Calls for Papers

Open Call for Papers:


The International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB) provides a forum within bioethics for feminist thought and debate. IJFAB welcomes feminist scholarship on ethical issues related to health, health care and the biomedical sciences, the social determinants of health, and global ethics. IJFAB aims to demonstrate clearly the necessity and distinctive contributions of feminist scholarship to bioethics.

IJFAB publishes at least one open issue per year, in addition to thematically framed special issues. Please submit your manuscript in any of the categories listed below, and the Editorial Office will see that it is reviewed either for IJFAB’s next open issue or for an appropriate special issue of IJFAB.

All papers published in IJFAB have been subject to triple anonymous peer review. The Editorial Office aims to return an initial decision to authors within 8-10 weeks. Authors are frequently asked to revise and resubmit based on extensive reviewer comments. The Editorial Office aims to return a decision on revised papers within 4-6 weeks.

Calls:


Vol 6, No. 2: Special Issue on Aging and Long-term Care

The deadline for submission for this issue has been extended to October 15, 2012.

Please inform the IJFAB editorial office immediately if you plan to submit for this issue

Guest Editors: Lisa A. Eckenwiler and Carol Levine

The past several decades have seen significant improvement in the health of older adults. In the United States and many other parts of the world, people are living longer and with less chronic disability than ever before. The aging population is burgeoning. While currently the proportion of older persons is 17 percent, by 2050 it is expected to be 26 percent. The oldest old, or those eighty and above, will increase from being just 1.4 percent of the population to 4.3 percent. The elderly, and especially the oldest old, are disproportionately women. Their caregivers are also disproportionately women, as family care is the predominant mode of care. Projections further suggest that elderly populations in many developing countries are growing more rapidly than those in affluent ones. Nearly 250 million of the approximately 420 million people over sixty-five live in developing countries, and expectations are that the majority will live there in coming decades. Compared to wealthier countries, these mostly low and middle-income countries will undergo this demographic shift quite quickly, even as they continue to contend with the burden of diseases like HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis, and with considerably less in the way of resources, including human resources.

These changing demographics generate a greater need for long-term care, whether that is provided in the home, in community settings, or in institutions. While there has been considerable debate concerning the nature and extent of future long-term care needs, especially given declining rates of disability in recent decades, the consensus is that they will grow. While governments, global health organizations like the WHO and PAHO, and other agents have acknowledged the importance of addressing current and coming demands related to aging and long-term care, the current state of the dependent elderly and of long-term care systems around the world are, on the whole, fragile and in urgent need of attention. Moreover, analyses and recommendations that are informed by feminist approaches are largely lacking.

This special issue of IJFAB aims to contribute to the ongoing conversations around ethics and policy in aging and long-term care. We invite essays written from a feminist perspective on any topic related to aging and long-term care. Possible topics include:


Submission instructions for authors are available here. Papers should be submitted in Microsoft Word format as email attachments to IJFAB@sunysb.edu.

The submission deadline for this issue is October 15, 2012.



Vol 7, No. 1: Proceedings of the 2012 FAB conference

All papers accepted for presentation at FAB 2012 will be reviewed for publication in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Authors should be prepared to submit revised papers in IJFAB style no later than November 15, 2012. Instructions for submission can be found at ijfab.org. All papers submitted to IJFAB are subject to triple anonymous review. Most papers published in IJFAB initially receive a 'revise and resubmit.' The Editorial Office looks forward to working with authors and reviewers to produce another superb conference issue.

The deadline for submission for this issue is November 15, 2012.



Vol 7, No. 2: Special issue on Transnational Reproductive Travel

The deadline for submission for this issue is June 1, 2013.

Guest Editors: Françoise Baylis and Jocelyn Downie

The transnational fertility industry is a multibillion-dollar global industry that continues to grow exponentially, with few guidelines or regulations. Indeed, it has been suggested that “internationalization has made oversight laughable… regulators are dogs with no teeth” (Carney 2011).

