CFP Premodern Otherness (Spec Issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies) (2/1/2022)

Special Issue: Premodern Otherness (Otherness: Essays and Studies 9.1)

deadline for submissions: February 1, 2022


full name / name of organization: Centre for Studies in Otherness


contact email: engms@cc.au.dk


Source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2021/11/24/special-issue-premodern-otherness-otherness-essays-and-studies-91

The peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for its special issue: Premodern Otherness: Encounters with and Expressions of the Other in Classical Antiquity, Medieval, and Early Modern Periods, Autumn 2022.



Otherness: Essays and Studies publishes research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that critically examine the concepts of Otherness and alterity. We particularly appreciate dynamic cross-disciplinary study.



This special issue will focus on representations and ideas of Otherness in classical antiquity, medieval, and early modern periods. Confrontations with and distinctive conceptualizations of Otherness were also present in the premodern era. The papers in this issue will focus on the different ways in which Otherness was expressed in thought, representations, and processes during this period. This can include but is not limited to, philosophical or literary works, material culture, historiography, treatises, etc.



Thinking about Otherness is not limited to contemporary identity politics nor Orientalism in the modern era. Socrates based his anamnesis principle, the idea that we have known everything in a previous life but have simply forgotten it, on his questioning how to deal with the Other and the unknown. However, the relevance of this theory and other premodern thoughts and texts on Otherness is often overlooked. When we discuss Otherness today, we mention modern thinkers such as Levinas or Derrida and might then discount the role Socrates and other premodern philosophers have had. The ideas of ancient thinkers have long remained relevant throughout the Middle Ages too and left their traces in the cultural production of that period and beyond. Think, for example, of the interactions in the Old English poem Beowulf between the monster Grendel and his surroundings, or encounters with the Faërie in Arthurian romances. The way in which these unnatural or unfamiliar phenomena are treated can generate fruitful discussions when it comes to Otherness and how it has been conceptualized through time. How can we now study and interpret these traces and what exactly are they? How are the encounters with Otherness or the Other visualised, presented, and described in premodern artwork or treatises? What can we learn from looking at representations of Otherness in the past and use those in our own dealings with Otherness now?



For this special issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies, we invite papers that explore representations and conceptualisations of the Other in the premodern period. These representations can be historiographical, literary, architectural, artistic, or interdisciplinary. We seek practice-led research outcomes, cross-disciplinary theoretical considerations, conceptualizations and theory formations and critical and analytical readings of source material.



Welcome topics include but are not limited to:

• Representation and Reception of Otherness in Classical and Medieval Philosophy
• Translation of Otherness in Premodern Literature
• Theoretical Frameworks for Premodern Alterity
• Framing the Other in Premodern Historiographical Texts
• Representations of the Other in Premodern Material Culture
• Spatial Practices in the Premodern Periods and the Other
• Encounters with Monstrosities in Premodern Art
• The Treatment of Women in Premodern Texts
• Marginalisation of Race in Premodern Treatises

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 to the guest editor Bregje Hoed at Otherness.research@gmail.com



Further information: http://www.Otherness.dk/journal/



The deadline for submissions is 1 February 2022.

 Last updated December 1, 2021 

 

CFP Otherness: Essays and Studies 7.3 (9/1/2019)

Otherness: Essays and Studies 7.3 (General Issue)

deadline for submissions: September 1, 2019
full name / name of organization: Centre for Studies in Otherness
contact email: otherness.research@gmail.com

The peer-reviewed e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for its next general issue, 7.3, forthcoming Winter 2019.

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 Exteriority

Otherness 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.  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
• Hybridity, Creolization, and the Global Other
• Representations of Otherness in the Global South
• Otherness and the Non-Human Animal
• Ethics, Responsibility, and the Other
• Memory, History, Trauma, and Otherness
• Sexuality, Gender, the Body and the Other
• 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 to the editor Matthias Stephan at otherness.research@gmail.com

The deadline for submissions is Sunday, September 1, 2019.


Last updated June 19, 2019

CFP Otherness and the Urban (Spec Issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies) (9/28/2018)

Special Journal Issue: “Otherness and the Urban”

deadline for submissions: September 28, 2018

full name / name of organization: Centre for Studies in Otherness

contact email: otherness.research@gmail.com


Otherness: Essays and Studies 7.1

The peer-reviewed e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for a special issue, forthcoming Spring 2019 – “Otherness and the Urban”


Edited by Maria Beville, this issue seeks to publish research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that examine, in as many ways as possible, the concepts of otherness and alterity as these relate to the experience and representation of the city.


The city is a unique and subjective space. It is fragmented and indistinct. It is at once place and text: to walk the city is to read it. In ‘Semiology and Urbanism’ (The Semiotic Challenge), Roland Barthes notes that the city is a discourse and a language: ‘[t]he city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city where we are, simply by inhabiting it, by traversing it, by looking at it’. However, in this discourse, there exists ‘a conflict between signification and reason, or at least between signification and that calculating reason which wants all the elements of the city to be uniformly recuperated by planning’. Our desire to map the city is a desire to map the self: an impossibility that constantly reminds us of our own inherent Otherness.


In this way the city is multivalent. It is both the location and the sign of the Other. And rather than merely existing as a physical place, the city is experience; individualised and multiplied in its alterity. While the city exists as a place to be read and is unique in every individual reading, it is also a place to be written, inspiring writers, artists, and thinkers to become lost in city streets and locales as they struggle to find new ways to meet the challenge of representing the unrepresentable.


Thus, the city is where the subject and space become intertwined. While the city becomes part of the subject and the subject a part of the city, urban space in its resistance of representation remains a constant challenge to notions of self, of sameness, of homogeneity. The city is therefore bound to exist in tension with identity, both individual and collective. Just as is the case with the self, there can be no cohesive vision of the city because the city not only resists mapping, it resists unified narrative in its flux; in its phantasmagoria.


And yet the otherness of the city remains a part of the definition of urban selfhood and understanding this is best achieved through a balanced view of the city’s physical and metaphysical dimensions. No examination of the textuality of the city should overlook the materiality of the city and its impact on the city experience. City design, city building, city governance and city use form the structures of the city which carry and mediate its otherness.


This issue seeks to develop a collective of research papers which examine the otherness of the city and the Other in the city.


Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The city as other in literature/ Otherness in the city in literature
• Otherness and the philosophy of the city
• Urban aesthetics and otherness
• Twinned cities
• Hybrid cities
• Haunted cities
• Folklore and otherness in the city
• Globalisation, otherness and the urban
• The uncanny city (in literature, art, film, media)
• The politics of alterity in the city
• Otherness in the postcolonial city
• The postmodern city
• The Gothic city
• Minority urban experience (in literature, art, film, media)
• Urban Otherness and popular culture

Articles should be between 5,000 – 7,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with a Word document attachment formatted to the Chicago Manual of Style standards. Please send submissions to the editor, Maria Beville at otherness.research@gmail.com


The deadline for submissions is Friday, September 28, 2018.


*Barthes, Roland. ‘Semiology and Urbanism.’ In The Semiotic Challenge, translated by Richard Howard. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. P191-201.



General Submissions

Scholars are always welcome to submit articles within the scope of the journal for consideration for our next general issue. We anticipate a general issue to come out in the Autumn of 2019.

Please address any inquires to Matthias Stephan: otherness.research@gmail.com.