Call for Articles: Low Theory/Radical Praxis
Posted by Frankie Hines and Matthias Kispert on 2025-09-26
The late David Graeber (2004), reflecting on the position of anarchism in the academy, once suggested that “what anarchism needs is what might be called Low Theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project.” In the spirit of Graeber’s proposition, this special collection explores how various forms of politicised praxis—including but not limited to organising, activist or creative practices—can be understood as forms of thought and knowledge production on their own terms.
Graeber’s notion of low theory was subsequently repurposed, most famously by Jack Halberstam (2011) and McKenzie Wark (2015). For Halberstam, low theory is “theoretical knowledge that works at many levels at once ... that revels in the detours, twists, and turns through knowing and confusion, and that seeks not to explain but to involve.” For Wark, who has used the concept across numerous works, low theory entails “a kind of comradely practice, where each kind of labor or science produces its own specific worldview … and where none claims to be the master discourse with authority over them all.”
Building on these lines of thought, this collection invites reconsiderations of the possible meanings of the low in “low theory” and reflections on how these meanings speak to notions of praxis as thought and knowledge-production. How, for example, might low theory be understood in relation to formulations of the undercommons, the minoritarian or the molecular? How can the practice of low theory interrogate and unsettle the politics of methodology, and how can methodologies informed by the commitments of low theory facilitate new forms of inquiry into the constitution of the present?
Low Theory/Radical Praxis additionally invites engagements with militant research, understood as “the place where academia and activism meet in the search for new-ways [sic] of acting that lead to new ways of thinking” (Bookchin et al. 2013), and with Linda Tuwihai Smith’s (1999/2021) influential call for an understanding of “research as a significant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other”. These interventions, as well as proposals for art practice as research (Borgdorff 2012), spell out the necessity of accounting for a thinking-with-practice at the intersection of, on the one hand, research and theory and, on the other, political, social and embodied action.
This collection seeks out explorations that consider the multiple correspondences, crossings and currents between low theory and radical praxis, for example through:
- theory that is grounded, concrete, operating “from below,” “movement-relevant” (Bevington & Dixon 2005); theory that strives to be tactically or strategically useful;
- social, activist, artistic and embodied practices as forms of thought and knowledge production, and as challenges to established epistemologies;
- theory that is covert, furtive, underground; theory that operates from, or carves out, an undercommons (Harney & Moten 2013); research, theory and politics approached through their extra-linguistic aspects—thinking through the body, the senses, the collective, etc.;
- theory that is minoritarian, molecular, or simply small in scale; militant research and emergent forms of grassroots knowledge; research and practice that mobilises marginalised and/or counter-hegemonic epistemologies and cosmologies as a form of resistance;
- theory that seeks to bring low the hitherto elevated—theories of “fallism” (Frank & Ristic 2020), irreverence, plagiarism and idea-thievery (Guattari 2009).
Please send abstracts of 300–500 words to f.hines@staff.newman.ac.uk and m.kispert@westminster.ac.uk by 31st October 2025. Full articles of around 8,000 words will be required by 31st March 2026. Submissions will then undergo a double-anonymous peer review process.
The special collection, edited by Frankie Hines and Matthias Kispert, is to be published in the Open Library of Humanities Journal (OLHJ) (ISSN 2056-6700). The OLHJ is an internationally-recognised diamond open access journal with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLHJ has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries.
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