At the heart of this industry are women who sell their ova and gestational services. Typically these women – poor women or immigrant women in low or middle income countries or students in middle and high income countries – have few options to earn the money they need to live and pay their bills. The purchasers are single women or men and heterosexual or homosexual couples who travel abroad to reduce costs, to access better quality care, to access medical resources otherwise not available in their home country, to reduce wait times, to avoid legal prohibitions on particular services or to avoid legal or professional prohibitions on access by particular demographic or social groups.

Arguably, this industry flourishes, in part, by capitalizing on differences in legal regimes, differences in wages and standards of living, and differences in cultural and ethical norms. A feminist perspective calls into question the role of exploitation, coercion, vulnerability, and inequity in transnational reproductive travel (at least as it is currently practiced and is being developed).

The aim of this special issue is to make a positive contribution from an explicitly feminist perspective to the ethical debates surrounding transnational reproductive travel. Contributions analyzing aspects of the debate that, to this point, have received insufficient, if any, attention are particularly welcome.

The Guest Editors invite submissions on any topic related to transnational reproductive travel.

Potential topics for this volume include:

Authors who plan to submit papers are encouraged to contact the Guest Editors prior to submission.

All papers must be submitted in IJFAB style. Please consult this page for style guidelines.



Vol 8, No. 2: JUST FOOD: Bioethics, gender, and the ethics of eating

The deadline for submission for this issue is April 1, 2014.

Editor: Mary C. Rawlinson

Western ethics rarely makes eating a main theme. Food belongs to the often invisible domain of women’s labor. While obesity, malnourishment, and lack of access to clean water are regularly cited as global factors in mortality and morbidity, bioethics, even feminist bioethics, gives little attention to culinary practices, water rights, or agricultural policy or to their effects on the status of women and the health of communities.

What and how we eat determines not only our health, but also our relation to other animals, the forms of social life, the gender division of labor, and the integrity of the environment. If hunger is the hallmark of poverty, obesity and obesity-related diseases are ironically afflicting the poor at alarming rates. Hunger also attends war, violence, and catastrophic environmental events; thus, thinking ethically about food engages issues of war and peace, as well as calling into question the global dependence on fossil fuels. Food can reflect social inequity or economic independence and social justice. It can preserve cultural integrity or yield to the homogenizing force of global capital. Food encompasses the full range of issues arising at the intersection of health and justice.

The Editorial Office of IJFAB invites submissions for JUST FOOD: bioethics, gender, and the ethics of eating, vol. 8.2. Essays may investigate any aspect of the ethics of eating, particularly as it relates to health and gender.

Women are disproportionately responsible for food around the world, yet they are globally underrepresented in the ownership of property or decisions about land use or in determining environmental or food policy. As the spike in obesity among women and children in “low-income” countries under the shift to global food indicates, women, like other vulnerable and underrepresented populations, are disproportionately affected by the globalization of food, as well as by environmental degradation and climate change.

Research suggests, however, that women are also “key drivers of change,” necessary to improving food production and consumption, as well as environmental health in any community. “If you pull women out, there will be no sustainable development.” (Report of Regional Implementation Meeting for Asia and Pacific Rim, Jakarta, 2007.)

IJFAB 8.2 will investigate the bioethical problems that result from the industrialization and globalization of agriculture, as well as the role of feminist bioethics in reimaging agriculture and our culinary practices to be more life-sustaining and to better promote justice, community health, and agency for each and all. Only very recently have large populations been able to eat without any knowledge of how their food is produced. This issue explores the question of our responsibility for what and how we eat, as well as global responsibilities for hunger and diet-related disease.

Possible areas of research include:

All papers must be submitted in IJFAB style. Please consult this page for style guidelines. Authors who plan to submit are encouraged to contact the Editor ahead of time.

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IJFAB also welcomes proposals for future special issues.

Instructions for authors are available here and at www.ijfab.org. Papers should be submitted in Microsoft Word, as email attachments to IJFAB@sunysb.edu.