Call for Papers | Vol. 14, No. 1 | Diasporas, Mobilities and Cultures | From 30 September to 3 December 2026

2026-09-30

Editors: Isabel Macedo (CECS, Universidade do Minho, Portugal), Victor Barros (Centro ALGORITMI, Universidade do Minho, Portugal) & Rosana Baeninger (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Brasil)

Over the past decades, international migration, diasporas, and the multiple forms of human mobility and immobility have become central to the reconfiguration of contemporary societies. Far from constituting free and homogeneous movements, these processes are shaped by political, economic, legal, and technological regimes that unequally distribute the right to move, remain, and belong. They involve not only the movement of people but also the circulation — and restriction — of knowledge, cultural practices, memories, affects, imaginaries, and forms of belonging.

Within Cultural Studies, mobilities provide a privileged lens for examining the relationships between culture, power, and difference. They enable us to explore how individuals and communities negotiate identities, construct memories, and contest representations in contexts shaped by borders and by racial, class, gender, and citizenship hierarchies.

This thematic issue shifts the focus from transnational connections in themselves to the unequal conditions that make certain forms of mobility possible, desirable, and visible, while others are restricted, criminalised, or forced (Araújo et al., 2026; Cabecinhas et al., 2026). Diasporas are understood here as historical formations shaped by colonialism, slavery, labour, exile, and resistance. From this perspective, academic mobility, scientific diasporas, and the internationalisation of higher education are also examined through inequalities in access to resources, visas, languages of knowledge, and circuits of legitimation.

The so-called “mobility turn” in the social sciences represented a paradigm shift: rather than treating territories, societies, and identities as fixed units, it foregrounded the relationships between movements, networks, infrastructures, and forms of anchoring (Sheller & Urry, 2006; Urry, 2007). Critical developments within this paradigm have, however, drawn attention to the inseparability of mobility and immobility and to the mobility regimes that classify people, authorise or restrict movement, and asymmetrically distribute risks, costs, and opportunities (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Sheller, 2018). It is therefore important to understand who can move and under what conditions, who is compelled to move or remain, and how these experiences are narrated and contested.

Across Portuguese-speaking contexts, contemporary mobilities cannot be dissociated from the histories of colonialism, slavery, forced displacement, the appropriation of territories and knowledge, assimilation policies, and anti-colonial struggles. This perspective allows examination of both the continuities of colonial hierarchies (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Quijano, 2000) and the practices of resistance, translation, solidarity, and creation developed by individuals and communities on the move (Correia Borges et al., 2025; Nardini & Macedo, 2025).

 

Objective of the Thematic Issue

This thematic issue brings together original contributions that critically examine the relationships between diasporas, mobility regimes, and cultural production across Portuguese-speaking contexts. Interdisciplinary approaches that connect biographical, local, national, transnational, and digital scales are particularly encouraged.

The issue seeks to understand how voluntary, constrained, and forced mobilities — and the immobilities that are constitutive of them — shape identities, memories, representations, cultural practices, and circuits of knowledge. It also examines the infrastructures and institutions that govern these movements; the material, epistemic, and symbolic forms of violence that permeate them; and the strategies of resistance, care, solidarity, and creation through which diasporic subjects contest borders and imagine alternative forms of belonging.

 

Topics of Interest

Contributions that address the intersections of culture, power, and inequality are particularly welcome, including, but not limited to, the following topics:

  • Diasporas, families, forced displacement, labour, and cultural production;
  • Mobility regimes, borders, visas, detention, and deportation;
  • Immobilities, waiting, confinement, and the right to remain;
  • Racism, coloniality, violence, and citizenship hierarchies;
  • Memory, heritage, archives, and migration narratives;
  • Media, digital platforms, and struggles over the representation of migration;
  • Academic mobility, scientific diasporas, and inequalities in the circulation of knowledge;
  • Intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, generation, and legal status;
  • Cultural, linguistic, scientific, and educational policies in migration contexts;
  • Resistance, activism, care, solidarity, and transnational political participation;
  • Art, literature, cinema, music, and other cultural expressions of diasporas.

 

References

Araújo, E., Schrooten, M., & Barros, C. (2026). Vidas transnacionais: Cultura, vulnerabilidade e cuidados além-fronteiras. Revista Lusófona de Estudos Culturais, 13(1), Article e026011. https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.7476

Cabecinhas, R., Lins, L., & Macedo, I. (Eds.). (2026). Migrações e comunicação na era planetária: Debates e ações. UMinho Editora. https://doi.org/10.21814/uminho.ed.196

Correia Borges, G., Simões, C., & Posch, P. (2025). A diáspora digital lusófona e a presença das culturas negras nos média: Um estudo a partir de entrevista aos fundadores da BANTUMEN. Revista Comunicando, 14(2), Article e025025. https://doi.org/10.58050/comunicando.v14i2.470

Glick Schiller, N., & Salazar, N. B. (2013). Regimes of mobility across the globe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39(2), 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2013.723253

Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.

Nardini, A., & Macedo, I. (2025). “A luta continua” do Projeto Prétu de Xullaji: Uma análise do vídeo-manifesto como narrativa de resistência política. E-Revista de Estudos Interculturais, (13), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.34630/e-rei.vi13.6319

Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), 533–580.

Sheller, M. (2018). Mobility justice: The politics of movement in an age of extremes. Verso.

Sheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). The new mobilities paradigm. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 38(2), 207–226. https://doi.org/10.1068/a37268

Urry, J. (2007). Mobilities. Polity Press.

 

Submission of Full Manuscripts:

From 30 September to 3 December 2026

 

LANGUAGE

Manuscripts may be submitted in English or Portuguese. Papers selected for publication will be translated into Portuguese or English and must be published in both languages.

 

EDITING AND SUBMISSION

Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies is an open-access academic journal that adheres to stringent peer-review standards, including blind peer review. After submission, each paper will be distributed to two reviewers, previously invited to evaluate it on its academic quality, originality, and relevance to the objectives and scope of the theme of this issue of the journal.

Original articles are submitted on the journal’s website at (https://www.rlec.pt/). When submitting for the first time to the Lusophone Journal of Cultural Studies, please register here.

The guidelines for authors are available here.

For further information, please contact: rlec@ics.uminho.pt