CELJ Award Winners

Winners and Judges’ Comments for 2023

Best Special Issue

American Review of Canadian Studies 52, no. 3: “Social Services, Supports and Well-being in Arctic Canada and Beyond,” edited by Andrew C. Holman and Brian Payne

Runners-up

Cultural Politics 19, no. 1, “Multispecies Justice”; Guest editors: Danielle Celermejer and Sophie Chao

and 

Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society 6, no. 3, “Understanding Comics at 30”; guest-edited by Daniel Worden and Rachel Miller

Judges’ comments

In the special issue of American Review of Canadian Studies on “Social Services, Supports and Well-being in Arctic Canada and Beyond," community-based researchers produced eight articles exploring social services and well-being practices used by Indigenous communities in Arctic Canada; the issue is evidence of an emerging field they call “Arctic wellness.” 

The judges found the editorial process to be innovative and noteworthy, given the high degree of collaboration editors employed in the research and editing processes. The publication process was part of a larger 18-month project and pushed the editorial team to utilize new ideas to decolonize the peer review process and challenge scholarly practice. Reviewers especially appreciated the care taken to center Indigenous ideas about wellbeing, both in content and in practice—for example, including abstracts in English and in the dialects of Inuktitut for almost all of the articles. 

This special issue provides a significant intervention in thinking about the health and wellbeing of Indigenous people in Arctic Canada, and has implications for approaches to public health and social services in Indigenous communities beyond Canada–especially in considering relationality as essential to research and practice and in drawing on Indigenous knowledges.

The judges found several entries for this award were extremely close, and had to make difficult decisions about where to bestow top honors. They therefore also wish to recognize Cultural Politics 19, no. 1, “Multispecies Justice,” and INKS 6, no. 3, “Understanding Comics at 30” as outstanding entries and close runners-up.

Best Public Intellectual Special Issue

North Carolina Literary Review 32, “Native American Literature of North Carolina”; edited by Margaret Bauer

Judges’ comments

We are pleased to award this year’s award for Best Public Intellectual Special Issue to NCLR’s issue devoted to Indigenous literature of North Carolina. The variety of the issue’s contents, its striking design, and its active promotion in the state’s Indigenous communities and writing networks help the issue meet its stated goal of welcoming future contributions to NCLR from Native American writers.

Best New Journal

Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures; edited by Kate Hext, Kristin Mahoney, Alex Murray

Judges’ comments

We select Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures as this year’s best new journal. We admire the thematic focus on a fecund historical hinge era, when the fragile remnants of early modernity and its ideals and institutions (science and reason triumphant) yield to the transformative pressures and forces of our own late modernity, giving substance to Woolf’s quip that “on or about December 1910, human character changed.” Cusp is cleanly and elegantly designed, and the editing is consistently strong.

Phoenix Award

Liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies; edited by Alessandra Raengo and Lauren Cramer

Judges’ comments

Our selection from this strong pool of nominations is liquid blackness, which is just stunning. We appreciate how it explores its questions about theories of blackness through a wide variety of media, as well as its careful curation of various voices and methodological approaches through the new editorial sections. The changes made to the journal since it joined Duke University Press beautifully expand its founding mandate to practice “a kind of ‘black study’ that prioritizes equal care toward art/artists and contributors.”

Distinguished Editor (co-winners)

Tani Barlow, editor of positions: asia critique

and

Paul Bové, editor of boundary 2

Judges’ comments

This year, the award judges were faced with several exceptionally strong candidates and two in particular stood out among their peers for their accomplishments. In both cases, the editors had served at least three decades at the helm of their journals; both had developed an effective editorial collective rather than a strictly hierarchical approach to leadership; and both are interdisciplinary yet have also published work that is significantly influential across several fields. With such high quality candidates, the judges agreed that we should declare two winners this year: Tani Barlow, editor of positions: asia critique, and Paul Bové, editor of boundary 2. Dr. Barlow is a founding editor of positions, which has won CELJ awards for best new journal and for several special issues. In 2020, she also developed a digital platform to complement the print publication, which is a major undertaking. Dr. Bové is credited with instituting a new editorial vision for boundary 2 when it was struggling in its initial years of publication, building its reputation and influence over the past three decades. The award judges find these editors equally worthy of the honor of being named CELJ Distinguished Editors.