FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers (Issue 34): Trans-
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-.
The 34th 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.
