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.

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FORUM – The University of Edinburgh’s Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts is looking for a Deputy Editor and Assistant Editors to join our editorial board and work on the journal’s 35th issue. All candidates for these positions need to be enrolled in a PhD programme or a Master’s programme (either Taught or Research) at the University for the entire length of the academic year 2023–2024. 

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Trans- is powerful: attaching itself to concepts, it challenges supposedly settled knowledge about the world we live in. In FORUM’s 34^th 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-.

The 34^th issue of FORUM invites contributions across the arts and humanities that engage with the concept of ‘trans-’. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Transgender: Trans experiences at the intersection of race, class, sexuality, disability; non-binary, intersex, the ‘third sex’; transition’s modes and histories; trans inclusivity/exclusivity; trans feminism; trans critiques of queer theory (against transness as metaphor, movement, or plastic).
  
  
• Translation: As collaborative practice; as empire-building and empire-resisting; canons and margins; sociology of translation; ethics, politics, and practice of translation (postcolonial, feminist, and beyond).
  
  
• Transnational and transcultural: Borders, barriers, thresholds; nomadism; the ‘glocal’; multi- and cross-culturalism; migration and exile.
  
  
• Transcorporeality, transhumanism, etc.: Philosophies of material friction, flux, and fluidity.
  
  
• Transdisciplinary: Science and art; medical humanities; digital humanities; the ‘social sciences’; archival studies; new media studies (transmediality and intermediality); academic obstacles in interdisciplinary studies.
  
  
• The critical, epistemic, aesthetic, and political limits of trans- as method, currently deployed.

All articles should be submitted by 3 April 2023. All suitable submissions will be subject to double-blind peer-review and submission does not guarantee publication.

Full submissions should be made at http://journals.ed.ac.uk/forum/about/submissions, where you will also find our Author Guidelines. 

For any questions relating to your submission, please contact us at Forum.Journal@ed.ac.uk.

N.B. As FORUM is a postgraduate journal, we are usually only able to accept submissions from postgraduate students currently enrolled in Masters or PhD programmes, or from early career researchers within three years of having finished a postgraduate qualification.

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FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers (Issue 33): Exclusion

 

 

For the 33rd issue of FORUM, we ask: what is modern knowledge without a little exclusion?

This, not that – us, not them – her, not her – here, not there. Race, gender and sexuality, caste, and class (only some of our ‘inconceivably coarse axes of categorization’, as Eve Kosofky Sedgwick puts it) find exquisite form in the moment we invoke that all-encompassing and all-rejecting ‘not’. After all, to know a thing – to know it profoundly, profitably – we must often exclude that which we do not wish to know.

Exclusion is generative. Its power lies in its violent capacity to create ‘small islands’, a term that we borrow from Andrea Levy’s 2004 novelization of the Black British fight for survival under Empire. Indeed, exclusion’s small and increasingly uninhabitable islands have long been the subject of our art, televisual media, fiction, ethnography, life-writing, and other cultural texts. These span across testimonios of genocide and the strained class divisions of Ken Loach’s films, but also a precocious Jane Eyre’s confinement to the Red-Room and the tragicomic excommunications of HBO Succession’s Kendall Roy.

Exclusion also produces emancipatory politics and aesthetics, unexpected kinships, subaltern communities and social scenes, counter-canons, and alternative modes of knowing, being, and feeling. Saidiya Hartman, for instance, offers us genre-defying historical methods to repair the brutal, anti-Black silences of trans-Atlantic enslavement in works such as Lose Your Mother (2006) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019). More recently, Alison Rumfitt genealogizes Britain’s trans-exclusionary feminisms through the Gothic horrors of Tell Me I’m Worthless (2021).

Recent critiques of ‘inclusion’ politics have even shown us how techno-modernity – and its eagerness to see, surveil, catalogue, and represent – has made exclusion desirable for those who wish to evade the anguish of constant interpretation. We might begin to see these tactics in John Cage’s 4′33″ (1952), where the formal exclusion of instrumentation prompts an uncontrollable ecology of noise; in Deleuze and Guattari, who remind us that a minor literature is that which “gives meaning up… [and] retains only its skeleton, its paper silhouette” (1975); in Herman Melville’s Bartleby and the pop star Taylor Swift, both of whom request to be excluded from processes of U.S. American capitalism, though, no doubt, to wildly different ends.

