Contribute

Submissions

We are always looking for contributions and we encourage you to submit suggestions for posts you would be interested in writing. The kinds of posts we have published in the past include:

Pieces about conceptual issues in medical anthropology or related disciplines
Posts reflecting on issues of general or public concern through the perspective of the social sciences
Research or fieldwork reports
Book or film reviews
Event reports (conference, workshop or lecture)
Video or audio recordings of lectures or interviews
Photo essays, interactive pieces or other multimedia presentations
Syllabi and accounts of experiences teaching medical anthropology or related disciplines
Topic-focused bibliographies for teaching or research
Announcements for conferences, panels, workshops or positions

This is not an exhaustive list; we are interested in any other ideas you might have. Submissions will undergo an internal review process among the site’s editors and regular contributors.

Series

One of the most successful aspects of Somatosphere has been the publication of series of pieces, which are akin to a special issue of a journal. A series is typically a curated group of submissions, imagined and edited by a contributor/s around a topic or issue of their choice. Series are sometimes organized by academic working groups or conference organizers as a forum for reaching a wider audience. At other times, Somatosphere editors create and invite participation in new series.

If you have an idea that would work well as a series, contact us at somatosphere@gmail.com with a short description of the proposed group of pieces, a timeline for publication, and a list of potential authors.

Book reviews

Book reviews are welcome and should be submitted with the following parameters:

Length should be about 1000 words (please feel free to submit something slightly longer if the book demands it)
The review should summarize the content of the book
It should comment on and critically engage with the book
It should situate the book in the field

If you are a book author, publisher or publicist interested in suggesting a book to be reviewed on the site, or if you are interested in reviewing a book, please contact us at somatosphere@gmail.com.

Style Guidelines

Audience

Because the audience for the site ranges from working medical anthropologists to undergrads and other various interested non-specialists, you can choose which sort of reader you’d like to write for, depending on what you want to do with the post. Two (non–mutually exclusive) general directions this can take are:

Using the post as an opportunity to express some aspect of your research in a relatively short and succinct manner, as you might during a conference presentation (for an academic/specialist audience); OR
Treating the post as a more general introduction to your research and the issues it raises pitched to an educated and interested but not necessarily specialist audience (in this case, think New York Review of Books, Chronicle of Higher Education, Scientific American, in terms of style and audience).

Spelling

The author can choose a spelling paradigm, as long as it is consistently adopted throughout the submission.

Format

Please send submissions in MS Word or RTF format. Unless your piece requires special formatting (for example, if it is a poem or if the text and images need to work together in some unusual manner), please use a common 12pt font like Times New Roman. Include a short author biography at the end.

References

The specific method of citing outside material is determined by each case.

Hyperlinks – If you are referring to a website or online article, you may choose to embed your reference as a hyperlink rather than a typical in-text citation or footnote. Some authors choose to link directly to publisher pages for books they are citing.
In-text citations – choose a common method, such as MLA or Chicago, and be consistent.
Footnotes/Endnotes – Keep these to a minimum unless, for example, some commentary on the edition of a text is required.
Works Cited – Include a list of works cited at the end of your submission, even if you hyperlink to the source within the body text. A works cited list is useful for scanning the sources, which is impossible to do if sources are only hyperlinked.

Length

Aim for between 1,500 and 2,500 words, but our posts are often much longer than those on other blog-type sites—so something shorter or longer than this can work as well.

Images

Images are required for all pieces. If you have photographs or other images that you’d like to include, send them as separate JPEG or PNG files (you may unwittingly alter or degrade the image by embedding it in a Word document). Please make sure that the images are high-resolution and that you either own the images or have the right to reproduce them.

Contact Us

If you are interested in submitting or pitching an idea for a piece, circulating an announcement or reviewing a book, please get in touch with us at: somatosphere@gmail.com.