edu

Guidelines for short fiction, & poetry: Short fiction should not exceed 3000 words. Send 3-5 poems. Submissions should be sent as follows: Paola Corso, 133 8th Avenue #4E, Brooklyn, NY 11215. paola_corso@hotmail.com

Guidelines for testimonial accounts: These should not exceed 3000 words. If these are creative in style and content then submit to Paola Corso. If, on the other hand, these are more critical or analytical, please submit to Nandita Ghosh.

DEADLINE: May 31, 2006 Special Issue Editors:

Paola Corso is a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow and author of Death by Renaissance and Giovanna's 86 Circles. Her poetry and fiction are set in her native Pittsburgh river town and explore the environmental impact of industrialization from a working-class perspective. She and Dr. Anna Kay France co-edited a book on International Women Playwrights. She currently teaches a prose workshop at Fordham University.

Nandita Ghosh is an assistant professor at Farleigh Dickinson University where she teaches courses on literature, culture, and the environment. She was involved in mobilizing active support in the US against the construction of the Maheshwar dam on the River Narmada and has networked with members of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (a grassroots movement in India protesting the environmental damage and human displacement caused by damming the River Narmada), as well as various human rights and environmental groups based in the US.

International Feminist Journal of Politics

Notes to Contributors

IFjP does not consider manuscripts that are under review elsewhere or that have been previously published. Submission of a paper to the journal will be taken to imply that it presents original, unpublished, work not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Where copyright permission is required, it is the author's responsibility to obtain such permission. By submitting a manuscript, the authors agree that the exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute the article have been given to the Publishers. Upon acceptance for publication, a transfer of copyright agreement will be forwarded to be signed by the author for all IFjP submissions. The editorial office must receive signed hard copies of the transfer of copyright agreement before accepted material can be published. Submission should be in English, typed in double spacing (including all notes and references) on one side only of the paper (or in electronic format, see below). English or American spelling is acceptable provided usage is consistent. Articles are read first by one of the IFjP editors. If it is appropriate for IFjP and ready for review, the article is sent out anonymously to be refereed by at least two readers. Every effort will be made to decide as to publication within 6 months of submission. Each author (or set of coauthors) will receive 1 copy of the issue and either 50 offprints or a PDF file of the article.

Preparation of copy

1. Type all copy--including endnotes and reference list--double-spaced, allowing generous margins on the top, bottom, and sides. Articles should range between 5,000 and 8,000 words. Authors are requested to send an electronic version of their article on disk or as an email attachment. It is important that authors ensure that their typescript is an exact printout of the electronic version supplied.
2. A brief biographical note about each author should be supplied on a separate sheet, and should include the article title and the author's name, postal address, and E-mail address, if available. The first page of the manuscript should have the article title 2 inches from the top of the page. The text should start 2 inches below the title. To protect anonymity, the author's name should not appear on the manuscript, and all references in the body of the text and in footnotes that might identify the author to the reviewer should be removed and cited on a separate page.
3. Tables, figures and plates should not be inserted within the pages of the manuscript but should be submitted on separate sheets attached to the article. All captions should be listed on the sheet along with the corresponding illustration. The desired positions for each table, figure, and plate should be indicated in the margin of the manuscript. A glossy print of each illustration should accompany the manuscript.
4. Only one hard copy of the paper plus abstract (of not more than 200 words) should be submitted if accompanied by a disk version or an email attachment saved in Word or RTF (Rich Text Format). If you are unable to supply us with an electronic version in either of these formats you should submit three hard copies instead. Send submissions to: The Editors, IFjP, Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 or email us on ifjp@yorku.ca. Please note that the IFjP office will retain one copy of the manuscript for its files.

Citations and references
Whenever feasible, submissions should follow the Harvard author-date system of documentation. References to works are given in the text in chronological order by enclosing the author's last name and the year of publication in parentheses (Miller 1978) and are keyed to an alphabetical list of references at the end of the article. Specific page or section references follow the date, preceded by a colon (Miller 1978: 234). Other examples are: (Miller and Jones 1978) for dual authorship; (Miller et al. 1978) for more than three authors; (Miller 1978a, 1978b) for two works by the same author in a single year; (Smith 1982; Chanock 1985; Robertson and Berger 1986) for two or more works by different authors.

Endnotes are used for material commenting on or adding to the text and should be used instead of parenthetical citations for references to more than three works, archival materials, unpublished interviews, and legal cases. Within endnotes, second and later references to a work should refer to the author's last name and date. Do not use op. cit. Endnotes should be typed double-spaced at the end of the article, preceding the list of references. Full references must be given in the reference list to all works cited in the text, including citations in endnotes. List works alphabetically by author and, under author, by year of publication. References not cited in the text will be removed from the reference list. Author’s first names (where available) should not be spelt out in full, but initials used instead, as a matter of standard practice.

Examples:
Book:
Smyth, C. 1992. Lesbians Talk Queer Notions. London: Scarlett Press.

Book, multiple author:
Kay, J., Mayer, C. and Thompson, D. 1986. Privatization and Regulation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Article in edited volume:
Dworkin, G. 1989. ‘The Concept of Autonomy’, in Christman, J. (ed.) The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy, pp. 46–68. New York: Oxford University Press.

Article in journal:
de Lauretis, T. 1989. ‘The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S., and Britain’, Differences 1 (2): 3–37.

Edited text:
Smith, A. 1976. [1776] An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Translated text:
Foucault, M. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977. C. Gordon (ed.). Trans. C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, K. Soper. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press.

Article in newspaper:
Lewin, T. 1992. ‘Hurdles Increase for Many Women Seeking Abortions.’ The New York Times, March 15; 1, 18.

Unpublished:
Fleck, S. E. 1997. ‘Choice or Bargain? Married Women's Labor Force Participation in Honduras’. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Economics, American University.

Further notes on style
It would be helpful if contributors would bear in mind the following points of style when preparing their papers. Justification of text: If you are using a computer or wordprocessor, use unjustified mode. Leave the right margin ragged and avoid word divisions and hyphens at the ends of lines. Only insert hard returns at the end of paragraphs or headings. Punctuation: Use a single (not a double) space after a full point, and after commas, colons, semicolons, etc. Do not put a space in front of a question mark, or in front of any other closing quotation mark.

Full points: Use full points after abbreviations (p.m., e.g., i.e., etc.) and contractions where the end of the word is cut ( p., ed., ch.). Omit full points in acronyms (HMSO, USA, BBC, NATO, plc), after contractions which end in the last letter of the word (Dr, Mr, St, edn, eds, Ltd) and after metric units (cm, m, km, kg,). Note especially ed. eds; vol. vols; no. nos; ch. chs, etc. Quotations: Use single quotation marks for quoted material within the text; double quotation marks should only be used for quotes within quotes. Quotations of over forty words should be extracted and indented and no quotation marks used.

Numerals: In general spell out numbers under 100; but use numerals for measurements (e.g. 12km) and ages (e.g. 10 years old). Insert a comma for both thousands and tens of thousands (e.g. 1,000 and 20, 000). Always use the minimum number of figures for ranged numbers and dates, e.g. 22–4, 105–6, 1966–7; but use 112–13, 1914–18, etc. for ‘teen’ numbers. Use the percentages sign only in figures and tables; spell out ‘per cent’ in the text using a numeral for the number (e.g. 84 per cent).

Dates: Set out as follows: 8 July 1990 (no comma), on 8 July, or on the 8th; 1990s (not spelt out, no apostrophe); nineteenth century (not 19th century) and insert hyphen when used adjectivally (e.g. nineteenth-century art).