Transformers: All they ever wanted was to save the world. As a disruptive desire, it echoes through every crisis: from ancient myths to climate revolt—and even in sugarcoated action films. Yet every attempt at salvation carries a shadow. It risks domination. The impulse to decide what the world should be and who deserves to inherit it is never innocent.
We’re told capitalism is the only system available, that there’s no alternative. Yet those who labor and live together under oppression know that the forces of change reside in one another, in restless togetherness. Alternatives quietly multiply in kitchens, strikes, and shared gardens, and in collective study, mutual aid, and borderless solidarities. Change is not a slogan. It is a practice, strengthened through endurance, conflict, tenderness, and the refusal to stand alone.
The work of thinkers, artists, and practitioners shows that saviourism is a fantasy so seductive that it traps the very people who cling to it, blinding them to their own dependency. This editorial cycle imagines futures beyond the confines of “the human” while holding firmly to our responsibilities in this world. We move toward futures where technology and ecology are shaped by care rather than conquest, where economic balance is practiced (not promised), and fairness is designed (not symbolized). Understanding one another becomes the daily work of survival and dignity.
For the 2026 issues, Energy, Organisms, Global Players, and Ancient Battles, we seek submissions for a section dedicated to work that helps expand our editorial sensibilities. Unlike our last open call, which welcomed finished texts, this year we’re inviting pitches to be developed in collaboration with AWC editors as part of a mutual process of transformation.
ISSUE 41: ENERGY
Release: Early April 2026
Call it a vibe, call it spirit—energy isn’t a metaphor. It’s breath, tremor, heat, rhythm, exhaustion, devotion. It’s the charge that animates life and the friction that exhausts it.
Energy is quantifiable in physics: the capacity to perform work, transferred between bodies in perpetual transaction. It’s in constant motion, kinetic energy propelling objects forward, potential energy coiled in stillness, electromagnetic waves carrying light and information. Civilization is an energy experiment: humanity's story of capturing, converting, and channeling force from one form into another. It is exercised across spiritual lineages: prana, qi, spirito santo, kaddish, all the goddesses and celestial beings that embody cosmic entanglements in our terrestrial life.
Energy flows also through social systems as power, extracted, hoarded, transferred, refused. It circulates through bodies as labor, desire, and depletion. It charges acts of creation: the artist's hand converting internal voltage into form, the musician translating vibration into feeling, the writer metabolizing experience into language, and the spiritual practitioner tracing a legacy of the soul.
We invite explorations of what sets life in motion and what drains it dry. From electrical grids to laborious technologies, from the spiritual charge of resistance to exhaustion weaponized against the vulnerable, how does energy move through our relationships with each other and the world? Who supplies power, and who refuses the grid? How is vitality extracted from land, labor, and bodies? What forms of energy emerge as insurgent forces circulating outside official channels: solidarity, refusal, mutual aid, creative rupture?
Suggested Formats
>Reportage on energy infrastructures, logistic networks, and resource extraction
>Poetic meditations or scores on rhythm, grief, or spiritual endurance
>Critical analysis of the institutional cultural battery and its countering spectacle
>Testimonies of burnout, recuperation, or collective stamina
Proposal Length: 200 words
Preferred Languages: All accepted, and Spanish, Quechua, and Hebrew are particularly encouraged
Addressed to: Relational Scientists, (Pata)Physicians, Spiritual Practitioners, Body Workers
Fig.1
ISSUE 42: ORGANISMS
Release: End of June 2026
The Gaia hypothesis suggests that living things and the nonliving environment work together as a single, self-regulating system that keeps Earth habitable. Formulated by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, it reframes Earth as a living entanglement, where biosphere and evolution shape global temperature, ocean chemistry, atmospheric composition, and the very possibility of habitability. But Gaia is not in equilibrium: it is precarious, transformative, and opportunistic.
In late-stage capitalism, life is forced to thrive in ruins. As Anna Tsing writes, capitalism doesn't just destroy, it leaves behind disturbed landscapes where new ecologies take hold. Matsutake mushrooms fruit in forests scarred by logging and war. Bacteria adapt to warming, acidifying oceans. Hybrid species colonize polluted wetlands. Collectives of care emerge from economic abandonment. These are not signs of resilience within capitalism's logic. They are evidence of survival despite the wreckage—indifferent to market value, thriving through contamination rather than purity. Survival is entanglement: porous, multispecies, unruly.
We seek contributions on organisms that thrive in spite of their conditions: microbiomes that blur the boundaries of self, weeds reclaiming industrial sites, and communities thriving in the margins, remembering life is stronger than exploitation. We ask: What interdependent worlds emerge in sites of industrial or ecological collapse? How do organisms without fixed boundaries—fungi, bacteria, and viral ecosystems—challenge capitalist logics of the individual, the autonomous, the extractable? What does it mean to thrive in contamination, to value what capital deems worthless? How do precarious ecologies teach us forms of survival that capital cannot commodify or control? What multispecies entanglements reveal capitalism as only one (failing) arrangement among many ways of being alive?
Suggested Formats
>Field notes from contaminated landscapes, Anthropocene ruins, or climate frontlines
>Scientific storytelling about microbiomes, mycorrhizal networks, adaptive species, or symbiotic systems
>Lyric essays on physical vulnerability, infection, digestion, interdependence, or permeability
>Visual documentation of hybrid ecosystems, feral ecologies, or collaborative survival projects
>Speculative biology imagining multispecies futures beyond capitalist extraction
Proposal Length: 200 words
Preferred Languages: All accepted, particularly Kurdish, German, and Turkish, are particularly encouraged
Addressed to: School Students
Fig.2
ISSUE 43: GLOBAL PLAYERS
Release: Early September 2026
The Global Minotaur for Yanis Varoufakis is the beastly system that sucks up the world’s surplus capital and labor via financial dominance, military force, and the hegemony of the dollar. They operate under a dual system: a financialized core where wealth multiplies through asset speculation and rent extraction, and a periphery still bound to traditional exploitation, labeled as countries “on the way to development.” Others remain outside the equation entirely, serving as wealth reservations for those who imposed the game.
