Issue 0: Source
Call for Submissions


For our first issue, we welcome submissions that reimagine the concept of source. When framed as a single point of origin, “source” reinforces colonial narratives of purity and linear progression.1 Instead, we reflect on the nonlinear paths that led us here. 2 Where might Upstream begin?


How can we reimagine “source” as an ongoing, interconnected process rather than a single point of origin? What are the possibilities, tensions, or limits of this reimagination?

We welcome critical and artistic works that complicate and expand the idea of “source”:



Ecological Source
Ecosystems are interactions of bodies and processes that transcend categories of energy, water, and food sources. Where do hydraulic, nutrient, carbon, and phosphorus cycles begin and end? When does free-flowing water become a flood? 3 


Spiritual Source
Where do we find practices of worship in everyday life? How does this teach us how to live and act? How might we explore other forms of collective meaning-making that embrace multiplicity, complexity, and interconnection?
 Knowledge Source
What stories, lineages, or citations shape how we know? How are inherited knowledges remixed, appropriated, and practiced? What do citations look like when sources have been silenced, forgotten, or destroyed?4 


Social Source
What political moments are we witnessing and when were the seeds sown? What spurs an individual to move and what spurs collective action? When does the gathering of people overflow into solidarity, into protest–into something else?

Future Source
 If the imperative to reimagine “source” involves disrupting colonial narratives of purity and linear progression, we must also remain accountable to the sources of violence we reproduce as future ancestors. 5  What flows downstream from where we stand – both insofar as what has already accumulated and what will accumulate as an upstream to a downstream?
Finally, we welcome other interpretations of “source.”
1  These colonial narratives are co-constituted through processes such as Indigenous dispossession, slavery, racial capitalism, and patriarchy. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999), Sylvia Wynter (2003), Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2012), Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014), Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015).

2 Ebbs and flows of momentum archived in Google Docs and Whatsapp messages. Half-baked thoughts and trailing tangents exchanged over pizza, pie, and often tea. Exchanges of the values, desires, and vocabularies each of us have amassed in our own journeys.
3 Anuradha Mathur and Dilip Da Cunha, Mississippi Floods (Yale University Press, 2001).
4 Readers will notice the footnotes scattered throughout this call. We partake in footnoting as a kind of citational practice that engages conversations that came before us and the ongoing conversations we are a part of. See Katherine McKittrick (2021) and Max Liboiron (2021).
5 Kyle Powys Whyte, “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises,” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 (2018).


Submission Guidelines


We welcome essays, creative writing, visual art, and interdisciplinary experiments. We hope to work with contributors to develop final pieces. You are welcome to submit work that is already finished, but we ask for pitches so that we can engage in an editorial process if your work is selected. You do not need to be affiliated with an institution to submit to Upstream. Pitches are reviewed by an editorial team consisting of both Philly community members and Penn affiliates.



Pitches are accepted on a rolling basis until January 19, 2025.

  • Submit a pitch to upstream.publication@gmail.com with the subject line: UPSTREAM ISSUE 1 SUBMISSION OR submit your pitch through the form below.
  • Pitches should include a brief 1-2 sentence biography and an abstract (no more than 300 words). You may optionally attach any sketches, drafts, etc.


If selected, final submissions will be due before 11:59 PM ET March 16, 2025.

Please direct questions to upstream.publication@gmail.com.







  •         For our first Call for Submissions, Tiger Dingsun designed a poster (17” x 22”) for us which we risograph printed with the help of Josh Zerangue.
  •          

















  • We celebrated with a launch party for Upstream on Dec 6, 2024 at Public Trust in Philadelphia. 

           On September 29, 2024, we gathered to create a collective drawing from our visual and textual sources. The intention was to layer traces of our past selves and phrases of our present textual resonances to build a piece of collective futurity.


    The instructions were:

    Bring a text that resonates with you today and an image that belongs to a past self. 

    Project your image on a large sheet on paper and trace its lines. 

    Someone else will pull a phrase from your text and label what was drawn with that phrase. Then the next person will go, all on the same piece of paper.
                       Noa is an artist, designer, and researcher attending to the debris of climate and colonial crises with curiosity and care. Their image is of the Earthships, blue sky, and clouds in the New Mexico Desert in May of 2018. Their text is Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s genius book Dub, which weaves human and non-human ancestors across time and space. 

    Ilya is an artist and seedkeeper in training. They offer an image of three blue eggs in a bird’s nest. The text they bring is a songsheet from Selichot, a night of song and prayer. 

    Eddy is an interdisciplinary artist and PhD student in English. His image is a postcard of a flock of sheep sent from a past self who once danced with the sheep on a farm in Wales. His text is Dante’s Vita Nuova, a text about the new life that springs from the braiding between love and mourning.

    Vivian is a graduate student in Anthropology. She had to leave early, but brought Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and an image from her research fieldsite: the overgrown ruins of (the promises of) a climate controlled greenhouse destroyed overnight by a typhoon.

    Yidan is learning to weave webs with no center. They brought an image of two nestled stones they found on a beach in Providence, RI, a place of formative memories.  Her book is Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber, a text brimming with the poetics of aliveness, connections, and love. 
            Ad is a graduate student living between Philadelphia and New York. They weren’t able to attend, but they would have brought an image of a small, finely woven basket, inlaid with pistachio shells as if they were jewels. They also would have brought a text from their mom about a dream she once had that ends with the words “this is life.” 

    Dagny-Elise is interested in using landscape and architecture to design a better world. Her image depicts a picture of herself, her sibling, and her stuffed rabbit. Her text is “Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods” by Shawn Wilson (Opaskwayak Cree Nation).

