Spect-actor General Call for Contributions

Spect-actor invites contributions from educators, theatre-makers, artists, activists, practitioners, researchers, students, and communities working at the intersections of critical pedagogy, critical theatre, popular education, and struggles for social transformation.

Click here to submit and to find out how to submit

Taking its name from Augusto Boal’s spect-actor, the journal begins from the proposition that people are not merely spectators of the worlds they inhabit. We participate in making and remaking them. Education and theatre can reproduce established relations of power, but they can also create spaces in which those relations become visible, contestable, and open to transformation.

Inspired by the traditions associated with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Spect-actor is also interested in the many practices, traditions, movements, and bodies of thought with which these traditions can enter into dialogue. We welcome work emerging from classrooms and rehearsal rooms, community organisations and social movements, universities and streets, prisons and cultural institutions, as well as work that troubles the boundaries between these spaces.

We are particularly interested in contributions grounded in practice and lived experience. What happens when critical pedagogy and critical theatre are actually put to work? Where do they create possibilities for dialogue, participation, resistance, or collective action? Where do they encounter contradictions or limits? How are these practices being reimagined in different cultural, political, institutional, and historical contexts?

We welcome

● Scholarly articles engaging critically with questions of pedagogy, theatre, oppression, liberation, participation, and social change.
● Accounts and reflections from practice, including workshops, performances, classrooms, community projects, organising, and activist work.
● Critical and theoretical essays that extend, challenge, or place the traditions of Freire, Boal, and related approaches into conversation with other bodies of thought and practice.

An Invitation to Inquiry

We understand Spect-actor not simply as a place in which finished knowledge is deposited, but as a space in which people working towards liberation can think with and learn from one another. We therefore welcome work that remains close to uncertainty, contradiction, failure, experimentation, and unfinished questions.

Contributions might ask, among many other possibilities:

• How are practices of critical pedagogy and critical theatre changing in response to contemporary conditions?
• What can Theatre of the Oppressed and Pedagogy of the Oppressed learn from the places in which they are now practised?
• What happens when these traditions encounter decolonial, feminist, queer, Indigenous, anti-racist, disability, ecological, abolitionist, or other liberatory practices?
• How do questions of power arise within supposedly emancipatory spaces themselves? What new practices are emerging that do not yet have established names?
• And, perhaps most importantly: what are people doing, together, to understand and transform the worlds they inhabit?

Timeline

• Deadline for expressions of interest (max. 500 words): 30 October 2026Workshops with prospective authors: November 2026 – January 2027
• Announcement of acceptance: 30 November 2026
• Workshops with prospective authors: November 2026 – January 2027
• Announcement of acceptance: 30 November 2026
• Submission deadline for completed manuscripts: 01 February 2027
• Publication of the 2027 Issue: Second quarter 2027

Submission and Review

Spect-actor is an independent, peer-reviewed, open-access journal. General submissions are accepted on a rolling basis.

Written manuscripts should normally be no longer than 7,000 words, including notes and references, and may follow APA style. We also welcome shorter and non-textual contributions. Authors submitting visual, audio, video, performance-based, or experimental work are encouraged to contact the editorial team if the standard submission format does not readily accommodate their contribution.

Submissions considered appropriate to the journal are peer reviewed. Throughout the editorial process, we aim to provide constructive and transparent feedback and to work with contributors towards publication.

For submission instructions and further information about the journal, visit the Spect-actor website.

For questions or to discuss an idea before submitting, contact:
Matthew Rich-Tolsma
Executive Editor
Spect-actor: A Journal of Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed
m.rich-tolsma@artez.nl