Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power; Kristin Aubel and Sarah Heinz (Vienna) (Web)

Proposals by: 30.11.2023

Coils of the Serpent is a scholarly online-journal dedicated to the investigation of contemporary manifestations of power. It is intended as an open-access platform where diverse theories and analyses of power shall be developed, brought into dialogue with each other, discussed, criticized, illustrated and popularized. The journal was launched in 2016 (Web).

The Politics of Home
The notion of home, while often associated with warmth, security, and personal sanctuary, is inherently intertwined with broader socio-political dynamics. It therefore encompasses more than a physical space, and it is never neutral, private, or simply ‘ours’. It is where inside and outside, private and public, as well as built forms, affective ties, and cultural imaginaries intersect in a politics of home. At their core, such politics of home encapsulate the intricate interplay between individuals, communities, and the broader structures and institutions of power that shape our lived experiences. This special issue seeks to explore the various ways in which ideas and ideals of homes are constructed, contested, and negotiated within the complex tapestry of society, highlighting the pivotal role played by political, cultural, artistic, and historical contexts. It therefore seeks to cover the multiple forms and functions that a politics of home can have, as well as the multiple forms in which literatures, the arts, media, activism, or concrete home-making practices negotiate and grapple with the diverse manifestations of such politics of home and their impact on individuals and communities.
Understanding home through the politics attached to it opens up a discussion about practices, selves, and relationships within, through, and beyond the home. Via objects put into specific places and their use, through activities like decorating, cooking, or playing, as well as through the social relations that these practices create or inhibit, the feelings they elicit, and the memories they amass, home is created, lived, and imagined, enabling the person performing these activities to experience, ‘feel,’ and remember home as a place, as social relations, and as a site for individuality and selfhood. This process can have positive and negative outcomes, it can be liberating and constricting, but it is never static, whole, or fixed. It is related to and produced by the interplay between public and private processes as well as chosen and imposed social relations. Read more … (PDF).

Women’s Studies Quarterly (Fall 2024 Issue); Guest Editors: Debarati Biswas (New Coll. of Florida), and Laura Westengard (New York City Coll. of Technology) (Web)

Proposals by: 15.09.2023

This special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly invites submissions that explore the literary, theoretical, and cultural lifeworlds created by and about unbearable being(s). “Unbearable being(s)” functions on multiple valences. “Unbearable being” is an affective state of being and becoming that indexes the intolerableness of existence within the normative. On the other hand, “unbearable beings” are the subjects who inhabit abject and/or revolutionary positions in relation to the sociopolitical apparatus and offer alternate possibilities of living and being in this world.
This special issue explores the unbearableness of that which cannot be contained within the category of what Sylvia Wynter defines as the “Man-as-human.” Infrastructures of oppression—the nation-state and its borders, citizenship, the unequal distribution of material resources deemed essential for survival such as healthcare, housing, education, and other human rights—police the borders of the category of the “Man-as-human” and cast out Black, Indigenous, people of color, impoverished, disabled, and LGBTQIA+ people differently. The COVID19 pandemic and accelerating climate change have further dismantled the fictions of liberal humanism and laid bare the exploitative and extractive designs of capitalist white supremacy that create the category of “Man-as-human.” Treated as the refuse of urban renewal and gentrification, and/or displaced by environmental crises, wars, and ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and capitalist exploitation, marginalized subjects have, however, effected enormous sociopolitical changes over time, and have fostered socialities in spaces deemed unhomely and unclean. Such abject spaces include prisons, hospitals, segregated housing projects, war-torn zones, disaster sites, nightclubs, single room occupancy hotels, digital spaces, and other similar sites. Read more … (Web)

Source: qstudy-l@mailman.rice.edu