The peer-reviewed e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for its 2026 general issue.
Otherness: Essays and Studies publishes research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that examine, in as many ways as possible, the concepts of otherness and alterity. We particularly appreciate dynamic cross-disciplinary study.
“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But it also means: to be taught.”
― Emmanuel Levinas,
Totality and Infinity: An Essay on ExteriorityOtherness is complex and multivalent term. Otherness is defined by difference, both via outside markers and internal characteristics. Otherness is also a means by which we define ourselves. Thus the concept is inevitably bound with conceptions of selfhood, making it fundamental for discussions of subjectivity, social, cultural and national identity, and larger discussions of ontology. In light of more recent theory and criticism, the assumed line between the self and the other, the defining boundary of identity construction, is blurred, and as such the entire concept of otherness has become intricate and problematic.
In recent years, the concept has become even more salient, as boundaries become increasingly tested, identities challenged, and difference ever more powerfully promoted. As bell hooks reminds us, “when the dominant culture demands that the Other be offered as a sign that progressive political change is taking place … it invites a resurgence of essentialist cultural nationalism” (Black Looks 1992). With that resurgence, we find the discussion of otherness ever more important. It is this concept, otherness, in all of its complexities and nuances that we seek to explore and discuss through Otherness: Essays and Studies.
Past projects from the Centre, and past issues of the journal, have brought together articles from the fields of cultural theory, continental philosophy, sociology, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, gender studies, Gothic studies, animal alterity, the performing arts, fandom and celebrity studies, postmodernism and poststructuralist theory, and the consideration of the post-linguistic turn in their consideration of otherness. This journal invites submissions dealing with aspects of critical, socio-political, cultural, and literary exploration, within the scope of studies in otherness and alterity.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Otherness in Cultural Representation
The Representation of Otherness in Popular Culture
Race, Otherness, and Mediated Representation
Cultural Appropriation, or The Commodification of the Other
Hybridity, Creolization, and the Global Other
Representations of Otherness in the Global South
Precarity, Otherness and Marginalization
Otherness and the Non-Human Animal
Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other
Memory, History, Trauma, and Otherness
Sexuality, Gender, the Body and the Other
Otherness, Phenomenology, and Lived Experience
Absolute Otherness vs. Self-Same Other
Monstrosity, Spectrality and Terror of the Other
Uncanny or Abject Others; or The Familiar Other
The Sublime or the Unimaginable Other
Otherness and the ‘Post-Racial’
Political Otherness, Democracy, and the Post-Truth Era
Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and the Identity of the Other
Articles should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with Word document attachment formatted to Chicago Manual of Style standards (Author-Date) to the editor Matthias Stephan at
otherness.research@gmail.com. See the submission guidelines at
www.otherness.dk/journal for more details.
While we accept papers on a rolling basis, consideration for the next general issue will cut off on Feb 15, 2026.
Last updated December 8, 2025
