Call for
Journeys

Documenting human patterns of mobility is a key element in the travelers' social anatomy. The distinctive dialectic process between the traveler and the foreign has led to processes of identity formation from Homer to the present day. The result of these dialectic processes has over time resulted in both substantial images of identification, imaginary, and xenophobic images.

With this special issue on Journeys Academic Quarter invite abstracts across the humanistic disciplines to focus on the journey as focal point and the human element in its centre. With this broad frame of incentive we call for articles on related categories and subcategories like literary forms/genres comprising everything from scientific or religious traveling to famous movie site tourism or colonial motivated mobility or subjects that involve cultural aspects, images of identity/identification and imaginary encounters that are mediated through journeys.

On this background there could be gained new insights by focusing on the journeys mutual relationship between real and imaginary as co-producers in the constitution of the self and the other. This is where you might find a localizable or presumed essence of a phenomenon that does not necessarily adapt to a familiar category of mobility. It causes attention to the exchange of cultural relationships, but also to those not characterized through regular conventions. In this sense, identity or identification could be seen as something that is intimately connected to mobility, whether it is journeys of reality or imaginary.

The imaginary momentum in travel narratives is typically established on the contradictions nearby/distance to which phenomena has unrestricted anachronistic possibilities. In this type of narrative you often find a refined use of syncretistic elements in regards to a thematic representation of politics, love, nationalism, etc. Under these conditions, the historic location and the "factual" space/time relationship has a deprioritized significance. The absence of a de facto time/space relationship does not necessarily mean that time is not present. The momentary occurrences can both correspond with the processes of life and be defined in time, although the protagonists act in imaginary time and space. Despite the imaginary conditions this genre often produces a highly developed "sixth sense" of the human aspect, to which a thematic relation is established.

According to the Douglas Harper OnlineEtymologyDictionary traveling (travail) is generically associated with "suffering, painful effort, trouble, to toil, labor, to torture, instrument of torture", which in the 18th-20th century's British pulp fiction genre would have a positive adventurous and heroic meaning. But travel as concept might find different interesting perspectives by including the less positive aspect of traveling focusing on the involuntary/forced traveler and the imprints they leave on history. The Prophet Mohammed and his escape from Mecca to Medina in the year 622 has for example derived great significance to the Muslim concept of Hijra (emigration) that today, maybe more than ever, influence topics spanning from Muslim pilgrimage to Muslim integration in non-Muslim countries.

The editors invite articles from scholars across the humanities and social sciences working within the confines stated above.

Suggestion for articles
Suggestion for articles, including an abstract of 150 words to be mailed to Rune Andersen and Knud Knudsen no later than October 20. 2011.
Accepted articles – using the Harvard System Style Sheet – to be mailed to the editors no later than January 1st 2012. Articles will then be reviewed anonymously. The articles should be around 15,000-25.000 keystrokes.
The issue will be published in the Spring of 2012.

Academic Quarter has been approved according to the Danish bibliometrical system for 2011 and forward.