Journal „The Space Between: Literature & Culture 1914-1945“; Layne Craig and Alexandra Edwards (Web)

Proposals by: 01.04.2025

It has become a cliché in academic spaces to acknowledge the increasing precarity of work in our field. University and government austerity, state censorship of LGBTQ+ and DEI-related learning, and the increasing ubiquity of AI replacements for intellectual labor produce interlocking crises that motivate us to hand-wringing commentary, but also to active response. Working in an environment of economic and existential uncertainty about our jobs and our fields, academic laborers have exited their roles, made do within limitations, adapted creatively, rebelled, and found new modes of solidarity—and sometimes all of these within the span of an academic year.
This special issue calls for a response to our own precarity that draws out the lineages, theoretical structures, and persistent historical inequities that tie our experiences to those of laborers in „the space between.“ Not unlike our era, the years from 1918-1940 were marked by shifts in technology, changes in understandings of gender, racist rhetoric and violence, and the rise of fascist movements, all of which impacted workspaces in the home, the factory, the farm, and the office. The editors hope that this issue will illuminate the ways in which the uncertainties and dangers of labor under capitalism shift and persist, unite and divide workers, pressure identities differentially, and self-perpetuate over time.
The editors welcome papers across disciplines that expand our ideas of labor, question the value of labor, point to alternate economic systems, and commemorate laborers who resisted and who succumbed to labor’s precarities. Essays on artistic work and the artist as laborer in the modern period are appreciated, but they hope to publish these alongside essays that call attention to the domestic, industrial, academic, and agricultural labor that made art possible. While Marxist engagements with the conditions of labor are part of this conversation, the frameworks we envision may move far beyond Marx in their theoretical orientations.
Accordingly, the editors seek to make space in this issue for contingent and/or precarious academic laborers to theorize contingently. As la paperson writes in A Third University is Possible, „A recognition of impossibility means to theorize contingently—that is, my thinking is temporary; my right to think aloud is contingent on the apparatus of legitimated colonial knowledge production that ought to be abolished.“ Continue reading →