Submission Guidelines

Submissions should be well-developed pieces that address relevant issues situated at the intersection of publicly engaged theory and practice. For more on what we look for in a PPJ piece, consider “Practicing Public Scholarship” by Editor in Chief Christopher P. Long. Before submitting, please read these guidelines carefully.

To submit your work, please complete all sections in our submission form. If you have questions about the submission process, contact the editorial team at publicphilosophyjournal@gmail.com.

Upon submission, your piece will be assigned a Review Coordinator who will prepare your piece for Collaborative Community Review in Google Documents and reach out to you with updates and requests for changes or additional information, if necessary.

Our Four Style Criteria

Pieces submitted to the PPJ for possible publication will be assessed according to these four style criteria:

Accessibility

Connects with the public at large and resonates with specific, publicly engaged individuals and organizations. This usually requires unpacking technical terms, linking to source and related materials, providing transcripts for audio and video, and providing alt-text for images.

Relevance

Timely and responsive to an issue that concerns a specific public community.

Intellectual Coherence

Compelling and well-ordered according to the genre of the piece.

Scholarly Dialogue

Cites and considers related dialogues within and beyond the academy, whether encountered in peer-reviewed literature or other mediums of scholarly conversation such as blogs, magazines, podcasts, galleries, and listservs.

For more information about how PPJ review teams use the style criteria to assess submission, please visit our Participant Instructions page.

Formatting

Please follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. For citations, please use Chicago style’s author-date system; reserve footnotes for necessary expansions.

Please provide a brief (100–150 words) abstract for your piece. Because we aim to publish for a diverse audience, we encourage submissions to be shorter and therefore more accessible to broader publics. Though not a strict limit, we recommend submissions be around 3,000 words.

File Formats

We accept textual, graphic, and audio/visual submissions. The following file types are accepted:

Text: .html, .docx, .pdf
Images: .gif, .jpg, .pdf, .png, .tiff (up to 2 MB*)
Audio: .aiff, .m4a, .mp3, .wav (up to 2 MB*)
Video: .avi, .m4v, .mov, .mp4, .wmv (up to 2 MB*)

Do not use apostrophes or quotation marks in the filename when uploading any type of file.

Land Acknowledgement

We strive to recognize all aspects of scholarly work, including acknowledging the lands upon which work is done. When you submit a work to the Public Philosophy Journal, our submission form asks that you state the Indigenous lands you occupied when you created your submission. If you worked in numerous places, you may enter them all, or only the primary location.

For help finding this information, visit this Territory Acknowledgement site. To view the PPJ’s acknowledgement, see Our History.