Habits of Waste accepts submissions that explore aspects of pop culture, especially music, films, books and television. HoW especially encourages essays examining multiple works that are in some way related. This may involve surveying the career of one person, but we also encourage crossing traditional authorship, subject and genre lines. We're looking for essays that discover surprising connections and open up new approaches to a topic. Articles may be on recent material, but we also invite consideration of older items. In every case, articles should strive to consider the pop culture work in its social context. Submissions should be between 1,000 and 4,000 words and in Microsoft Word format, sent as an email attachment to the editors.
A note about audience. Sometimes, academic approaches rely on very specialized terminology to handle the extraordinary fragmentation of the contemporary academy. While we don't reject such an approach for a specialized audience, here we aim to reach the academy and the mainstream alike. Accordingly, HoW is happy to consider approaches in a wide variety of styles (though clear communication should be a feature common to all articles). Articles that make us both laugh and seethe with jealousy because we didn't think of it first have a good chance of getting published.
Finally, writers will retain the copyrights for their articles. If you wish to reprint something you've previously had printed somewhere else, please notify us so that we can obtain permission. All other questions concerning copyright and permissions should be submitted to the editors.
