July 03, 2017
Proposals which present critical perspectives from/on the Philippines and Southeast Asia—or, more broadly, the global South—are invited for contributions to a Forum Kritika on Radical Cultural Responses to Crises in Urban Democracy, a special, themed, section of the online open access journal Kritika Kultura.
Contributions may be proposed in the form of academic papers (5,500 words), activist case studies/artists’ statements (1,000 to 2,000 words), photo essays (3/4 pages), manifestos (1,000 words), or provocations (1,000 to 2,500 words).
All articles accepted will be submitted to blind peer review; the Forum Kritika on Radical Cultural Responses to Crises in Urban Democracy will be edited by Dr. Niamh Malone (Senior Lecturer in Drama, Liverpool Hope University) and Victor Merriman, Professor of Critical Performance Studies (Edge Hill University). The target publication date is Feb. 2018, with final contributions due at the end of Nov. 2017.
The editors welcome proposals from critical perspectives in areas such as, but not limited to, the following: performance studies; migration studies; political economy; postcolonial studies; social studies; urban studies; visual studies. Interdisciplinary papers are very welcome.
Contributors might find the following indicative list of questions helpful in framing proposals:
• What is ‘urban democracy’ and how and where may it be seen to exist?
• What are the consequences for society of the impact on cities of neoliberalization?
• Privatization of formerly public space—in what ways do community and arts interventions interact with corporate ownership?
• Where civic authorities distinguish between citizens and denizens, what kinds of crises—ethical and practical—does this produce for urban life-in-common?
• What kinds of change are needed to reinvigorate urban spaces as democratic spaces? How may artists and intellectuals inspire radicalism in artistic and political projects?
• In what ways, and to what purposes, might cultural work and cultural workers recast themselves to engage with an emerging alter-capitalist backlash against instrumentalism, marketisation and co-option?
• Where do cultural workers stand in relation to an urban regeneration discourse that recruits the arts to assert the existence of an urban public sphere—accessible, democratic and progressive?
Proposals should be presented in the form of 300-word abstracts, and include details of authorship, institutional affiliations, and preferred email addresses. Please submit proposals jointly to malonn@hope.ac.uk and victor.merriman@edgehill.ac.uk no later than July 18, 2017.
Kritika Kultura is acknowledged by a host of Asian and Asian American Studies libraries and scholarly networks, and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Thomson Reuters (ISI), Scopus, EBSCO, and the Directory of Open Access Journals. For inquiries about submission guidelines and future events, visit http://journals.ateneo.edu/ojs/kk/ or email kk.soh@ateneo.edu
