Volume 5, Issue 1 (Spring-Summer 2026)

 

Call for Papers

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 15 September 2025

 

Theme: Women of the North: Matriculture among Circumpolar Peoples

 

In and around the Arctic and Subarctic, culturally distinct Indigenous societies from several states share complex intertwined histories of contact with different colonial societies, especially with the European, the Canadian, the American, and the Russian polities. As a result of historical contact interactions, current Indigenous societies share ambilineal descent patterns that can be traced into this deep history. Many of these societies practiced kinship systems that recognized matrilineal or bilineal descent, while others embraced matricentric or matrifocal structures embedded within patriarchal contexts. Yet, gaps in ethnographic records and fragmented narratives have limited our understanding of these intricate cultural systems, particularly the roles, agency, and lived experiences of women.

For this issue of Matrix, we invite contributions that explore how matricultural systems – broadly understood as Geertzian cultural frameworks of symbols and meanings pertaining to women – are interpreted and understood in Northern contexts where women’s roles, relationships, and contributions are central to social organization and cultural expression. We invite contributors to explore how women’s roles as bearers of knowledge, cultural leaders, and community anchors are shaped by and within matriculture. Drawing on insights from ethnology, history, anthropology, Indigenous studies, legal studies, religious studies, linguistics, and creative arts, we welcome contributions from scholars, community members, public servants, non-government organizations, Indigenous organizations, artists, and practitioners.

We especially encourage critical examinations of how external forces – such as colonialism, missionary activities, state policies, militarization, and resource extraction – have influenced, challenged, adapted or disrupted these systems. This issue seeks to bridge historical inquiry with contemporary lived experience, weaving together social structures, worldviews, spiritualities, governance systems, and environmental relationships.

We also encourage creative artworks of any media and personal reflections on this theme.

Since this issue of Matrix seeks to better understand circumpolar matricultures, we welcome research which addresses questions such as: How are matricultural systems, as Geertzian cultural systems, lived in the North? How might the environment influence the cultural participation of women? What do northern Indigenous myths and legends tell us about northern matricultures? How have external influences – such as colonial, missionary, and state – impacted or shaped matricultures in the North? The goal of the issue is to explore the meaning of womanhood and the lived experience of women in societies around the North, thereby developing a synthesis between social structures and worldviews, including religions, cosmologies, legal traditions, and views of the environment.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Articulation between matrilineality, bilineality, and subsistence patterns

• Women’s leadership in governance, community decision-making, and legal traditions

• The role of sisters, sisters/brothers, mothers/daughters, mothers/sons, and intergenerational kinship networks, with kinship networks that can include namesake kinships, biological and adoptive kinship practices, and organizational structures

• Women’s roles in celebrations, festivals, ritual life, and spiritual leadership

• Matricentric or matrifocal systems within patriarchal societies

• Christianity, missionary influences, and shifts in gendered power structures

• Women’s roles in environmental stewardship, land rights, and resource governance

• Impacts of colonialism, state interventions, and militarization on gender roles

• Women’s voices in Arctic sovereignty, geopolitical discourses, and intergovernmental negotiations

• Ethnographic and ethnohistorical accounts of women’s lived experiences

• Indigenous feminism, cultural resurgence, and gendered resistance movements

• Myths, legends, and oral histories that reflect or resist matricultural paradigms

• Creative expressions – artworks, literary pieces, reflections – exploring women’s experiences in the North

 

Guest editor: Dr. Sharon Angnakak (independent scholar)

Submission via email to: Please submit a 200-word abstract (max) and a 50-word biography to Linnéa Rowlatt, Managing Editor, at lrowlatt@networkonculture.ca, or to the Editorial Collective of Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies at info@networkonculture.ca with the Subject line ‘Matrix Vol. 5(1) Abstract Submission’.

Deadline for Abstract Submission: 15 September 2025

 

About Matrix

Matrix: A Journal for Matricultural Studies is an open access, peer-reviewed and refereed journal published by the International Network for Training, Education, and Research on Culture (Network on Culture), Canada. Matrix is published online through Open Journal System on a biannual basis.

For many years, scholarship has explored the expression and role of women in culture from various perspectives such as kinship, economics, ritual, etc, but so far, the idea of approaching culture as a whole, taking the female world as primary, as a cultural system in Geertz’ classical sense of the term – a matriculture – has gone unnoticed. Some cultures have a weakly defined matricultural system; others have strong matricultural systems with various ramifications that may include, but are not limited to, matrilineal kinship, matrilocality, matriarchal governance features – all of which have serious consequences relative to the socio-cultural status of women, men, children, and the entire community of humans, animals, and the environment.

The main objective of Matrix is to provide a forum for those who are working from this theoretical stance. We encourage submissions from scholars, community members, and other knowledge keepers from around the world who are ready to take a new look at the ways in which people - women and men, historically and currently - have organized themselves into meaningful relationships; the myths, customs, and laws which support these relationships; and the ways in which researchers have documented and perhaps mis-labeled the matricultures they encounter.

For more information, visit our website: https://www.networkonculture.ca/activities/matrix.