CALL FOR PAPERS
for a special issue of “Open Cultural Studies”
CHALLENGING NIHILISM: AN EXPLORATION OF CULTURE AND HOPE


“Open Cultural Studies” (www.degruyter.com/CULTURE) invites submissions for a special issue entitled “Challenging Nihilism: An Exploration of Culture and Hope”, edited by Juan A. Tarancón (University of Zaragoza, Spain).

DESCRIPTION

It seems that nowadays a fairly generalized feeling is that we are living through bleak and incongruous times. 1) Bleak because in recent times there has been an unprecedented retreat from human rights and social values as the logic of capital (growth, profit, accumulation) is, to all appearance, replacing the principles of justice, solidarity, and the common good that, to a greater or lesser extent, used to preside over social and civic life. In like manner, the erosion of democratic politics, the growth of inequality, the spread of ethnonationalism, and the normalization of cruelty are transforming the ways we make sense of social relations. To all this should be added shifts in the geopolitical landscape and an environmental crisis whose consequences we cannot quite yet fathom. 2) Incongruous because all these painful processes lead people to make seemingly irrational decisions, favoring passionate emotional whims over humane considerations and their actual wellbeing. It is not just that emotions determine, maybe more than ever before, how we assess and adapt to social changes, but customary patterns for enacting emotions like rage and kindness, anger and love, hate and empathy are in the process of dramatic change.
Needless to say, these forces are detrimental to the functioning of society, if nothing else because they are changing future prospects and leading to unheard-of pessimism about human progress. The more the sense of social responsibility wanes, the more we descend into despair and nihilism. Worse still, such dynamics both prevent us from sustained building upon past social accomplishments and deter us from imagining new horizons and the likelihood of new possibilities. In view of this situation, one of our main challenges is to dispute the cynicism of contemporary life. In the social climate we are living through, many people seem to have readily renounced the hope of making progress in emancipatory projects that once defined the aspirations of society. Indifference, selfishness, and the loss of a sense of possibility define the current moment and determine how we manage and counter the challenges thrown up in society.
Given present circumstances, hope can be a revolutionary force. Hope requires a different way of conceiving the past, present, and future. Hope helps question the sense of inevitability of history and the imposed limitations of dominant narratives. Hope, as Ernst Bloch noted, is a recognition that there is always an excess that cannot be contained by any one articulation, thus opening up the future to a wider range of perspectives. The aim of this issue of Open Cultural Studies is to ask what it means to speak of hope in the current conjuncture. Why can hope not compete with nihilism in these present times? How can a way of being in the world that fosters fatalism be defied? This issue seeks to offer suggestions as to how hope can be operationalized and, above all, how culture and the cultural critic can play a role in the endeavor to think through hope in imagining other futures and other ways of engaging with the world.
Cultural studies has always been about the promise and the hope of change. From its origins as a new type of intellectual work, it has been rooted in the belief that other, fairer, more humane futures are always possible. Cultural studies has always found optimism and confidence in the inescapable complexity and contingency of any social formation. Put another way, however uncertain the present situation, culture is a fundamental terrain of struggle and cultural critics need to work towards nurturing hope, calling into question the seeming inevitability of a process that is destroying social justice. In doing so, they will be laying the groundwork for a different understanding of history, one that enables people to imagine and accept other possibilities and reconstruct the context in ways that enable us to look towards the future with optimism. In a word, this issue aims to draw together a variety of scholarly and creative perspectives that illuminate the ways culture can foster hope and provide the basis for a more humane social order.
Scholarly essays that explore such critical issues are welcome. Considering that questions of hope can be analyzed from a great variety of perspectives, topics may include, but are not limited to:
· Narratives of hope. Old and new narrative strategies; genre analysis.
· Hope and the visual arts. Popular culture, science fiction, utopian and dystopian narratives. Other forms of cultural work.
· Hope and the entertainment industry; new industrial approaches to culture.
· Hope and the media. The new media landscape, social networks, misinformation and alternative facts, algorithmic culture.
· Cultural approaches to hope and the environmental crisis.
· Culture and hope in the face of authoritarianism, ethnonationalism, anti-intellectualism, the surveillance state, the militarization of society, and geopolitical shifts.
· Hope and the legacy of oppression: Diversity, intolerance, social movements, resistance, solidarity, social justice.
· Questions of culture, hope, and neoliberalism: antidemocratic forces, corporatization of society, consumerism, privatization, deregulation, globalization, inequality.
· Hope and technology: Emerging technologies, big data, artificial intelligence, virtual reality.
· Theorization of the relations between culture, hope, and contextually relevant concepts like nostalgia, ethics, democracy, affect, care, socialism, nostalgia, religion, etc.

HOW TO SUBMIT

Submissions will be collected from January 1 to April 30, 2025 via the online submission system at https://www.editorialmanager.com/culture/

Choose “Research Article: Challenging Nihilism" as the article type.

Before submission, authors should carefully read the Instructions for Authors, available at
https://www.degruyter.com/publication/journal_key/CULTURE/downloadAsset/CULTURE_Instruction%20for%20Authors.pdf

All contributions will undergo critical peer review before being accepted for publication.

As a general rule, publication costs should be covered by Article Publishing Charges (APC); that is, be defrayed by the authors, their affiliated institutions, funders or sponsors. Authors without access to publishing funds are encouraged to discuss potential discounts or waivers with the journal’s Managing Editor, Katarzyna Tempczyk (katarzyna.tempczyk@degruyter.com), before submitting their manuscript.

Further questions about this thematic issue can be sent to Juan A. Tarancón (juantar@unizar.es). In case of technical problems with submission, please write to AssistantManagingEditor@degruyter.com

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