Call for Papers

 

Deadline Issue
1 February 2010 Reconstruction 10.3: Inventions of Activism
1 May 2010 Reconstruction 11.1: Multilingual Realities in Translation
1 February 2010 Reconstruction 11.2: Cultural Productions of 9/11
Ongoing Open Issues
Ongoing Guest Editor of Upcoming Themed Issue
  FAQ for Prospective Guest Editors

 

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture is an innovative culture studies journal dedicated to fostering an intellectual community composed of scholars and their audience, granting them all the opportunity and ability to share thoughts and opinions on the most important and influential work in contemporary interdisciplinary studies.

The following is a constantly updated collection of CFPs for currently planned open and themed issues, including contact information. Please refer to our Submissions page for general submission guidelines and peer review process.

NOTE: Reconstruction CFPs are regularly posted to the following listservs: H-Net, CULTSTUD-L, UPenn, Anthropology Matters, e-NASS, intertheory, and CACS. To suggest another listserv for our CFP postings, please contact the Managing Editor.

  

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Reconstruction 10.3: Inventions of Activism

Edited by Michael Benton, Alan Clinton, Wes Houp and Danny Mayer

"Creative acts of social justice fulfill every function that can be asked of a work of art. They inspire us, make us think in new ways, and birth new beauty and dignity in our world."--Rebecca Alban Hofberger, "True Visions”

"Screw Hope; Let's Act"--Walker Lane "Nope to Hope: False Capital and the Spectacle Triumphant"

This issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture solicits a variety of work which looks to activism as a broad array of creative practices yet to be defined.  We seek not to revisit debates between theory and practice, but to view activism as a form of invention which may lead to new cultural formations.

What challenges do activists face as practicing utopians?  What more or less local examples of activism can be looked to as models for further practice?  How can activism as performance, as technology, as art lead to the production of new political and social theory?  How is activism the art of the possible?

We would like this issue itself to be a form of activism inasmuch as it brings together a set of theorized practices in the form of case studies from the present and the past, a community of minds in both its contributors and subsequent readers.  We also encourage contributors to look to problem areas that have not yet been addressed or not addressed sufficiently, and to propose new models of cultural intervention.   
Some areas of particular interest expressed by editors should serve as a starting point:

  1. Testimonials of individuals and/or groups that document the structures of collective action and resistances (both external and internal) to these movements. 
  2. Activism as a form of social and political creativity.  Considerations of how theory can promote or become activism, or how theories of political and social invention derive, post facto, from such activities. 
  3. The rhetoric of activism in its statements and endeavors.
  4. Narration and development of (potential) actions with respect to labor (broadly defined).
  5. Activism as a form of education, as supplement to or alternative for traditional educational theories.  Educating activists.  Activating educators.  Theoretical and practical issues within "the academy." 
  6. Resistance to resistance: fatigue, Bruce Robbins' "sweatshop sublime," institutional reprisals from the most oppressive (violence, termination) to the most frustrating (hypocrisy and lip service from those in power, mainstream media misinformation, public indifference), mythologies (of the American dream, of freedom of choice, of the free market, etc.) 
  7. Reform from within the institution vs. revolution from without.
  8. What is (non)violence and what roles do violence or nonviolence play in activism?  
  9. Issues of activism in different social and historical contexts, what can we learn (from Obama's vision of service to the most dangerous underground resistance movements)?
  10. Psychologies of activism.  For instance, do activists and/or organizers of activism benefit more from an openness to depaysement (the process by which the ethnographer/observer becomes altered and/or mediated by the culture under investigation) or dissociation/dispassion (the idea of "objective" or "critical" distance from the subject under study as providing a "better" vantage point).
  11. What are the benefits or disadvantages of “traditions” in activism?   Marx notoriously stated that he was not a Marxist, with that in mind, what kind of problems derive from the institution of founders and followers in activism?  Even more fundamental, what is the problem of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “inner conflict of traditions,” the inevitable conflict between universal rules and specific, ever-changing circumstances/situations.
  12. J.K. Gibson Graham asks in Postcapitalist Politics “If we want other worlds and other economies, how do we make ourselves a condition of possibility for their emergence (7)?”

We hope that activists of all kinds will view this issue as a form of potlatch that may lead to new practice and theory, new activist communities.  While we encourage the use of anecdote as example and extended narratives as models for inventing activism, we do not want this issue to be primarily about smoking guns and personal beefs.   In the light of the sensitive nature of this endeavor we will consider a variety of approaches to publication--including anonymity and/or "fictocritical" accounts which do not name names or present a situation with altered details.

Please send completed papers and abstracts to the editors at inventionsofactivism@gmail.com no later than February 1, 2010. Earlier submissions and queries are welcome as we may be able to collaborate with authors in order to produce work that not only fits with the intent of the issue but with the standards of Reconstruction. Also, we encourage you to forward this CFP to interested parties and lists.

 

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Reconstruction 11.1: Multilingual Realities in Translation

Edited by Angela Flury and Hervé Regnauld

Cityscapes, landscapes, subway stations, tomato fields, universities, and bedrooms—the locales of multilingual or mixed language realities are everywhere. Yet literary and popular representations of multilingual realities as such remain largely constricted by the single language that must, in hegemonic fashion, encompass all others, especially on the printed page of a novel. The dominance of a single language also affects so-called nonliterary discourse; for instance English is now the primary language charged with disseminating scientific (and technological) words and concepts. Film, arguably, has come closest to conveying the Babeldom of public and private spheres, as its projected translation, by way of subtitles, nevertheless promises a semblance of cohesion. Perhaps this accessible rendering of multilingual fragmentation can even be regarded as one of the emerging conventions of world cinema as a contemporary global form.

