United States
Refract is an online journal founded and operated by graduate students and dedicated to conversations about visual culture, non-canonical methodologies, and divergent histories. We publish early-career and established scholars and artists working in a variety of genres, and are interested in work that employs visuality as a lens to engage geographies and histories that diverge from U.S. political and academic empire. We seek pieces that theorize, dream, and imagine as intervention, as well as pieces that challenge the author’s, artist’s, and editorial board’s intellectual commitments as they reflect on the visual as a site of encounter, entanglement, and social change.
As an open access digital journal, we believe that constantly working toward universally designed and accessible spaces disrupts concentrations of power, broadens the range of voices legible to academia, and expands the terrain of visual studies discourse. Our peer review process is characterized by rigor, care, and cultivation of the contributor’s strengths and style. We work closely with our contributors to develop pieces that meet the field’s standards of excellence and foreground individual interventions and voices.