Submissions

Articles

The Highlander Journal does not charge fees (APC) for publishing. 

Contributions of up to 15,000 words (including references, captions and notes) are welcome, in line with the rationale of The Highlander.

The first page should contain a title, subtitle (if desired), acknowledgements (if any), and the corresponding author’s name, affiliation, e-mail address, postal address and telephone number. Affiliations and e-mail addresses of co-authors should also be included.

The second page should contain an abstract of 200-250 words. This should indicate the scope of the paper and its main arguments.

The rest of the paper should contain the main body of the text, references, appendices, tables, and necessary footnotes (numbered consecutively). Footnotes should be kept to a minimum.

Commentaries

Commentaries and responses to articles published by The Highlander should adhere to the same style guidelines explained here.

Style Guidelines

Papers should be written concisely, but not at the expense of clarity. The text should be typed in 12-point Times New Roman font, and should be single-spaced (including Abstract, References and Footnotes). Page numbers should be entered at the top right-hand corner of each page.

Headings and subheadings

• Headings within the text should be positioned on the left-hand side of the text;
• Primary Headings should be typed in bold and have initial capital letters;
• Secondary Headings should be italicised and have initial capital; letters;
• Tertiary Headings should be in normal font and also have initial capital letters.

Footnotes

Footnotes should be kept to a minimum. They should not be used for references, but for explanation and expansion of argument where appropriate. Footnotes reference numbers should appear as consecutive Arabic numerals and must be embedded in the text (so that any footnote additions or deletions will automatically change all the footnote changes throughout the paper).

Referencing

Formatting should conform to the Chicago Manual of Style. Citations in text should be referenced in parentheses: (Author Year) as in (Said 1978); (Author Year: Pages) e.g. (Sharma 2008: 309).

References should be listed under a heading called References at the end of the document, and should appear in alphabetical sequence using the following style:

Journal articles

Shah A. (2006), ‘The Labour of Love: Seasonal migration from Jharkhand to the brick kilns of other states in India’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 40 (1): 91-118

Books

Scott, J. C. (2009), The Art of Not Being Governed: An anarchist history of upland southeast Asia, Yale: Yale University Press

Edited books

Bates, C. (ed.) (2001), Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in diaspora, Bakingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Book chapters in edited collections

Bharadwaj A. (2009), ‘Assisted Life: The neoliberal moral economy of embryonic stem cells in India’, in D. Birenbaum-Carmeli and M. C. Inhorn (eds.), Assisting reproduction, testing genes: Global encounters with new biotechnologies, New York: Berghahn Books: 239-258

Translations

Bjerre, J. (1960) Kalahari (trans. Bannister, E.), New York: Hill and Wang

Electronic sources

Islam T. (2010), Let’s Save Puran Dhaka!, Accessed at http://urbanpovertyinbangladesh.blogspot.com/ on 23 April 2012

Theses

Vidanage, H. R. (2009), Exploring the impact of online politics on political agents and political strategies in the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. PhD thesis. University of Edinburgh

Newspaper articles

Roy P. (2012), Eyes Wide Shut!, The Orissa Post (Bubaneshwar), 15 March, p.14

Magazine articles

Kaung, K. M. (2011), Potemkin Politics: Are the Burmese reforms for real?, Himal Southasian: 21-25, December

Film

Title. Format (e.g. DVD). Directed by xxx (date of release); place of publication, publisher/distributor, distribution date (if different from date of release, as in the case of DVDs).

Grey literature

This includes, but is not restricted to, governmental and non-governmental reports, pamphlets, internal company documents, conference papers, working papers and unpublished material. Reference to grey literature should follow the author and title style for books, but without italics for the title.

Other conventions

Language

English is the working language of this publication, but we are willing to consider submissions in other languages, subject to our capacity to review and edit them. Words in other languages should be italicised.

Spelling

First preference spelling from the Oxford English Dictionary should be used (eg, ‘criticize’, ‘organization’,—but ‘analyse’, ‘incise’); as should British-English (eg, ‘aesthetic’, ‘learnt’, ‘labour’, ‘programme’, ‘skilful’, ‘unshakeable’).

Abbreviations and Acronyms

Abbreviations and acronyms should be explained at the first occurrence. These, and other conventions, should be used consistently throughout the paper, and typed without full points. Thus: GNP, PhD. Per cent is preferred to %, unless used frequently. Always percentage.

Dashes

Use an em-rule (–) with a character space either side.

Numbers, Dates and Measurements

Words should be used for simple numbers from one to ten, while figures should be used for numerals from 11 upwards. Exceptions are references to page numbers, and in sets of numerals, some of which are higher than ten (eg, 17, 6 and 2).

Four-figure numbers should have a comma, and a further comma with each additional three figures (eg, 2,000; 5,000,000.)

Dates should be written in full (eg, 15 February 1943), and decades in number, without abbreviation (eg, the 1980s). Write 20th century, and use 21st-century ideas. Metric units are preferred for contemporary weights and measures.

Quotations

When in the text, these should be in single quotation marks, and should be in double quotation marks when appearing as quaotations within quotations. Quotations of more than two lines of text should be indented.

Tables, Illustrations and Figures

Tables, illustrations and figures should be numbered consecutively in Arabic numerals, and placed in their appropriate location and caption marked in the text.

Illustrations may be provided in colour or greyscale and submitted as either .tiff or .jpeg files with a minimum quality of 300dpi. The online nature of this series means there is no additional cost for the inclusion of photographs, maps, etc and contributors are encouraged to use illustrations where appropriate.

Authors who are in doubt about the accepted style or conventions should refer to a recent article of The Highlander.