But multilingual realities are not exactly reader friendly in any medium, including film. One wonders at the function of characters’ thoughts made audible in Wim Wenders’s film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire), when commuters on a Berlin subway train can be heard thinking in German and Turkish (though the English subtitles render only the German). One wonders what Apollinaire’s already fragmented conversation poem “Lundi Rue Christine“ would look like with bits of conversation in languages other than French. Would the bits make a meaningful difference? One wonders at the fragments of French floating through Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight, fragments yet to be translated, even in the most recent edition. Charlotte Brontë’s Villette continued to be published well over a century without an annotated translation of all its French bits and pieces. One wonders how and to what extent the foreign language is immaterial (a point raised by Umberto Eco with reference to Tolstoy’s War and Peace).

Another open question is the status of languages in the formation of scientific knowledge. When science is concerned, some languages play a unequaled role, as did Greek at the beginning of the Christian Era (or Common Era), Latin in the Middle Ages and English today. It seems English is becoming a language which invents (creates) scientific words (and concepts) and that there is no need to find any equivalent in other languages as most every scientist speaks and publishes in English. But can scientific neologisms properly be considered English in any traditional sense, even given the fact that neologism is a constant process in any language? How can scientific concepts, born inside of one language, be translated into another language? Does working in a “single language” limit scientific creativity? Is there anything (or could there be) like a Pidgin, or Creole way of writing in the sciences?

How do single language texts, in any discourse or genre, signify mixed language realities? What is at stake in the representation of multilingual realities in a particular text, medium, place, or time? To what extent do texts at different historical and cultural junctures reflect the ideologies of their scene of writing? What are the affects of characters/individuals in multilingual situations, the affects of multilingual space? How do “other” languages in a given text/situation play with questions of figure and ground, decor and inflection? How have certain authors and artists made the conventions and realities of multilingual space a central thematics? What formal innovations have writers from various disciplines and traditions produced to address such realities and what are the politics of these experiments? What are the links between language and identity, and what are the problems which may arise from these links when translation is at stake?

We invite papers that address the above issues and related questions from a variety of disciplines and in any conceivable context, including nationalism, imperialism, modernism, epistemology, sexuality, gender, class, religion, race, etc. Please send completed papers and abstracts to Angela Flury (aflury_at_depauw.edu) and Hervé Regnauld (herve.regnauld_at_uhb.fr) no later than May 1, 2010. Earlier submissions and queries are welcome as we may be able to collaborate authors in order to produce work that not only fits with the intent of the issue but with the standards of Reconstruction. Also, we encourage you to forward this CFP to interested parties and lists.

 

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Reconstruction 11.2: Cultural Productions of 9/11

Edited by Christopher Schaberg and Kara Thompson

How has the subject of “9/11” been produced?  From the moments when people cried “too soon” to the gratuitous preying on the subject in the name of “9/11”—how has this date stamp affected cultural production?

This special issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture will present a range of disciplinary responses to the aftereffects—as well as the affective hype—of the notoriously popular subject of 9/11.  We mean the subject of 9/11 to register in least two senses: as the topic of myriad discourses, and also as the individual liberal subjects who were (and still are) affected, traumatized, or otherwise interpellated by the effects and afterimages of 9/11.  Therefore, we are not as interested in “what really happened” on that day as much as we are interested in the cultural production(s) of 9/11—how “9/11” became a subject as such.  We hope to analyze how the events of 9/11 created a cause–effect reversal of sorts, and how by its very utterance, 9/11 can evoke affective trauma.  We are also interested in the material implications for thinking that after 9/11, certain things in the world “had changed.”

We therefore solicit focused articles from divergent fields and disciplines that reconsider the subject of 9/11.  We do not claim to know whether it is still “too soon” or whether the subject has had “enough time” to be thought about clearly; indeed, we hope to indicate the difficulty of such considerations in the issue.  The issue will thus seek to foster a dialogue wherein we might begin to gauge the mythological and affective reverberations of this strange moniker, “9/11.”

While there has been a staggering amount of work that has tried to make sense of this subject, from films to novels, from conspiracy theories to The 9/11 Commission Report, this special issue of Reconstruction will attempt instead to bracket the subject as a subject—that is, we seek essays that assess what trends have emerged and what gaps have been opened up by the cultural production(s) of this subject.   We envision a series of scholarly articles, as well as a significant review section of cultural productions (in myths, medicine, advertising, music, movies, architecture) that may not warrant full-length essays, but still deserve critical notation in terms of the subject produced by “9/11.”

We invite work that focuses on the following topics:

This list of topics is representative but not exhaustive; please feel free to propose articles or reviews that are in line with the scope of the issue but whose contents may not appear above.

Send abstracts or proposals of no more than 300 words as well as a CV to co-editors Christopher Schaberg (schaberg@loyno.edu) and Kara Thompson (kara.thompson@oberlin.edu) no later than February 1, 2010 (final drafts of invited submissions will be due August 15, 2010).  We are happy to answer queries concerning review pieces or other possible submissions.

 

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Open Issues

Contact: Reconstruction Submissions Editor

We are continually accepting submissions for upcoming open issues, and can promise a prompt reply.

Submissions may be created from a variety of perspectives, including, but not limited to: geography, ethnography, cultural studies, folklore, architecture, history, sociology, linguistics, psychology, communications, music, philosophy, political science, semiotics, theology, art history, queer theory, literature, criminology, urban planning, gender studies, education, graphic design, etc. Both theoretical and empirical approaches are welcomed.

 

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Guest Editor of Upcoming Themed Issue

Contact: Reconstruction Managing Editor

Reconstruction is always interested in proposals for future themed issues. If you are interested in proposing a themed issue, please review our FAQ for Prospective Guest Editors and contact the Reconstruction Managing Editor for further information.

FAQ for Prospective Guest Editors

 

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