FORUM Postgraduate Journal Call for Papers: The Body

28-Jan-2026

The body is often treated as a biological given - the primary site of selfhood, perception and agency. Yet recent work across the fields of medical humanities, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, affect studies, media studies, trauma studies, critical race studies, trans studies and disability studies have shown that bodies are historically produced, unevenly valued and differentially exposed to violence and care. For instance, work on the performative materialisation of sexed bodies in Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (1993), on queer orientations and lines of belonging in Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006), and on material feminisms attentive to matter and environment in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s Material Feminisms (2008) has shown how social orders repeatedly position feminised, racialised and queer bodies as more regulated and more vulnerable.

These fields foreground embodied perspectives, revealing that what counts as a “normal” or “legible” body is always shaped by power and, in doing so, re-evaluate how we understand history, narrative and knowledge itself. In literary and linguistic regimes, bodies are never separable from sensory and linguistic structures. Sensations are filtered and organised by cultural norms, technologies and institutions: who is seen or surveilled, who is heard or silenced, whose touch is permitted or pathologised. Language and voice, including accent, dialect, sign languages and non-verbal communication, mark bodies as familiar or foreign, compliant or resistant. Crossing borders is thus bodily, sensory and linguistic at once: bodies move (or are immobilised) across national frontiers, but they also navigate sensory thresholds and linguistic boundaries that structure experiences of belonging, exclusion and translation.

The 37th issue of FORUM invites contributions from across the arts and humanities that engage with the theme “The Body”. We welcome work that traces alternate histories of the body, explores how bodies and bodyminds are represented, regulated and reimagined, and examines the crossings and frictions between bodily experience, the senses, and language. We welcome articles and creative-critical essays that address bodies in relation to movement and stasis, sensation and insensibility, language, translation and silence, and that attend to the ways bodily, sensory and linguistic borders are constructed, policed, crossed and reimagined.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

  •   Racialised embodiment and resistance: histories of racism, bodily marking, surveillance and anti-racist practices
  •   Embodying history and futurity: bodies in historical, speculative and alternative-world narratives
  •   The body-mind relation: dualisms, entanglements and critiques of the body/mind split
  •   Human, nonhuman and more-than-human bodies: cross-species, ecological and hybrid forms of embodiment
  •   Sensory lives of texts: touch, sound, smell, taste, and vision across literature, media and performance
  •   Parts, fragments and traces: hands, faces, skin, organs and other bodily fragments as historical and symbolic sites
  •   Genre and cultural value: how bodies shape - and are shaped by - genre, canon formation and hierarchies of taste
  •   Queer, trans and crip temporalities: non-normative life courses, bodily transitions and ways of inhabiting time
  •   Affective bodies and atmosphere: how emotions are registered, transmitted and historicised through bodies and environments
  •   Bodies as matter and metaphor: bodies of knowledge, bodies of work, the body of the text (and related practices, e.g. editing), the body politic
  •   Representing bodies across disciplines: literature, film, TV, theatre, art, the sciences and medicine
  •   Embodied methods and practices: performance, phenomenology, ethnography, practice-based research and related approaches
  •   Bodies and space: How bodies inhabit, are represented within, and constructed by spaces (e.g. the domestic, hospitals, schools, the workplace, etc.)
  •   Body and illness: pain, disability, trauma, fatigue, ageing, care, diagnosis and the politics of medical authority

Send the full article by 5th April 2026 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.