Contributor guidelines

Culture Caleidoscoop aims to be an open, inclusive publication for practitioners, professionals, academics, researchers, volunteers, or anyone who’s interested in the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors.

Please see the Culture Caleidoscoop Style Guidelines for guidance regarding language.

Culture Caleidoscoop is open to receiving contributions in a variety of formats on a wide range of topics and submitted by a wide range of contributors. We welcome high-quality submissions that align with our values. We expect contributors to:

Reflect on your work. What is the work that you’re doing and why are you doing it? Why are you doing it in that way? We welcome success stories but encourage critical analysis and reflection too.
Provide context. We want to know about the conditions your work takes places within. We want to know about the why and how of your work. Explain how the work relates to wider issues in the sector and society, and how it relates to other work that has gone on before or is happening elsewhere.
Acknowledge complexity and ongoing processes. Arts, cultural, and heritage organisations, practices, and research are not neutral. This work is about people and ongoing processes. We are interested in the complexity, the messiness, the unexpected, and the unfinished-ness of this work. Contributions do not need to show a set of neat results and can be written in earlier stages of research to show interim findings.
Be transparent. What is your role and involvement? How do your experiences, background, and position affect your perspective?
Be authentic. Honesty is the best policy! What really happened during your research or project? What mistakes happened along the way? What did you learn and what can others learn from this?
Centre yourself and other participants in the contribution. Use I or we pronouns instead of the passive voice as much as possible. If there are multiple authors, try to make it clear who is speaking or writing when. We welcome personal perspectives and accounts as well as more theoretically grounded content.

All in all, we hope that contributors will submit thought-through, reflective contributions – whether an interview, case study, thought piece, video essay, etc.

Get in touch!

Please contact us if you have any questions or ideas about your potential contribution.

Publication process

Please see our workflow here.

Contributions can be submitted any time of year. Proposals for contributions submitted by the initial deadline will be reviewed by the Editorial Collective, and developed contributions based on these ideas will be considered for inclusion in the original publication of the issue. However, we will continue to accept submissions on this topic in the future, to continue the conversation. Ideas for contributions submitted after the initial issue deadline will be included in the expanded version of the issue, and we will continue to publish relevant contributions as needed.

We would like to support submissions in any language, but we are still working out how best to do this. Please get in touch to discuss details (for now, in English) so that same language peer-review and translation can be arranged.

Online drop-in sessions will be arranged, so potential contributors can discuss ideas with the editorial team and brainstorm how to develop these ideas.

Peer review process

Click here for information on our peer review process.

Types of contributions

We welcome contributions in a variety of media. We encourage contributors to express themselves via the medium suitable to their own practice and the content.

Written contributions

Written contributions should be maximum 4500 words (excluding references and captions), with the exception of written interview pieces, which we expect to be approximately 2500 words.

Audio/visual contributions

We encourage audio and/or visual contributions, such as photo or video essays, podcasts, filmed interviews, single images, etc. Culture Caleidoscoop is being tailored to our contributors’ desires and needs, so we are adapting the platform as we learn more about our contributors’ ambitions and ideas.

For all audio and visual contributions, we expect contributors to include three to four sentences describing and summarising the contribution, especially how it connects to the issue theme and the overall focus of Culture Caleidoscoop.

Referencing, notes, and citations

References and citations are not necessary for publication in Culture Caleidoscoop. However, if they are included, please follow The Chicago Manual of Style. A free resource can be found here.

Additional notes may be added to provide more context or information. Please keep these to a minimum (in other words, please don’t include tonnes of footnotes)!

Accompanying photographs, images, and illustrations

For any photographs, images, or illustrations that you wish to be embedded in your written contribution:

Send these as high-quality images (minimum 300 dpi).
Send these in separate files (PNG, JPG, TIFF).
Number the files in the order they should appear within the written contribution.
Make clear call-outs in the written contribution for where each image should be.
In a separate Word, OpenOffice, or RTF document, include:
a caption (maximum 50 words) and
alternative text for each image. The alternative text should be a short, relevant description of the non-text element. For examples and guidelines, visit WebAIM.

In all, there should be (1) the document with the written contribution, (2) file(s) for images, and (3) the document with the captions and alt text.

Contributors are expected to get permission from any people identifiable in photographs or images as well as the copyright owner. On submission of the images we assume you have the correct permissions and copyright.

If your contribution includes content such as photos, figures, tables, audio files, videos, code, etc., that you or your co-contributors do not own, you must have proof that the owner of that content has given you written permission to use it and has approved of the publication of that information or content under the CC BY licence.

We are happy for any contributions to include media or content in the creative commons.

Culture Caleidoscoop generally publishes under licence CC BY 4.0. This means that the copyright remains with you, the contributor, and that what you publish can be reused without restriction. We are happy to consider CC BY-ND or CC BY-NC licences for specific contributions if there’s legitimate reason to believe that the contribution could be exploited by an external party.

Authorship and contributor information

Culture Caleidoscoop does not limit the number of contributors listed in the publication. We welcome collaborative contributions. We expect all those involved in the production of the contribution to be acknowledged and assume all listed contributors have agreed to the publication’s content and on their name being listed.

We do not require our contributors to be attached to an institution or to have certain credentials.

We will correspond with one of the listed authors.

Please include your name and any affiliation that you think is relevant when submitting your contribution. This can be the institution where you work or your role in a community, for example.
If your research is affiliated with a certain organisation or institution, this must be declared. Similarly, any funding for the research and/or conflicts of interest must be declared. If there is a possible competing interest that could be considered as exerting influence on the publication process, we must be informed immediately.
Please include a short biography (50–100 words) describing yourself, your work, and your role in relation to the topic of your contribution. Please also include any social media handles (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, etc.).