CFP + Submissions :: Concrete

Issue 17 Call for Papers:

The Interview Issue

REVISED DEADLINE: 8 OCTOBER 2023

Deadline: 27 August 2023

To be published December 2023

NANO: New American Notes Online welcomes brief interviews of less than 5,000 words for Issue 17.

NANO invites a variety of interview types for issue 17: unscripted, critical, short, long, filmed, email, on-the-record, off-the-record, phone, Zoom, traditional, and non-traditional—these are just a few of the types available for interviewers. While we encourage submitters to review some of the seventeen interviews that NANO has published, we would like potential authors to break new ground and search for topics and interviewees that may not have been given a voice in the past.

Please note:

Interviews must be original. They may not be previously published in part or whole.
NANO is also accepting scholarly articles about the interview as a genre or object.
While scholarly articles about interviews may be considered for peer-review, interviews will not be sent to peer review; they will be edited. See next point.
Each interview will be reviewed for fit and writing quality; final decisions for acceptances, revisions, and edits will be made by NANO's editorial team. This special issue uses a different process than NANO's scholarly article special issues; Issue 17's process is a blind single-review (not a double-blind peer review process). The designations are: reject, accept with revisions, accept.

Interviews may utilize multimedia to accentuate an idea, underscore the thesis, or emphasize the human aspect of the interview. Such multimedia may consist of images, film, sound, graphics, data sets, or digital humanities tools—among other possibilities. In general, NANO interviews should be written to appeal to a non-specialist, international audience; thus, jargon and insider/outsider perspectives should be avoided.

Interviewee and interviewer teams may come from any discipline/field. The following areas of interest are meant as suggestions:

Art (visual and performative)
Literature
Film
Languages
Philosophy
Cultural Studies
Digital Humanities
Music
Identity Studies
Race Studies
Gender Studies
Affect Studies
Immigration/Migration Studies
Theory and Practice
Religion
Class
Economics
Ideology
Ethics
Scholarly articles about interviews

[This is a partial and incomplete list]

Please email NANO's editor if you would like to pitch an interview idea: Sean Scanlan: [email protected]

Please keep in mind these important guidelines before submitting to the form (see upper left of this page):

— NANO uses modified MLA citation style. Please refer to our style guide here.

— NANO does not use endnotes or footnotes, but we do use MLA-style works cited. Sources must be indicated via an in-text parenthetical citation.

— Interviews should be less than 5,000 words, not including works cited.

— Authors must obtain necessary multimedia copyright permissions before submitting.

— Manuscript: 12 point font, double spaced, author’s name removed

— Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

— Please submit via our online submission form.

NANO is a multimodal journal. Therefore, we encourage submissions that include images, sound, video, data sets, or digital tools in support of a written argument. The multimodal components of the essay must be owned or licensed by the author, come from the public domain, or fall within reasonable fair use (see Stanford University Libraries’ Copyright & Fair Use site, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/ and the U.S. Copyright Office’s Fair Use site, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html for more information). NANO’s Copyright and Permissions information is on the top of this page.

For questions about submissions, queries, video, audio, or image usage, please contact: [email protected] or [email protected].

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

JUST ANNOUNCED:

Issue 16 Call for Papers

REVISED DEADLINE: FRIDAY, 25 SEPTEMBER 2020

~~DEADLINE: FRIDAY, 31 JULY 2020~~

Special Issue: “This is What Makes Us Girls”: Gender, Genre, and Popular Music

Guest Editors: Erin Kappeler and Ryan Tracy

“This is What Makes Us Girls,” the last track of Lana Del Rey’s 2011 debut album Born to Die, offers a theory about the nature of coming-of-age femininity. The song imagines teenage sisterhood as a torsion between loyalty and betrayal; a modality of friendship in which an ethos of “putting love first” undoes the bonds of support that sustain young women through the trials of youth. Del Rey’s flippant yet comforting refrain, “Don’t cry about it. It’s all gonna happen,” might be perceived as a betrayal of more sanguine discourses on “girl power” and feminist sisterhood. Yet Del Rey’s provocation also opens up space for affirming feminine (and perhaps feminist) agency while keeping peer-to-peer conflict and romantic passion closer to the center of the definition of “real life” for girls.

Taking its cue from Del Rey’s bad girls pop anthem, this special issue of NANO: New American Notes Online will explore pop artists who, like Del Rey, theorize gender, deploying and redeploying the normative and transformative functions of genre. What can the genre of pop music—and the genres within pop music—teach us about genres of femininity and masculinity in our current moment? How might artists like Del Rey, Janelle Monáe, Mitski, King Princess, Dolly Parton, or RuPaul help us to think through Andrea Long Chu’s recent provocation that “everyone is female, and everyone hates it”? Is popular music a utopian site for embracing what philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter has called “our collective agency and authorship of our genres of human being”? Or does the music industry’s mode of racialized and patriarchal appropriation, commodification, and capitalization continue to threaten popular music’s potential to generate images of femininity that are socially equitable and just? Furthermore, what happens to representations of gender in American popular music when they spill over the borders of place, nation, and era? In what ways do pop artists function as arbiters of gender? And how might competing definitions of femininity betray each other across the genre of pop music?