    Eissa is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose work explores memory, urban space, and internet culture. He brought a digital collage he believes his late grandfather made, depicting blurred text over a blue moonlit sky, a fragmented image that remains because it wasn’t backed up in their chats and is now largely illegible. The text he chose to share is from The Hundred Years' War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. 

    Brittany is an arts worker and interdisciplinary thinker, passionate about philosophy, aesthetics and currently black & white photography. Her text is the lyrics to Kelela’s Happy Ending. Her image is a film photograph of her in Ghana from 2021. She is at a family gathering and is wearing a white dress in front of an old car.
                       Maria is an artist and writer with a habit of going to the movie theater on Tuesdays. In her image, a figure falls into a deep, blue abyss of water. Her text is Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel

    Maya is a sculptor, poet, and amateur Medievalist who lives in her grandmother’s witch-house with a little black cat. They made a painting years ago—above a rocky seascape hovers a raven, a girl, and an egg. Her text, “when you plant seeds, you don’t dig them up every day to see if they have sprouted. You simply water them.”

    Sol is an artist living and working in Seoul and Philadelphia. Their image is a photo of the trace left on my body to enter the US. Their text is Fluxus Performance Workbook.

    Mel is a graduate student within Landscape architecture and Fine Arts engaged with evidencing the reciprocal relationship of spatial processing. Looking to the reflexive behaviors inherent to navigating the built environment. Her image is a poster called Eat Your Sidewalk from SPURSE art collective and her text is “The Sound of Moving Meditation” an interview with Merideth Monk.

    Alec is a graduate student training in landscape architecture. He did not attend the activity, but he would have brought an image of the overgrown banks of the Houston Ship Channel taken in spring. His text is from Natural History of Vacant Lots, describing how pioneer plants sync calendars with real estate. 

    Victoria Antoinette is an artist, sculptor, and scholar. She is interested in making the familiar strange and exploring the layered, interconnected interplay between selves. Her image depicts the base of a tree lining a street in Philadelphia—it is both confined and capable. Her text is How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human by Eduardo Kohn.
    
               Amirio is a writer, interviewer, and audio storyteller exploring the relationship between humans and our beyond-human kin through a Black, queer lens. Their image is of him as an infant with his grandfather in McCormick, South Carolina. Their text is Jamaica Kindcaid’s My Garden (Book):, which considers the garden as an archive of all aspects of human life.




    Frequently Asked Questions



    General Information


    What is Upstream?
    Upstream is a print publication and curatorial collective interested in tending to all our relations. Together, we work to notice, question, and map the dynamic ecologies between people, the built environment, and our nonhuman relatives. 

    For our first issue, we welcome submissions that reimagine “source” as an ongoing, interconnected process rather than a single point of origin. Further guidelines for submissions are here.

    We are a porous and evolving group of Philadelphia community members and Penn affiliates, excited to see who swims in our direction.



    Submissions


    What can I submit?

    Submissions can include essays, artwork, photography, poetry, hybrid forms, and more. We are currently looking for content that has the ability to be shared through print media.


    Do I have to live in Philadelphia to submit?
    Regardless of current location, we hope for contributors to engage intentionally with the context of Philadelphia. We are prioritizing submissions from folks based in Philadelphia. However, we will consider submissions from elsewhere. 


    Do I need to be a Penn student or affiliate to submit?
    No. While a number of us are Penn-affiliated, Upstream is enthusiastically and intentionally engaged in a broader community.


    Do I need to be an artist, writer, or designer to submit?
    No. We welcome contributions from anyone interested in engaging with our themes.


    What are the length or format requirements for written pieces?
    Pieces can range in length, with short-form essays aiming to be around 500 words and long-form around 1,000-2,000 words. Poetry submissions have no minimum or maximum expectations. We’ll work with contributors to determine the appropriate length and form of final pieces.


    How do I submit my work?
    Submit your work via our submission page, or send an email following the guidelines listed on the submission page.


    Can I submit more than one piece?
    Yes, multiple submissions are allowed as long as each adheres to the guidelines.


    What is the deadline for submissions?
    The deadline for pitches is January 19, 2025, with final submissions due by March 16, 2025.


    Can I submit a pitch instead of a completed work?
    Yes, pitches are required before submitting completed works. 




    Getting Involved


    How can I join the Upstream team?
    Fill out our interest form and/or reach out to us through instagram or email. We’ll reach out to invite you to info sessions and/or to speak directly with us. 


    What roles are available for volunteers or contributors?
    Roles include editorial, design, outreach, events coordination, curatorial and more. 


    Do I need to attend meetings in person?
    We do meet in person, but offer hybrid options to accommodate remote contributors.


    What kind of commitment is involved?
    While there is no single way to be involved, we hope that people in the collective will communicate capacity and commit to attending meetings. 




    Events and Community Engagement


    Do you host events?
    Yes.  We hope to hold workshops and gatherings that bring together Philadelphia community members around shared interests in art, ecology, and relationality. Follow our instagram and sign up for our mailing list to be informed about events!


    Where are your events held?
    We aim to host events in accessible, community-oriented spaces, often outside of campus settings, with no fees for entry.



    Publication Logistics


    When will the first issue be published?
    The publication date for Issue 1 will be announced soon.


    Will the publication be free?
    Yes, published issues will be available for free at designated locations in Philadelphia. 



    Can members of the editorial team submit work?
    Yes! As the publication is in its emergent phase, we imagine members of the collective will submit content. Our ambition is to broaden the submission pool over time, aiming to eventually have the majority of content come from outside contributions.



    Will Upstream have a digital component?
    While our primary focus is on printed matter, we plan to maintain a website for submissions, archives, and outreach.

    Get Involved

    If you’d like to get involved, please fill out our interest form below! We will reach out to you to invite you to an info session and/or speak with someone.  You can also reach out to us directly at upstream.publication@gmail.com