The 33rd issue of FORUM invites contributions from across the arts and humanities that engage, in these ways and many more, with the concept of ‘exclusion’ throughout all historical periods. Topics can include, but are not limited to:

•       Modes of exclusion: borders and boundaries; categories and genres; ‘banter’, gossip, and small talk; ignoring and ostracising; exile and desertion; ‘cancelling’; ‘ghosting’
•       Excluded subjectivities and knowledges, such as in terms of race, ethnicity and nationality, indigeneity, class, caste, sexuality and gender, dis/ability, and religion
•       Excluded or exclusionary spaces (physical, affective, digital) and temporalities (moments, durations, periods) and their many intersections
•     Processes of canonization and archive-formation
•       Liberation’s exclusions: cis-homonormativity and trans-exclusionary feminism
•       Exclusion and exclusivity: luxury and taste
•       What’s left behind: waste and garbage; the ‘quaint’; the ‘problematic’; ‘outdated’ technologies, styles, and genres; ‘low culture’; excess and guilty pleasures
•       What’s left unsaid: reticence, inarticulateness, forgetting, silence
•       Self-exclusion: withdrawal, anti-surveillance, anti-representation; self-exile and seclusion
•     Diversity, equality & inclusion: its foundations, forms, successes, and failures
•     Embodied exclusions of, and beyond, Covid-19: self-isolation, quarantine, ‘no contact’, socio-medical inequities, accessibility; the exclusionary pasts, presents, and futures of other epidemics/pandemics (such as HIV/AIDS); overlooked illness and/or disability narratives (mental health, the ‘chronic’, the ‘invisible’)
•       Responses to exclusion: pessimism and optimism; counter-canons/archives; collectivity and organising; renewal and reclamation

 

All articles should be submitted by 4 April 2022. All suitable submissions will be subject to double-blind peer-review and submission does not guarantee publication.

Full submissions should be made at http://journals.ed.ac.uk/forum/about/submissions, where you will also find our Author Guidelines. 

For any questions relating to your submission please contact us at Forum.Journal@ed.ac.uk.

N.B. As FORUM is a postgraduate journal we are usually only able to accept submissions from postgraduate students currently enrolled in Masters or PhD programmes, or from early career researchers within three years of having finished a postgraduate qualification.

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Following periods of social, political, and economic turbulence governments and communities around the world rally in efforts designed to preserve, challenge, or radically overhaul the status quo. Although there is now some reason for optimism, we find ourselves faced with the aftermath of numerous upheavals. Is this a unique opportunity to use the tattered threads of the social fabric to make something new? Where do we go from here?

 

 

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The 30th issue of FORUM invites articles and book reviews that look at Creative Resistance and how it emerges in different forms, in different cultures.

Read More Read more about CfP Issue 30: Creative Resistance - deadline extended till April 20th

The 30th issue of FORUM invites articles and book reviews that look at Creative Resistance and how it emerges in different forms, in different cultures.

Read More Read more about CfP Issue 30: Creative Resistance

 

FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers, Issue 29 (2019): Co-Creation and Collaboration

Art forms such as opera, theatre and dance routinely remind us of the power of ensemble performance, but examples of collaborative practice can also be found in fields more usually associated with solo activity. Artists’ colonies and shared studios fostered close working relationships between painters such as Picasso and Braque, and Gilbert & George have spent their whole working lives as a collaborative duo. In poetry, the Japanese renga form is a structured but improvised collaboration; Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads marked a notable attempt at a joint venture; Eliot’s The Waste Land was transformed by Pound’s editorial input. Current academic research often foregrounds interdisciplinary approaches, while theories of intertextuality emphasise the interconnectivity of different works and the reader’s interpretive role in a text’s meaning.

But artistic dialogues can also be combative and provocative, as in medieval flyting, the Dozens, and rap battles. Drawing on the works of others may result in appropriation, pastiche, parody or plagiarism. Historically, collaboration can be problematic or even dangerous: during wartime it became a dirty word, the opposite of resistance. In our increasingly polarised ideological landscape, is political compromise achievable, or even desirable?

For issue 29 of FORUM we seek submissions from a range of disciplines which engage with concepts of co-creation, collaboration, co-authorship and cooperation. Submissions may relate to, but are not limited to:

- Artistic partnerships, collectives and cooperatives
- Knowledge exchange in and between universities and learned societies
- Translation and adaptation
- Intertextuality
- Interdisciplinarity
- Ekphrasis
- Citation, allusion, palimpsests, sampling, satire, pastiche and parody
- Oral and folk traditions
- Open source publishing and online collaborations

FORUM is a peer-reviewed journal for postgraduate students working in culture and the arts. Authors must be current postgraduate students, or must have completed their postgraduate degree no more than three years ago. Formatted according to MLA guidelines, papers must be between 3000 and 5000 words in length, and book reviews around 1,250 words. FORUM also considers multimedia or alternative presentations for publication.

