Call For Papers: Issue 28, Contending with Crisis

For its twenty-eighth issue, InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture invites scholarly articles and creative works that address the complex and multiple meanings of contending with crisis.

Defined by the global uncertainty of a world afflicted by varied and ambiguously interrelated states of emergency, the present can be seen as a critical historical conjuncture characterized by crisis. In the context of its worldwide occurrence, crisis refers irreducibly to a multitude of circumstances, events, and thematizations: military conflict, debt crises, issues of political representation, the mass migration and displacement of refugees, increasing ecological disruptions. Such ruptures in the social demand constant attention from individuals and communities, constituting a need for committed artististic and scholarly engagements with questions of what it means to be in crisis and how to deal with it.

Following Lauren Berlant’s understanding of crisis as “an emergency in the reproduction of life, a transition that has not found its genres for moving on,” we encourage authors to contemplate the fluidity/liminality of crisis, exploring both its emancipatory and repressive potentials. As an ongoing situation, a conceptual and rhetorical figure, an ideological representation and for many an urgent fact of life, the contemporary condition of crisis evokes a range of responses from those forced to contend with it.

For IVC 28, we invite contributors to explore visual representations and contestations of various states of crisis. How do crises emerge and perform in the visual field? How does the global situation of crisis reconfigure the possibilities of political representation? How do the material conditions of crisis constrain and transform everyday life and social organization? What kind of aesthetic responses and modes of cultural production proliferate in response? What forms of domination surface in times of crisis and how do they become realized in ensuing reorganizations of social orders? What productive potentials emerge or re-emerge in the face of specific and far-reaching crisis conditions?

Possible topics of exploration include, but are not limited to:

Visualizing/representing crisis, the visual politics of crisis
Political representation and subjectivity in/of crisis
Uneven distribution of vulnerabilities along lines of race, gender, and sexuality
Precarity, biopolitics and affective regimes of crisis and austerity
Activism, social movements, visual and performative protest repertoires
Creative responses to states of crisis, new modes of artistic production, aesthetics of resistance
Collaborative aesthetics and the commons
Material landscapes of crisis, crisis and urban space, austerity urbanism
Aesthetics of rupture, ruin, abandonment
Historiographies, afterlives of crises
Crisis genres: crises of dispossession (debt crisis, moral discourse of indebtedness), crises of political representation (Arab Spring, global rise of neo-populist nationalisms, Brexit, 2016 US election), postcolonial crises, military crises (Syria, Ukraine), refugee and humanitarian crisis, ecological crises (climate change, Fukushima, DAPL)
Please send completed papers (with references following the guidelines from the Chicago Manual of Style) of between 4,000 and 10,000 words to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu by June 30th, 2017. Inquiries should be sent to the same address.

Creative/Artistic Works

In addition to written materials, InVisible Culture is accepting works in other media (video, photography, drawing, code) that reflect upon the theme as it is outlined above. Please submit creative or artistic works along with an artist statement of no more than two pages to invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu. For questions or more details concerning acceptable formats, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact the same address.

Reviews

InVisible Culture is also currently seeking submissions for book, exhibition, and film reviews (600-1,000 words). To submit a review proposal, go to http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/contribute or contact invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu.

Dialogues

The journal also invites submissions to its Dialogues page, which will accommodate more immediate responses to the topic of the current issue. For further details, please contact us at invisible.culture@ur.rochester.edu with the subject heading “Dialogues submission.”

* InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture (IVC) is a student-run interdisciplinary journal published online twice a year in an open access format. Through peer reviewed articles, creative works, and reviews of books, films, and exhibitions, our issues explore changing themes in visual culture. Fostering a global and current dialog across fields, IVC investigates the power and limits of vision.