Call for Papers: Dandelion Journal

The Dandelion editors seek submissions on the theme of THE CONTEMPORARY for their forthcoming issue.

When will the contemporary end? When did it begin?

Contemporary cultural production and questions about the nature of contemporaneity itself have become dominant in recent scholarship but just what is ‘the contemporary’? What type of creative and scholarly work is being done under its aura? Should we apprehend the contemporary as a noun, offering definition and order to a discrete period in history; or is it rather as an adjective, traced with a particular structure of feeling, an interdisciplinary apprehension to what is happening Now and an anxiety towards what comes next?

We seek submissions that address how the social, political and aesthetic dilemmas that characterize our present are made manifest in the twenty-first century’s cultural production. For instance, if the contemporary is the cultural logic of neoliberal capitalism made tangible, then how can its ‘common sense’ be registered, revised, or resisted? Is the contemporary experienced similarly across the globe, or are its pressure points, modes and sites of dissent different depending on their location? How might we pull on the emergency brake?

We are also keen to examine emergent methodologies and debates that offer a barometer of the contemporary in humanities scholarship. For example, how to explicate ‘the contemporary’ is a matter of anxiety for art history: does the term simply denote a period that came after the modern, or were all works of art once contemporary? And what are the conceptual tools and interpretive frameworks we need to study contemporary writing in the present age? As literary scholars have noted, one of the defining features of twenty-first century fiction is the return of the novel about time. How, might we ask, are time and space to be negotiated in an era of transnational literary form and planetary ruination? Finally, we wish also to consider the fate of the humanities, and academic labour itself, inside the contemporary University.

The journal invites submissions from postgraduate students and early career scholars that address the theme of the contemporary across the spectrum of Arts and Humanities research.

Topics could include, but are by no means restricted to:

• Periodisation and the competing temporalities of ‘the contemporary’ across the humanities: Beyond –modernisms, ‘Post-Post’?
• Methodological shifts in the humanities: Digital Humanities, Medical Humanities, World Literature, Post-Critical.
• Tone and the contemporary’s affective intensities: Hope and Pessimism, Anxiety and Belonging.
• The Anthropocene: Environment and Ecocriticism.
• Mapping the networks and flows of Late Capitalism and Neoliberalism: Towards a contemporary realism?
• Contemporary Resistances: Digital Commons, the Hacker, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Indigenous Social Movements.
• Human, Non-Human, Post-Human: Artificial Intelligence, Prosthetics, and Augmented Reality; Embodiment and Subjectivity.
• The Future of the Novel: Transnational, Graphic, Documentary, Historical, Science Fiction.
• The Production, Philosophy, Criticism, and Curating of Contemporary Art.
• The Relation between Contemporary Art and Art History.

Submission guidelines

We welcome short articles of 3000-5000 words, long articles of 5000-8000 words and critical reviews of books, film, and exhibitions. We also strongly encourage submissions of artwork including visual art; creative writing; podcasts and video footage (up to 10 minutes). We would be happy to discuss ideas for submissions with interested authors prior to the submission deadline.

Please send all completed submissions to mail@dandelionjournal.org by 6^th February 2017.

Please also include a 50-word author biography and a 200-300-word abstract alongside your submission. All referencing and style is required in full MHRA format as a condition of publication and submitted articles should be academically rigorous and ready for immediate publication.