Welcome to FORUM, a peer-reviewed journal for postgraduate students working in culture and the arts. Our objective is to create and foster a network for the exchange and circulation of ideas – we hope that you will find plenty of interest and inspiration in the articles we have published to date.

Announcements

FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers (Issue 35): Emotion and Affect

30-Jan-2024

Affect theory turns our attention towards a re-contextualisation of emotional and affective experiences within past and contemporary constructions of race, gender and sexuality. It leads us towards the para-rational zones of lived experience (sensations, disturbances, intensities, etc) and offers new interdisciplinary methodologies. The study of emotionality interrogates the boundary between human and non-human, with contemporary research in ecological feeling playing with the border between humans and other species, nature and geological formations. This issue is interested in how these contemporary and modern affective debates have impacted, and continue to impact, the ways in which we think about feeling.

 

Critical studies into emotionality explore the materiality and the somatics of emotion, offering new perspectives in the ways in which artistic forms have engaged with and responded to affective dimensions. Recent publications such as Xine Yao’s Disaffected (2021) and Lauren Berlant’s On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022) examined attachment both interdisciplinarily and intersectionally, considering the ways in which sentimental paradigms are universalised, engaged with and criticised through literary and artistic media. In the same vein, we are interested in discussions of the limits and boundaries of feeling, and in new interdisciplinary, intersectional and contextual understandings of feeling, affect and emotionality.

 

The 35th issue of FORUM invites contributions from across the arts and humanities that engage with the concepts of emotionality and affect. Topics can include, but are not limited to: 

  • Responses and depictions: Portrayal of emotions in art and emotional responses to art
  • Emotions and the creation of art; readerly and writerly affect
  • Interdisciplinary attitudes to affect
  • Ecocriticism and nonhuman affect
  • Limits to emotionality: ugly feelings; unemotionality and emotional manipulation
  • Contextual perceptions of affect: historical attitudes to emotions; medical feelings and pathology
  • Rationality and emotion: emotionality and artificial intelligence; criticism and emotionality
  • Affect theories: phenomenology; terminology and language of feeling; aesthetics and poetics of feeling
  • The role of emotionality in the construction of racial, gender, sex and/or class identity; racial and transgressive feeling
  • Mind vs body: modes of perception, sensation and the senses
  • Affective networks; communities of feeling

 

Send the full article by 15 April 2024 at http://journals.ed.ac.uk/forum/about/submissions. Suitable submissions will be subject to double-blind peer-review. For questions email Forum.Journal@ed.ac.uk.

N.B. We are usually only able to accept submissions from postgraduate students or from early career researchers within three years of having finished a postgraduate qualification.

Read more about FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers (Issue 35): Emotion and Affect

Current Issue

Vol 34 (2023): Trans-

Issue 34: Trans-

Ash Jayamohan (Editor-in-Chief) & Claudia Sterbini (Deputy Editor)

Trans- is powerful: attaching itself to concepts, it challenges supposedly settled knowledge about the world we live in. In FORUM’s 34th issue, this destabilisation becomes central. We draw attention to the importance the prefix ‘trans-’ has acquired in recent decades as an index of movement, crossing, and shifting – and we are interested in your approaches to all that trans- has to offer, as both description and method: transnationality, translation, transdisciplinary, transgender…

Trans- constructs new epistemic trajectories. Translation Studies troubles canons, transdisciplinary fields expand our classrooms, and transnational narratives become powerful tools in questioning naturalised national confines. In this new space of trans-, paradoxical themes coexist in moments of ‘magical realism’, in the words of Marisa De Andrade.

Our intellectual promiscuity catches up to the art we study: the ‘scholarly’ fables of Jorge Luis Borges’ Labyrinths (1962); the mixed materials of Wangechi Mutu’s artworks; the musical wanderings of musicians such as Rina Sawayama; the tumults of expatriation as ranging from the epic sprawl of the Odyssey to the hard-won joys of Erasmus in Gaza (2021).

Finally, of course, trans- is best known in its coupling with and troubling of gender. Trans criticism such as C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides (2017) has drawn attention to the complex, racialised logics of trans exclusion, while trans liberation’s social possibilities shimmer through the photography of Juliana Huxtable and Samuel R. Delaney’s Triton (1976).

We find that art and culture, in all their forms, expand and enhance our understanding of trans-.

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Many, many thanks to the following people for their excellent work in reviewing and editing this issue:

Elizabeth Blakemore, Chun Sui 'Christopher' Chan, Emma Dussouchaud-Esclamadon, Maxime Geervliet, Elisabeth Goemans, Sharon Hsieh, Alexandra Huang, Neelofer Korotana, Matthew Lear, Kai Lim, Alisha Palmer, Moss Pepe, Shivani Pillai, Isabel Schueler, Hannah Trifunovic, and Lara Virrey. 

Thanks as well to the rest of our PGR colleagues and the LLC Postgraduate Research Office.

Published: 13-Oct-2023
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