Missing Chapters – Understanding Higher Education Institutions as Racialized Spaces

As part of the swissuniversities project "Transforming Educational Spaces: Addressing Racism, Anchoring Intersectionality," the accompanying publication Missing Chapters will appear in March 2027. The volume brings together diverse perspectives on higher education institutions as racialized spaces, aiming to make visible a range of voices, forms of knowledge, and modes of expression. For selected chapters, we therefore invite public submissions of contributions.

So far, the following thematic structure has emerged:

• Preface – Why This Book?
  The editors situate the publication within its context of emergence and its aims.
• Remembering – On What Basis Is This Book Built?
  Historical and societal contexts of the publication: Swiss postcoloniality, politics of memory, and continuities of colonial entanglements.
• Arriving – Who (Does Not) Belong?
  Questions of inclusion and exclusion: who is (in)visible within higher education, and under what conditions?
• Learning – Who Produces Knowledge?
  Racism in higher education in its institutional, structural, and violent dimensions. The focus lies on questions of language, power, responsibility, and solidary knowledge production.
• Enduring – What Do We Carry?
  Emotional, social, and material burdens within the higher education context, particularly for racialized individuals: mental load, precarity, multiple burdens, classism, and the ambivalences of visibility and emotion.
• Empowering – Where Does Agency Lie?
  Forms of resistance, community-building, solidarity, and allyship, as well as practices of agency among those affected.
• Envisioning – What Has Yet to Be Written?
  Future perspectives: utopias, visions of belonging, and concrete transformations, as well as new forms of (artificial) knowledge production.
• Conclusion – (Still) Missing Chapters
  The project team's reflection on perspectives, voices, and gaps that remain missing from the publication.

We welcome contributions to all thematic chapters (excluding the preface and conclusion) — in poetic, artistic, literary, and experimental formats. Equally welcome are visual, documentary, and hybrid works, including photography, illustration, comics, collage, visual essays, archival and conversational formats, mapping and data visualizations, as well as performative or audiovisual contributions, provided they can be appropriately documented or prepared for the book publication. The aim is to bring diverse forms of knowledge into an open, transdisciplinary dialogue. The editorial team reserves the right to decide on the publication of contributions.

Requirements

• Submission deadline: October 25, 2026, 11:59 PM
• Submissions to be sent by email to: anina.mathivannan unibe ch