Announcements

Call for papers: Special issue "Negotiating Consent in African Studies: Fieldwork Ethics, Moralities, and Shifting Power Relations in North-South research interactions"

We invite papers focused on, but not limited to, addressing the following questions:

  • What are some of the ethical and moral implications of the new standardization and bureaucratization of ‘consent’, and how does it materialize in fieldwork moralities?
  • What factors beyond institutional expectations influence researchers as they pursue informed consent and ethical research more broadly?
  • Who is to define what determines legitimate and authentic informed consent in qualitative research? And ultimately, what can such debates on ‘consent’ in African Studies bring to both a Nordic and African research context?

Click to see the full text of the call for papers.

2023-11-13

NJAS has a new logo

The Nordic Journal of African Studies has a new logo! You can see versions of it at the top of the page, and here.

NJAS has been published entirely online since 2004, and now, more than thirty years after the journal’s inception, we are excited to unveil a new logo suitable for our dynamic online presence. The logo incorporates elements from the cover that has served us so well for thirty years, drawing on elements of its colour scheme and its geographically inspired visuals. 

The new logo emphasises the dynamic links and collaborations we aim to encourage and support between Africa and the Nordic Region (and, of course, the rest of the world). 

The logo was designed by Kiira Koivunen of Mene Creative, whose work we unreservedly recommend.

Over the coming weeks and months, we will gradually update the website and our social media presence to incorporate the new logo. We will also use the new logo in future published documents.

The historical cover of NJAS will remain visible on previously published issues.

2023-09-08

NJAS awarded DOAJ Seal; new copyright policy coming up

We are pleased to announce that our journal has been awarded the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) Seal. The seal indicates that our journal follows best practices in open-access publishing. Only about 10% of open-access journals receive the seal. We are proud to be at the forefront of open-access publishing.

In other open-access news, NJAS will be changing our standard article licenses starting with the third issue of 2023. Until this point, articles have been published with CC BY-NC (Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial) licenses.  We strongly support non-commercial publishing, but in practice, the Non-Commercial license has a lot of legal grey areas: for example, most social media sites are commercial enterprises. In addition, CC BY licenses, allowing for commercial use, are required as part of the Plan S open-access requirements.

Articles published to this point will retain the CC-BY NC license. In the future, if authors wish to have portions of their articles published with more restrictive licenses (e.g., original artwork), they can get in touch with the editorial team to work out a plan.

For all articles, past and future, commercial restrictions do not apply to the authors themselves, who hold the copyright to all their work and are free to re-use it in any context, as long as the  work is cited as having been originally published by NJAS.

We will add more information on the new copyright policy to the website soon.

2023-06-20

Accepting submissions / problems with emails in system

As of 1 August 2022, NJAS is happy to accept submissions again. We look forward to receiving your work!

The email system associated with our online submission platform is experiencing some technical difficulties, and messages sent through the site may not be delivered. We are working on the problem! If you have a problem sending messages through the site, please contact us directly and we will help you. For technical issues, contact njas-tech(at)njas.fi. Onlines submissions are still working properly. We hope to have the issue resolved very soon, and we thank you for your patience.

2022-07-31

Articles now accepted in French (all sections) and Swahili (languages section)

We are pleased to announce that we can now once again welcome article submissions in English or French in all sections. In the languages and linguistics section, we are also accepting, on a trial basis, articles written in Swahili.

All French and Swahili articles should include an English translation of the abstract.

2022-05-19