What are the meanings of magic? Depending on who is doing the labelling, the term “magic” has marked out and stigmatized “false” religion from “true,” women’s from men’s practices, the traditions of rural and poor people from those of rich city dwellers, the “primitive” from the “modern,” the colonized from the colonizer, the “West” from the “Rest,” and so on. Even as “magic” is claimed or reclaimed by some people or groups (modern Pagan Witches, for example, or some spiritual feminists), its use by theorists inside and outside the academy as an attributive category of disdain or condemnation remains unavoidable. 

Despite all this baggage, the hope that "magic" remains a useful umbrella category under which to shelter interesting interdisciplinary conversations lies the heart of MRW's mission statement: we are “a rigorously peer-reviewed scholarly journal, drawing from a broad spectrum of perspectives, methods, and disciplines, offering the widest possible geographical scope and chronological range, from prehistory to the modern era and from every inhabited continent.”

For the 20th-anniversary issue of Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft (Spring 2026), we would like to put this vision to the test: How (and whether) is the category “magic” useful in your own scholarly research or teaching? Why might we keep using the term, why might we want to reject it, and might its ongoing contestation and critique serve as a goad (or a hindrance) to trans-disciplinary scholarship and understanding? What does “magic” mean in your field, in your scholarship, for your informants or interlocutors, in your conversations?

We are looking for short discussion contributions, no longer than 3000 words (including all citations and other apparatus), about the usefulness or otherwise of the category in your scholarship. We want to hear from senior scholars and from up-and-coming scholars, from scholars in fields where the term “magic” seems unproblematic and from scholars in fields where it is studiously avoided or ostentatiously rejected. Perspectives we would welcome include (among many others):

• Africana Studies
• Anthropology
• Art History
• Caribbean Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Decolonial Theory
• Ethnobotany
• Folklore
• Gender / Women's Studies
• Geography
• History
• History of Medicine
• Indigenous Studies
• Medieval Studies
• Pagan Studies
• Philosophy
• Queer Theory
• Religious Studies
• Science and Technology Studies
• Tantra Studies
• Transhumanism Studies

Statements of interest due May 1 2025. These should include: 

• A very short abstract (50-100 words)
• A brief self-positioning (discipline or field, geographic/chronological range, topic, other information you find relevant). Using myself as an example:
  I am a white cis male religionist studying witches and witch trials in early modern Poland, with a focus on questions of gender, popular religion, spells and charms, and the politics of memory.