Submissions

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

• You are currently a student at Stellenbosch University, or this article was written while you were a student at Stellenbosch University.
• You are a postgraduate (Honours or higher degree level) student, or, if you are currently an undergraduate student (i.e., not enrolled for an Honours or higher degree), this article is an adaptation of an essay or assignment submitted for assessment for a third-year module in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, and received a final mark of at least 80% (please indicate in your additional submission comments to which module and which lecturer this article was submitted).
• The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in the additional submission comments).
• Your article is no shorter than 1500 and no longer than 5000 words.
• The submission includes an abstract of 150 to 250 words.
• The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, Markdown, Typst, LaTeX, or other common markup or document format.
• The text uses markup correctly; headings, body paragraphs, blockquotes, etc. are indicated with the format's markup or built-in styles, rather than manually changing the text properties (such as increasing font size and setting text to bold to imitate a heading).
• You have provided your references in a format such as BibLaTeX, Hayagriva, or other export from a reference manager such as Zotero (this enables us to auto-generate your bibliography instead of requiring you to format it manually). Where available, identifiers such as ISBNs, DOIs, or URLs have been provided for the references (this enables easier verification of your citations). You may leave the bibliography or reference list out of your article document.
• The article uses the Stellenbosch University variation on the Harvard citation style, i.e., references are in-text, there is a comma after the author's surname, and no space before the page numbers, e.g., (Author, 2025:123) or Author (2025:123).
• The document has been anonymised, so that no identifying information about the author is included. (Please indicate in your additional submission comments whether you will need to de-anonymise the article before publication.)
• You are the sole author(s) of this work, and you are responsible for creating every part of it, except where indicated by proper citation. No part of the work is the product of an uncredited source, generated or other (excluding spelling- and grammar-check suggestions). You assert and declare ownership of this work under South African copyright law.
• By completing this submission, you accept and agree to release your work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/), with you maintaining authorship and copyright ownership, and all rights associated with that ownership, so that the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal may publish your work under the terms of said license. You further agree and accept that any not-for-profit activity of the Stellenbosch Socratic Journal, including selling printed copies of the journal volume containing your work for the purposes of recouping operating costs, shall be understood to be non-commercial activity for the purposes of interpretation of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.