DEADLINE EXTENDED TO APRIL 11, 2025. SUBMIT HERE.
"Feminist Visions and Struggles for a Gradeless University"
Guest edited by Atia Sattar, Man Kaplan, Stina Soderling
Feminist Formations invites submissions for the special issue "Feminist Visions and Struggles for a Gradeless University". This issue aims to stitch together a practical and theoretical foundation from which to imagine and facilitate feminist futures for higher education. We seek papers that critically engage with grading practices from a range of intersectional feminist perspectives. We are particularly interested in how a feminist pedagogical lens can draw attention to the social and institutional structures that grades function within, including but not limited to the colonial origins of the education system; racism and ableism in assessment; and the gendered care work of feminist education. Papers might offer methods for alternative grading that embody feminist principles, analyses of normative grading regimes, or interventions into dominant discourses around ungrading and the university structure. We invite contributions that not only confront grading as a material and institutional framework inimical to feminist pedagogy, but also imagine the converse: alternative forms of assessment capable of structuring feminist institutions of higher education.
Literature on feminist pedagogy provides a rich framework for understanding and undoing systems of privilege and power within the classroom and higher education institutions at large. Many feminist teachers accordingly recognize that grades are an integral aspect of the power system we want to disrupt. However, feminist critiques of assessment practices and their material and institutional frameworks remain underdeveloped. This gap is precisely where this special issue will intervene. Our goal is to amplify the conversations and interventions taking place in feminist circles that challenge traditional assessment models and envision a gradeless university.
Just as the university can serve as an incubator for movements for change, so can it incorporate those movements for its own benefit. Insofar as the movement towards ungrading is no exception, effective feminist pedagogy may require more than the adoption of alternative grading structures; it may also require the cultivation of (re)orientations to academia, student learning, and even collegial responsibility to intervene in the colonial, masculinist, and neoliberal contexts of the university. This special issue will therefore explore alternative grading practices as decidedly feminist as well as illustrate frameworks for thinking and activism that engage with critical, decolonial, and abolitionist perspectives. It calls on practitioners of feminist and gender studies to honor the vision and mission of our field by disrupting the tyranny of grading both within and beyond the classroom walls.
We encourage proposals that draw on feminist educators’ own experiences with alternative grading and related practices, and/or illustrate how these approaches to assessment can disrupt institutional structures and their systems of rewards and punishment. Potential topics and questions include:
● Feminist analyses of grading, including alternative grading practices and methodologies. What does a feminist perspective make visible or possible that is currently missing from the alternative grading movement? Do grades matter? What matter do grades have? Why engage in this work when it’s so difficult?
● Experiences and experiments in (not) grading. What is a feminist tactic you have used to resist the grading regime in your classes, and what conditions enabled this resistance?
● Engagements with theoretical frameworks that enable resisting grades. For example, how can discourses on decolonization, disability, labor, wellness, and care work inform feminist approaches to alternative grading and assessment models? Can alternative grading practices offer a “corrective” to ableism, racism, and sexism within education?
● The role of students. In what ways can students reinforce or disrupt normative grading practices? How do alternative grading strategies reorient student labor and priorities?
● Institutional structures, supports, and challenges. How do you negotiate the university’s tendency to co-opt pedagogical innovations and methods of learning that challenge the neoliberal structure? What other practices (e.g. peer review, final grade requirements, faculty evaluation, and faculty contingency) need to be rethought or dismantled in order to create a gradeless university?
● Alternative grading across different institutional contexts. How does alternative grading vary between public and private universities, small and large institutions, etc? What are the experiences of ungrading and/or challenging grading structures in minoritized community colleges, or HBCUs that have long engaged in practices of radical change and worldmaking? How do practices vary across disciplines and class sizes?
● Labor and (not) grading. Who does the labor of challenging the grading regime? (How) is this labor gendered and racialized, and how can an intersectional feminist lens help us shift this labor burden? What is the role of scale in practicing alternative grading; what is possible in a small seminar class versus a lecture with 300 students?
● Collectivity and social movements. What is the role of collective action in imagining and building a gradeless university? How do, or can, struggles against grading connect with movements beyond the walls of the university? What feminist pedagogical lessons might movements teach us as academics?
● Historicizing the current interest in ungrading. What can we learn from, for example, the alternative school movement of the 1960s or the anarchist schools of the early 20th century?
● Envisioning futures for gradeless education. What might need to happen beyond the university in order to make a gradeless university possible? What kinds of worlds are made possible when alternative assessment practices are embraced? What values and forms of knowledge are prioritized in those worlds?
Submission Process: Please submit a 500-word abstract as a Word .doc (NOT .docx or .rtf) file by March 31, 2025 to Submittable. Editors will send out invitations for full articles by April 30, 2025. On May 1, 2025, submissions for full manuscripts will be live for invited individuals. Final submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes and references. Please contact the guest editors at feminismwithoutgrades@gmail.com for inquiries or feministformations@oregonstate.edu.
Following the deadline, guest editors will review the manuscripts and determine those to be sent for full review. Citations should follow the Chicago Manual of Style. For more details, please see Feminist Formations submission guidelines. Manuscripts will be subject to anonymous review and must adhere to the publishing guidelines of Feminist Formations, found at: https://feministformations.org/. Scholarly essays should not exceed 10,000 words, including notes and references. Files must be in Word .doc (NOT .docx or .rtf).
Anticipated Publication Date: Spring 2026
For information on submission preparation, download a Feminist Formations style guide, submission checklist, and anonymization guide.
Questions about the submission process may be sent to Editorial Assistant Eric Warren and I-Yun Lee at feministformations@oregonstate.edu.
Questions about the review process may be sent to the guest editors at feminismwithoutgrades@gmail.com.
Feminist Formations is a leading journal of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, published three times a year by the Johns Hopkins University Press. It is housed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Oregon State University, under the editorship of Patti Duncan. For more information, see www.feministformations.org.