This issue welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to gender, genre, and pop music, including but not limited to the following:

• affect studies and pop music

• the politics of desire

• influence, citation, affiliation, intertextuality

• sentiment

• race and racialization

• transgender studies

• masculinity studies

• queer theory

• cultural appropriation

• disavowals of and reinvestments in feminism

• new media/social media

• nationalism and patriotism

• disability studies/crip theory

• #MeToo and the recording industry

• class and classism

• performers as commodities

• postcolonial and decolonial theory

• convention and originality

• iterability, citationality, performativity

• disidentifications

Please direct questions to the special issue editors: Erin Kappeler, Tulane University [[email protected]] and Ryan Tracy, CUNY Graduate Center [[email protected]].

NANO is a multimodal journal. Therefore, we encourage submissions that include images, sound, video, data sets, or digital tools in support of a written argument. The multimodal components of the essay must be owned or licensed by the author, come from the public domain, or fall within reasonable fair use (see Stanford University Libraries’ Copyright & Fair Use site, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/ and the U.S. Copyright Office’s Fair Use site, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html for more information). NANO’s Copyright and Permissions information is on the top left of this page.

For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact: [email protected].

NANO uses modified 8th Edition MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style. See: https://nanocrit.com/Submissions/Submission-Guidelines

Please use the Submission Form on top left of this page.

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

• Revised Submission deadline: 25 SEPTEMBER 2020

• Publication: Late Winter 2020

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

*Image: RuPaul image from Muppet Wiki; Ariana Grande screenshot from “Don’t Call me Angel,” YouTube; Conchita Wurst image from Express

REVISED DEADLINE:

Issue 15 Call for Papers

~~DEADLINE: THURSDAY, JANUARY 31, 2019~~

REVISED DEADLINE: FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 2019

Special Issue: Twin Peaks: The Return

Guest Editors: Matt Miller and Matthew Lau

This special issue of NANO will explore the significance of the recently released third season of the seminal television show, Twin Peaks. Controversial from the outset and divisive to fans and critics alike, the new Twin Peaks (2017) is emerging as perhaps even more radical and important than the original series (1990-1991). The original Twin Peaks is often considered the first cult television show that spawned intensive fan followings in the emergent world of the web, and the immense catalogue of paratexts and influences the series has inspired since has never been fully tabulated. As a central work of American surrealism, a universe of oddities continues to find Twin Peaks’s orbit.

It is challenging even to define the latest Twin Peaks season. Creator David Lynch has referred to it as an 18-part feature film, and it has been presented on the big screen as a film at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and other venues. While Twin Peaks has always played with the tricks and tropes of genre television, especially detective fiction and soap operas, it has also pushed beyond the conventional limits of television and transgressed and exploded expectations. Season three of Twin Peaks is amorphous both in terms of its media formations and its constantly shifting tableaux of symbols and themes. It is an origin myth and tale of apocalypse, a profound questioning of the nature of good and evil, a veritable dictionary of post-modernity, a slow-moving narrative painting, a testament to the strength of a single woman, a series of elegies for actors and actresses who died between seasons two and three, a retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey, a cosmic dream, and a forum for music videos. Co-writer Mark Frost has extended its world back to ancient Sumerian mythology, but season three of Twin Peaks also tracks the pulse of the moment with major statements on the current opioid crisis and the puzzling reversal of the FBI as an institution being looked to for salvation by a significant portion of the American left.

This issue welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to season three of Twin Peaks, including but not limited to the following:

• Twin Peaks as genre fiction (for example, science fiction, detective fiction, horror, and soap operas)
• Examinations of use of artistic devices such as symbolism, allegory, and parallelism
• Media transformations and adaptions of season three 
• Twin Peaks fandom in all its forms
• Use of music in Twin Peaks (its score, Roadhouse musical interludes, and atmospheric effects)
• Authority in Twin Peaks, including the role of Lynch’s refusals.
• Twin Peaks and its literary and media paratexts (especially The Final Dossier)
• Reception of season three of Twin Peaks by the television and film industry
• Explorations of intertextuality in Twin Peaks, season three (with film, painting, music, etc.)
• Explorations of gender and feminist critique
• Examinations of the hero’s journey and critique of heroism 
• Religious vision and its disguises in season three
• Philosophical implications of Twin Peaks, season three
• The origins of Twin Peaks in Lynch’s other works, including not only his films but his drawings, paintings, writings, short films, 
and other proto-works

Please direct questions to the special issue editors: Matt Miller, Yeshiva University [[email protected]] and Matthew Lau, Queensborough Community College (The City University of New York) [[email protected]].

