Blog

Project dldl/ድልድል aims to achieve its impact by facilitating collaboration across sectors and stakeholder groups, and by encouraging cross-cultural learning through South–North knowledge exchange. We are especially keen to reverse the historical dominance of Northern societies in setting theoretical paradigms and in dictating practices internationally within domestic violence and gender-based violence research and practice.

This blog has been set up to further these aims and to facilitate the communication of new knowledge within the project’s thematic areas. Submissions can cover any topic related to the project’s objectives (see ‘The Project’), including pieces that explore:

• intersections between religious beliefs, human psychology/mental health and domestic violence;
• approaches that integrate the clergy, theology, religious beliefs or spiritual parameters in domestic violence interventions and psychosocial support, and ways to measure the effectiveness of such initiatives;
• efforts to train clergy and seminarians in gender issues, and marital and domestic violence issues, and to streamline such training in seminary education;
• experiences of and responses to domestic violence in migrant and ethnic minority groups, analysed with sensitivity to gender and faith parameters.

We invite blog submissions from researchers, practitioners, psychologists, social workers, clergy, seminarians and activists, from across the world and in any language or format. Submissions can be: empirical studies; lessons and findings from organisational programmes; ethnographic experiences from the field; or more reflective pieces that aim to provoke critical thinking in the community of diverse stakeholders we seek to connect.

In line with other decolonial initiatives that we support and are guided by (see Decolonial Subversions), we welcome written, acoustic and visual contributions, including posters, poems and podcasts. Written contributions should follow the guidelines outlined below. Visual and acoustic pieces should follow the submission guidelines given below, adapted from Decolonial Subversions.

If you are interested in submitting a blog in any of the above formats, please contact the project‘s dedicated email soasflf@soas.ac.uk to discuss your idea and agree on a submission timeline.

Written submissions

Length: Submissions should ideally be between 800 and 1200 words. For longer submissions, please contact the team to discuss possible arrangements.

Submission specifications:  All submissions should be made in a Word file in Times New Roman font size 12, and should be double-spaced. References should be provided as hyperlinks to the relevant text, followed by a full bibliography. Authors are encouraged to cite open-access sources that can be accessible to all readers, especially those outside the UK. The bibliography should follow the APA Referencing Style. Direct quotations (such as testimonies) should be set in double inverted commas. Quotations longer than forty words should be indented left and right 1cm, font normal, with no inverted commas.

For spelling conventions in English, please see the style guide available. We do not specify spelling conventions in other languages, but authors are expected to be consistent in terms of both spelling and stylistic choices.  

Ethics standards: All content should be developed and presented in line with rigorous ethics and safeguarding standards as anticipated in domestic violence research and practice internationally. Participant data used in blog essays must have been collected and processed in accordance with existing data protection legislation.  If unsure what these standards are, contributors should contact the project team at the time of considering making a submission.

Permissions and Copyright: Submissions will be attributed to the authors and will be published under the website’s Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) International Public License. This means that the authors retain full copyright over their work, but agree to publish their work first on the project website. It also means that the work can be (re)used with proper attribution by anyone for any reason publicly, but not commercially. This licence allows the author to remix, adapt and build upon the project work non-commercially. The new work must acknowledge the project website as the original publisher and must be used non-commercially; however, derivative works do not have to be licensed on the same terms.

Acoustic and visual submissions

Types of contributions: Acoustic pieces may be podcasts, songs, oral stories, personal reflections, ethnographic documentation, interviews or recorded conversations. Visual pieces may be either single or a collection of photographs, drawings, paintings, posters or data figures.

Length: Acoustic pieces should not extend beyond 20 minutes (unless a case is made for longer pieces a priori). Visual contributions should comprise a maximum of 10 images, which should be accompanied by short captions and an introductory text to provide the story behind the visual content. All contributions should discuss how they respond to the thematic areas that the project and blog are dedicated to.

Submission format: For acoustic pieces, contributors are advised to set up a free account on Soundcloud, which identifies them as the creator of the content.  Audio recordings can be developed off-line on personal devices and then published on Soundcloud in an acceptable format. Once published, contributors should copy the link and send this to our team to publish on the project’s blog. Visual contributions should be sent in jpeg (or jpg) format or figures created using MS Office packages (i.e. Word, Excel or another design tool), in order to ensure the highest resolution and visibility.

Ethics standards: All content should be developed and presented in line with rigorous ethics and safeguarding standards as anticipated in domestic violence research and practice internationally. Participant data used in blog essays must have been collected and processed in accordance with existing data protection legislation.  If unsure what these standards are, contributors should contact the project team at the time of considering making a submission.

Permissions and Copyright: Contributors should own or have permission to use the material they submit. The blog piece will be published under the website’s Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) International Public License. This means that the authors retain full copyright over their work, but agree to publish their work first on the project website. It also means that the work can be (re)used with proper attribution by anyone for any reason publicly, but not commercially. This licence allows the author to remix, adapt and build upon the project work non-commercially. The new work must acknowledge the project website as the original publisher and must be used non-commercially; however, derivative works do not have to be licensed on the same terms.