CALL FOR PAPERS ISSUE 5.2: ‘Bodies in Disarray’

As we write this call for papers, both human and inhuman forces threaten the bodies of millions with severe illness and death. Massive #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality are sweeping across the world while a pandemic spreads among the populations of all
continents—hitting hardest at the most marginalized and vulnerable communities, both in terms of infection rates and economic consequences. News cycles in the Global North during the first half of 2020 featured uncontrollable wildfires in Australia, the locust plague in East Africa, the accelerated destruction of the Amazon and the consequent threat to its indigenous peoples, escalating violence against Kurds, Palestinians, Yemenis, Uyghurs, and others, the official exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and of course the heavily mediatized racist murder of George Floyd that sparked the current global anti-racist protest movements. Surely, even a casual observer cannot escape the anxious feeling that something is coming to a head; yet, what this “something” might be is not always immediately obvious, nor is it accurate to speak of a singular “thing”. Systems, cycles, feedback loops, discourses, identities, species, temporalities, and bodies intersect in innumerable ways. They are mutually constitutive and interdependent, but they can also disrupt each other’s configurations—they can be thrown into disarray . For instance, we see this paradoxical dynamic with the COVID–19 crisis: it came about under the current
conditions of global capitalism, but has also called the future of that same system into question. We invite graduate and postgraduate students of the Humanities to contribute to the next issue of Junctions , titled ‘Bodies in Disarray’ . From all fields, we welcome submissions that engage with this subject and the issues that stem from it, such as:

- Precarious bodies, vulnerability, and grief: What are the social and material conditions under which certain bodies are made “precarious” (e.g. disabled people, marginalized genders, queerfolks, BIPOC)? What is the relationship between these conditions and bodily experiences of precarity? Who gets to be free from precarity and why? How do societal crises like war, famine, and pandemics affect established processes of grief and grievability—and whose lives are grievable to begin with? What should be the role of shared vulnerability in political responses to crisis and disarray? Under what conditions can disarray, precarity, and vulnerability be seen as sources of political strength, potency, and transgressiveness?

- Individuality, privacy, and the collective: What does a global crisis mean for the perceived tension between individual freedom(s) and collective responsibility, especially when it comes to questions of the body? How do pervasive new media platforms and technologies reinvigorate the privacy dilemma (e.g. COVID–19 tracing apps, social media, state surveillance)? In the face of ongoing crises and the technologies designed to manage them, what is the relevance of critical theory today? For example, are Foucauldian notions of biopolitics, necropolitics, and thanatopolitics still productive and ethical to think contemporary governmental practices? How do systemic upheavals and public health crises facilitate shifting notions of (in)dividuality and bodilyautonomy?

- Acceleration and deceleration in times of crisis: How do crises exacerbate pre-existing structural inequalities (in terms of class, race, gender, dis/ability, etc.)? How do crises accelerate other crises and processes (e.g. ecological destruction, forced migration, civil rights movements,disinformation, online activism, etc.)? Conversely, how do they decelerate such crises and processes? To what extent might people’s experience of time be affected by systemic upheaval, and specifically for whom is such a temporal shift (im)possible? Are there parallels to be drawn between the current disruption of everyday life and the experiences of, for instance, queer/trans* folks and disabled people—and if so, what would those parallels entail?

- Histories and discourses of public health and political economy: How are historical analyses and comparisons of public health crises relevant to the current day? In what ways do institutional responses to the ongoing pandemic accentuate structural biases, e.g. regarding the “societal value” of “essential workers”, the arts, the accessibility of (reproductive) healthcare and information, and the allocation of emergency funds? How do issues like institutional racism, police brutality, and continued urban segregation intersect with “traditional”, eurocentric notions of public health? Why have hitherto discounted ideologies like eugenics and social darwinism recently gained such purchase within popular and policy-related discourse? How does the digital proliferation of (dis/mis)information about the aforementioned topics interact with off-line public spheres?

Other potential topics of interest include (but are certainly not limited to!):
- Perceptions and framing of “productivity” in times of crisis
- The ethics of academic research in/about periods of collective suffering
- The role of cultural institutions, the arts, and the Humanities in contemporary capitalism
- Applying the concept of “virality” across different Humanities fields

We also encourage book reviews on recent publications related to these issues, and a separate call for book reviews will be published shortly. Submission length is 4000–6000 words for original articles, and 1000–2000 words for book reviews. Submissions should engage with the scholarly literature of the appropriate discipline and clearly identify its contribution to the field. The complete manuscript should be in
Chicago author-date referencing style, following the official Junctions Word template and the prescribed author guidelines (found at https://junctionsjournal.org/about/submissions/ ). Please submit a digital copy (as a Word document) via the submission system on our website by September 11th . Please omit references to the author in manuscripts to ensure anonymous reviews. After double-blind reviewing, accepted articles will undergo a revision process which will conclude with the publication of the journal issue. The journal does not accept manuscripts previously published by or simultaneously submitted to other publications. Please contact editor@junctionsjournal.org with any questions about the publication process. For more informal questions about the issue, you can contact the managing editors on Twitter: Dennis Jansen ( @rmpdenjan ) and Mark Whittle ( @markwhittle444 ).

Important Dates
11 September: Deadline manuscripts
30 October: Notification of editor decision
13 November: Deadline first revisions
1 January: Deadline final revisions
1 February: Planned publication of issue on https://junctionsjournal.org/

Junctions: Graduate Journal of the Humanities aims to connect the different disciplines of the Humanities by collecting disciplinary and interdisciplinary texts that are accessible to readers from across the Humanities. This gives graduate and postgraduate students the opportunity to gain valuable publishing, editing and reviewing experience. Everyone who submits an article to Junctions will receive feedback from our reviewers, and if your work is selected for publication, the editors will guide you through the different stages of editing to produce a professional article and begin your academic CV.