Categories
Contributors to Allegra can submit their work under four broad categories:
Something like a special issue, but even more special! Each contribution in a thematic thread is selected and moderated by you as a guest curator/team of guest curators and externally reviewed as part of our care review system.
A review or a collection of reviews (symposium) of books or films, in text, interview, discussion or other formats.
A standalone piece, which can take the form of an: essay, field note, conversation, note, film, fiction, or happening.
We also publish Editorials, Newsletters, Resonancecasts, Gatherings, Petitions and Calls as a means of forging ALLIANCES.
Forms
Within each category there are a broad variety of forms your contribution might take. For example, you may have a thematic thread of essays, or fieldnotes, or a mixture. If you have something youโd like to publish but think it doesnโt fit within our proposed forms, then please get in touch. We are flexible.
An important note on multimodal anthropology. Allegra is keen to accept non-textual submissions: podcasts, videos, audio recordings, photos, drawings, comics, virtual objects and everything else you can think of (and think with). However, we see multimodal anthropology as traversing across all other submission types (e.g. an essay is an essay, whether it is done through photos or texts, a book review is a book review, whether it is produced via podcast or text and so on). We want to fight the hegemony of text not by creating silos for non-textual material. This is why we do not have a multimodal section, and rather infiltrate every other section of the website. Nevertheless, we are mindful that we have to take the mediums we use seriously and that, often, assessment and editing skills shift as we move across mediums. This is the reason why our โmultimodal teamโ is here to offer guidance to authors willing to experiment with other mediums. We encourage contributors, even if they work primarily with text, to think about the images, sounds, etc. they want to accompany their piece. A 2000-word essay needs 2-3 images. Read more about how we review creative anthropology here.
We are not a blog but an open access, multimodal anthropological platform. Maybe we once were a blog. We donโt like the strange hierarchy between blog posts and journal articles that feed into discourses of rankings and impact factors.
Linked to that: Don’t use AI/LLMs to write stuff for us (and in general, too). If you’ve come to us, we’re assuming it is because you have something special to say. We want to read your voice and your thoughts, not some superficially polished product that, by using a language prediction engine, also fills the pockets of broligarchs. In line with our manifesto for slow scholarship, we need rather less than more, sped up scholarly production.
Desk and peer review
All contributions are desk reviewed and most forms are peer reviewed. See here for more information on our review process.
Open Access
All our content is published under a Creative Common CC-BY-NC 4.0 licence.
Allegra Processing Charges
All reviewed content on Allegra now has a DOI, which costs us 1 USD to create. Please send us this amount, or more if you can afford it, here: https://allegralaboratory.net/donate/.
Should you have access to institutional funding for Open Access publications, and are willing to support our work, we can also formally bill you for a higher, mutually agreed APC. This is a great way to support Allegra!
Style
Referencing
If you cite other works, please reference academic publications at the end of your contribution. We donโt mind the style of referencing you use, as long as it is consistent. If you have links that you want to include, it is helpful to insert the hyperlinks directly in the word document. This makes most sense for publicly accessible sites (for example, don’t link to pay-walled journal articles). Please keep academic references to a sensible minimum and include a full list at the end.
Keywords / Tags
Please choose 3-5 keywords from the list of ‘tags’ on the right hand side of this page and include them below the title in your submission (you have to click ‘tags’ on the little box on the right of page).
Author Bios
Once a piece has been accepted for publication we will ask for an author bio (60 words max) so that your profile can appear on the site: https://allegralaboratory.net/authors/
If you want your photo to appear next to your bio, please create an account on gravatar.com and upload a picture on your profile. You should make sure that the email address you are using to register on Gravatar is the same as the one you used to communicate with Allegra. If for whatever reason, you would rather not have a photo or need to remain anonymous then please let us know.
Here are instructions on how to create a Gravatar profile:
- Go to: https://gravatar.com/, click on โget started nowโ. Follow the cues to create a new profile.
- Click on โAvatarโ and add a picture (if your photo is not in the correct format, in mac: right click on the pic, then scroll down to โquick actionโ, then select โconvert imageโ to jpeg).
- Now, click on โAboutโ and enter your name and a short bio (80 words). Please note that this profile is public. You can also change your โprofile urlโ, although this is not compulsory.
- When submitting your post to the thread curator(s), please share the email address you used to create your Gravatar profile.
Images
We will need at least one image for your contribution. Any images/photographs used in the text should be sent to us separately (in high quality, the longest side must be maximum 600 pixels). Each picture should be accompanied by captions, as well as attributions. It is your responsibility to make sure that the images in your post are either your own, or are open access.