Please e-mail your article or book review, a short abstract, and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled .doc(x) files to editors@forumjournal.org or submit online at forumjournal.org by 1 October, 2019. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.

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FORUM Call for Papers, Issue 28 (2019): Walls

  

Schott, Lorelei. Walls or Gates?. 2018.

 

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, it seems apropos to speak of walls. Yes, walls. In the current political climate, walls divide and separate. They draw the line between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In everyday life, they delineate and create the spaces we inhabit. Yet, these divisions are not always necessarily physical. In mainland China, for example, the Great Firewall restricts access to the internet. Abroad we might find it difficult to communicate because of the language barrier. In effect, it seems that walls stand between us and others, between us and the outside world.

In art and literature, however, walls sometimes come to stand for something else. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” they come to criticize and denounce the rest cure and the patriarchy. In Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” they are the springboard for philosophical meditations. Whereas, in Finnegans Wake, Humpty Dumpty’s fall is in many ways the catalyst for James Joyce’s archetypal, kaleidoscopic, polyphonic, multilingual, and cyclical rewriting of history. In visual art, walls become the medium. With the application of paint or of plaster, walls are turned into murals and frescoes. In Mexico, for example, the politically charged murals of Los Tres Grandes unified people in the aftermath of the revolution. Despite appearing mundane and uninspiring, walls have symbolic value in political, religious, cultural, and artistic spheres.

In this issue of FORUM we seek and encourage contributions which engage with the concept of walls in its largest expression. We invite you to think about physical walls, psychological hurdles, and invisible barriers, whether they separate and divide or bring people together.

Papers must be between 3000 to 5000 words in length, formatted according to MLA guidelines.

FORUM is also considering academic book reviews (1,250 words) and multimedia or alternative presentations for publication.

Please e-mail your article, a short abstract, and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled .doc(x) files to editors@forumjournal.org or submit through the website by 15 February, 2019. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.

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FORUM Call for Papers, Issue 27 (2018): The Gaze

Mary Cassatt, ‘In the Loge’ (1878)

The gaze is essential to the ownership and interpretation of art. Even as the woman in Cassatt’s ‘In the Loge’ gazes at the action onstage, she herself is being observed by the man in the background. In The London Review of Books, Julian Barnes writes: ‘It’s as if he’s telling her: don’t forget that the male gaze rules here, my good woman.’ From Jane Austen to #metoo, the recognition and subversion of the dominant gaze has repeatedly shed new light on cultural hierarchies.

Issue 27 of FORUM seeks contributions from a wide range of disciplines concerning the gaze, recognition, and identification. All aspects of culture and identity can be said to be subject to a form of the gaze - how does an art form interact with its audience? How does the presence of the gaze affect the ownership of a medium? How is the gaze redirected in subversive art? Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

• Visibility and readership of subjugated narratives
• Digital humanities and contemporary audiences
• The #metoo movement and the male gaze
• Queer audiences and popular culture
• The gaze and hierarchical structures
• The male gaze in art and literature
• The onlooker in visual art
• Cinema audiences in the 21st century
• The ‘selfie’ and social media viewership
• Interactions of the audience with live performance
• The gaze in canonical literature
• The gaze and sexual identity
• Historical perspectives on sight and reception
• The mutual gaze

Papers must be between 3,000 – 5,000 words in length, formatted according to MLA guidelines.

FORUM is also considering academic book reviews (1,000 words) and multimedia or alternative presentations for publication.

Please e-mail your article, a short abstract, and your academic CV in separate, clearly labelled .doc(x) files to editors@forumjournal.org by 11 September, 2018. All eligible articles will be peer reviewed prior to publication. Only one submission per author per issue is permitted.

 

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Postgraduates at the University of Edinburgh is seeking papers for the Latest Learning Colloquy.

A number of papers by colloquy participants will be selected for publication in a special issue of FORUM.

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A big thank-you to all our delegates and academic guests who joined us last month for ReVision: Editing Across Disciplines.

We hope everyone enjoyed the conference and took away something useful: according to our feedback forms (thanks to all who filled in!) it seems that the workshops were particularly interesting, as was the diverse range of disciplines gathered together on various panels. We were glad to hear you all felt relaxed and enjoyed the friendly feedback and peer support the delegates at the conference provided, whilst managing to ensure all papers were professional and up to date. You can check out the pictures and download a copy of the programme here!

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