Seeking articles for the next 2025 Council for Museum Anthropology section news column of Anthropology News.
We invite submissions on the theme of Signal/Noise for CMA’s next column in Anthropology News. What museum/exhibit/heritage-related stories do you have about how communities, cultures, and individuals distinguish meaningful patterns from background noise, interpret disruptions, and find (dis)connection amid interference? What counts as signal versus noise in museum-based work, and who gets to decide? How are fuzzy boundaries clarified or precarious structures disrupted in collections and exhibitions? What happens when communication is both necessary and fraught, or what makes messages shared or misconstrued?
Send a short descriptive pitch for your proposed piece to CMA Secretary, Lillia McEnaney at mcenaneylillia@gmail.com by March 1 for the Signal and Noise theme. Authors will go through an editorial process with McEnaney before Anthropology News’ formal deadline, approximately 2 month after the initial submission. We encourage submissions from both students and faculty.
Themes for 2025:
Q2 – Signal/Noise – Pitch due March 1 (publish by end of June)
Q3 – Invisibility – Pitch due June 1 (publish by end of September)
Q4 – Fluidity – Pitch due September 1 (publish by end of December)
Note that final essays should
* be below the 1,600-word limit;
* not have in-text citations or notes, but rather includes hyperlinks to any work mentioned in the text;
* only use images or other media that are either owned by the author, have Creative Commons licenses and are properly attributed, or have explicit permission from the copyright holder.
Anthropology News publishes pieces that are legible to a broad audience within and beyond the discipline. Pieces can be either stories or photo essays:
Stories—short-form exploration of an interesting topic with detail and depth, up to 1600 words
Photo essays—six to eight high-quality, visually compelling images + up to 750 words of introductory text