Global crises are never evenly distributed. The real actors—finance, tech monopolies, and sovereign wealth funds—are engineered to escape accountability. Now, the Minotaur has evolved through techno-feudalism: owning the digital commons and extracting rents from cloud serfs who generate infrastructure value they can never possess, Big Tech platforms function as global feudal lords. In this system, algorithmic governance replaces democratic control. The resulting collapse of international legal accountability should be our departure point to understand how geopolitics are framed today. Cloud capital replaces market competition, and over the past four years, imperialist axes have reshaped the notion of territorial sovereignty, as capital finally flows completely independent of nations.
We seek analyses of these global choreographies: How do financial and technological systems evade accountability? Who plays, who gets played, who breaks the rules, and who rewrites them entirely? From transnational lab or networks and algorithmic governance to migrant routes and data extraction, these are not separate crises but mechanisms of the same system feeding the Minotaur. We demand a planetary imagination rooted in redistribution: the reclaiming of commons, the dismantling of digital fiefdoms, the refusal of our role as tribute.
Suggested Formats
>Investigative journalism on debt, trade networks, or techno-feudalism
>First-person accounts of migration, displacement, or border-crossing
>Analytical essays on algorithmic governance or platform capitalism
>Photo essays mapping resource extraction, labor flows, or financial architectures
>Policy critiques proposing redistributive alternatives
Proposal Length: 200 words
Images: Up to 1 image may be included
Languages: All accepted, particularly Farsi, Chinese, and French, are particularly encouraged
Addressed to: Activists, economists, asylum seekers
Fig.3
ISSUE 44: ANCIENT BATTLES
Release: End of November 2026
Under racial capitalism, battles are waged over epistemologies and resources. For millennia, Indigenous cosmologies operated under fundamentally different logics than capitalism: cyclical time rather than progress, reciprocity rather than extraction, kinship with non-human worlds rather than dominion over nature. These were not utopias. Indigenous societies practiced their own hierarchies and violence, sometimes entwined with feudal or colonial accumulation. The past teaches us that relational worlds are never simple, and we can trace ways of living that resist extraction, domination, and erasure.
Robin Wall Kimmerer writes of the “Honorable Harvest,” protocols ensuring that taking from the earth requires asking permission, taking only what you need, and giving something in return. Ailton Krenak challenges the separation of nature and culture, arguing that rivers and forests are relations, not resources. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson recovers biskaabiiyang: peeling back colonial layers to practice planetary governance and land relations beneath. Ubuntu, “I am because we are,” embedded personhood within relational webs, rejecting the bounded individual that capitalism requires. Aboriginal Dreaming tracks encoded law, ecology, and kinship into the landscape itself, making land inseparable from memory and obligation.
To deprogram this conquest logic is to ask: What pre-capitalist struggles shape our contemporary instincts? How do indigenous, ancestral, or mythic practices inform present resistance? What comes after our struggle against capitalism ends? What epistemologies and practices were targeted for elimination precisely because they made capitalism impossible?
We seek contributions that revisit ancestral conflicts—not to romanticize them, but to recover what conquest tried to annihilate: survival without profit, community without borders, conflict without domination, peace as a practice sustained by environmental and social justice rather than absence of war. What comes after capitalism may require recollecting what other worlds felt and looked like, how they organized care, how they ended wars, how they lived with disagreement without demanding sameness.
Suggested Formats
>Historical excavations, relics of forgotten revolts, cosmologies, or commons
>Mythic retellings connecting ancient conflicts to contemporary struggles
>Oral histories or intergenerational dialogues on memory and resistance
>Visual meditations on ritual, territory, or sacred landscapes
>Speculative futures imagining post-capitalist peace
Deadline for proposal: September 15th
Proposal Length: 200 words
Languages: All accepted, particularly Hindi, Arabic, and Urdu, are particularly encouraged
Addressed to: Historians, storytellers, indigenous communities, students of mythology
General Submission Guidelines
Submission Deadline
February 28, 2026
Pitch Requirements
- Abstract length: 200 words
- Include a 50-word bio and a brief statement about your connection to the theme
- Submit as a PDF file
Note on Formats
The formats are specific to each issue. While we encourage submissions that fit their guidelines, we also welcome hybrid, experimental, or cross-genre proposals that push the boundaries of conventional forms.
Selection Criteria
We prioritize marginalized voices and embodied experiences. We welcome works that challenge dominant Western-centric narratives and support multilingual content, collaborating with translators when needed.
Fees and Remuneration
Submitting a pitch is open to everyone. Selected contributions will be remunerated upon publication, following editorial evaluation and development with the AWC team.
Send your pitch to
Dalia Maini
dm@artsoftheworkingclass.org
//
- Footnotes
Cover: Mariuccia Secol, Io, 1973, documentazione di una performance. Courtesy the artist.
Fig1. Having Al Sindy, In the Aftermath 2024, 2-channel video, Sculpture Drawings Performance. Courtesy the artist.
Fig.2 afield. Photos by Veerle Vercauteren
Fig.3 Citra Sasmita, ‘Altar of The Divine Awakening’, 2023, Acrylic on traditional Kamasan canvas, 55.5 x 57.5cm. Image from Yeo Workshop