Photo Essays

The Highlander welcomes the submission of photo essays that critically engage with the political, material, and social economies of our region of interest. We define photo essays as submissions with between 5-15 images accompanied by up to 2,000 words of text and references. The distribution of images and texts can be decided by the author. However, we ask that images are central to the submission, not merely illustrative of the community, material, or arguments, that feature in the text. We ask for critical submissions that aim to advance the understanding of Highland Asia and the methods we use to engage with the region, be it the nature of ethnographic fieldwork, photography as a documentation tool, or similar explorations.

Good submissions will be tightly focused on a single topic or defined geographical region. We encourage authors to see their photographs as interventions in scholarly and regional debates in the same way they would view written submissions. Furthermore, we expect that any images submitted are the product of ethical research partnerships with the communities represented in the images. If that was not possible for whatever reason, please raise this in your submission and explain why your submission adheres to the ethics of social science research.

Submissions should follow these guidelines:

• Advance conversations around Highland Asia by intervening in ongoing scholarly debates.
• Show a strong engagement with any community featured in the submission.
• Be tightly focused on a single topic. If the topic is regional, please limit the focus to a small geographical entity such as a single city or a single village. If an author wishes to submit a broader comparative photo essay we ask for a justification as to the merits of the comparative piece for the specified subject.
• The photographs should have some aesthetic merit, though this is secondary to the content and structure of the photo essay as a whole.

Ethics and Engagement:

We acknowledge that photography has had a complex history in Highland Asia. Photography arrived in the region entangled with colonial projects of resource extraction and documentations of racial difference. In the post-colonial period, this has been further complicated by othering representations of national minorities. At the same time, however, photography has also been a profoundly liberating medium, holding states accountable for human rights abuses and advancing social justice. Given these histories, submissions must be sensitive to photography’s multiple and difficult histories, and we will hesitate to accept any submission that cannot highlight its academic value, regardless of aesthetics.

We also encourage submissions from researchers who have had a sustained engagement with the communities or the regions that feature in their submissions. If you do not identify as being connected with the community in your images and you have only recently started working with that community or in that region, we suggest that you wait and send us your submission at a later date

If your submission covers any of the following themes: ethnic festivals, public rituals, tattooing, traditional material culture practices, we strongly suggest you narrow your focus to a specific aspect of your subject matter and use your captions to inform the reader what your critical contribution is to scholarly debates regarding contemporary or historic Highland Asia. We acknowledge that many areas of imperial interest, such as tattooing, are also of increasing indigenous interest. However, due to the fraught photographic histories of these subjects and the potential for misrepresentation, we ask for sensitivity from all submissions. To this end we welcome critical notes by authors on the photographs they did not include, topics they did not address, or voices that have been silenced through omission or erasure.

Submission Guide:

Written requirements:

We ask that the photographic essay be between 1,500 to 2,500 words. We ask for submissions to be in the format of Microsoft Word, font Arial, size 11 text. The author should stick to the broader citational guidelines for the journal [insert]. All submissions will include 50-100 words specifying the author/authors affiliations and their relationship to any communities featured in the submission.

Observations

Observations are typically short essays submitted by respected writers and scholars, and published in close coordination with the journal editors. The style and form can vary, and conducive to reflection without the constraints of more traditional scientific formatting.

Book Reviews

The Highlander Journal invites reviews of books that engage the thematic and conceptual contours outlined in the journal’s Focus and Scope. We are interested in both ‘classic’ theoretical texts as well as recent empirically grounded works that have engaged the highland spaces and populations and overtly or implicitly figures the heuristic notion of ‘Zomia+’.

While our journal is broadly concerned with the study of Highland Asian communities situated at the margins of the state, we encourage reviews of books that allow discussions to unpack the relevance of received categories and tropes such as ‘highland space’, ‘margins/periphery’, ‘borders’, ‘frontiers’, ‘remote’, ‘backward’, ‘state evasion’, ‘stateless’ etc. We seek to inspire multidisciplinary Area Studies in its broadest sense, and thus, our interest goes beyond conventional Area based approaches restricted by ‘methodological nationalism’ in Asian Highland contexts. Moreover, books that illustrate the relations between Highland-Lowland dichotomies or those that identify the circulation of the Highland heuristics in other contexts outside of Asia (example, in the Americas, Oceania, Eurasia, and Arctic/Antarctica) are particularly welcome. The books we review are usually situated roughly from the Pre-Modern era to the Twenty-first century, but we are open to relevant books that fall outside of this temporal boundary. Our journal believes in supporting diversity in knowledge production, and in that spirit, we also welcome reviews of relevant and rigorous books by vernacular and less-visible local publishers whose merits deserve discussion.

We also occasionally welcome Review Articles which thematically discusses a set of inter-related 2-3 books which together provides a meaningful discussion of new trends or theoretical directions within a field (while adhering to the larger scope of the journal).

Book Review Submission:

All reviews must be approved in advance by the editors. Please email us your enquiries to aditya.kakati@iheid.ch. We also occasionally solicit reviews of books that are of specific interest.

Content: The book review should be an engaging, informative, and critical discussion of approximately 700-1000 words. Review articles are longer and can range from 2000-2500 words.

A review should be submitted through the article submission portal as an MS Word file, should be typed double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman font with 1-inch margins on all sides, and should conform to The Highlander Journal Style Guidelines. References to other works should be kept to a minimum. Page number citations of the specific book under review should be made in-text under parentheses.

The header of the review should include:

• Author(s) or editor(s) first and last name(s) (please indicate if it is an edited book)
• Title of book • Year of publication • Place of publication • Publisher • Number of pages • Price (please indicate paperback or hardcover) if available • ISBN

Reviewer Information

At the end of each review, please include your name and institutional affiliation (if none, then as an independent scholar), email address and mailing address.