For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: [email protected].

NANO uses modified 8th Edition MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style. See: https://nanocrit.com/Submissions/Submission-Guidelines

Please use the Submission Form on top left of this page.

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:
• Submission deadline: January 31, 2019
• Publication: spring/summer 2019

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

*Image: Screenshot from Twin Peaks, Season 3, Episode 8, 2017.

Issue 14 Call for Papers

DEADLINE: FRIDAY, MAY 15, 2018

Special Issue: Captivity Narratives Then and Now: Gender, Race, and the Captive in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century American Literature and Culture

Guest Editor: Megan Behrent

Captivity is everywhere in the texts and popular culture of the twentieth- and twenty-first-centuries—from headline grabbing icons of captivity such as Patty Hearst and Jessica Lynch to the growth of captivity-themed popular television such as Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Orange is the New Black, and The Handmaid’s Tale. In its modern iterations, captivity serves to both reify and defy the social construction of race, gender, and national identity endemic to early expressions of the genre.

But, early captivity narratives set the stage for these modern examples. In fact, there is a large body of scholarship from Nancy Armstong, Rebecca Blevins Faery, Christopher Castiglia, Cathy Rex, Gordon Sayre, and Susan Scheckel among others, attesting to the cultural and ideological role that seventeenth-century captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson’s ur-text have played in the development of an imagined national community. These early narratives also established one of the most consistent tropes of the genre: the use of white female bodies “as guardians of the boundaries of race to serve the territorial and political purposes of white men and their claim to dominance,” (Faery) or to create what Lauren Berlant has called a “national symbolic.”

This NANO special issue seeks to explore this complex legacy by inviting multimodal papers that examine tropes of captivity in 20^th and 21^st century culture. More specifically, we seek papers that explore the legacy of the captivity narrative genre, particularly its modern, postmodern, and contemporary permutations. This issue seeks to determine the extent to which narratives of captives, particularly those written by women, persist and define American literature and culture.

This issue of NANO welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to captivity narratives, including but not limited to the following:

the various forms of captivity (e.g., lawful imprisonment, kidnapping, mental or physical illness, abuse, sex trafficking, slavery) in women’s narratives of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries
captivity narratives in modern and contemporary media (women’s magazines, television, film, graphic novels, video games)
captivity narratives, the nation & nationalism, particularly during times of war of political conflict
captivity narratives and the construction of gender and the domestic sphere
captivity narratives, race, and the construction of the other
the use of writing and narrative as therapy to cope with the trauma of captivity
the various coping strategies women have used to deal with captivity in different times and places
social valuations of transculturation in the narratives of captive women, including but not limited to transatlantic, trans-Caribbean, and other border-crossing captivities
voyeurism and the male gaze in women’s captivity narratives

Please direct questions to the special issue editor: Megan Behrent ([email protected]).

For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: [email protected].

NANO uses modified 8th Edition MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style. See: https://nanocrit.com/Submissions/Submission-Guidelines

Please use the Submission Form on top left of this page.

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

Submission deadline: May 15, 2018
Pre-production begins June, 2018
Publication: fall 2018

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

*Image: Coverly-Rowlandson Woodcut from “Bottom Up: Section III: Captivity.” Edited by James N. Green and Wendy Woloson. The Michael Zinman Collection of Early American Imprints, The Library Company of Philadelphia, 2004. www.librarycompany.org/zinman/.

Issue 13 Call for Papers

DEADLINE: December 2, 2017

REVISED DEADLINE: FRIDAY, JANUARY 12, 2018

Special Issue: The Anthropocene

Guest Editors: Kyle Wiggins and Brandon Krieg

In the Anthropocene–our geological present defined by humans as the dominant, destructive force in the natural world–calamity is familiar. As Jeremy Davies puts it in The Birth of the Anthropocene, “Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, rocks, plants, and animals are experiencing changes great enough to mark the ending of one epoch and the beginning of another” (2). We have entered a moment of environmental crisis, yet the concept of “Anthropocene” continues to be used in “diverse, contested, and even incompatible ways” and its influence on humanism and the humanities remains much debated (6).

For McKenzie Wark, the Anthropocene “is a series of metabolic rifts, where one molecule after another is extracted by labor and technique to make things for humans, but the waste products don’t return so that the cycle can renew itself again. The soil depletes, the seas recede, the climate alters, the gyre widens: a world on fire” (Molecular Red, xiv). Ironically, Wark sees opportunity in this unsettling. He argues that this age of “carbon liberation” invites a reorganization of time and material resources, one that might generate an endurable relationship between human labor and nature. Jane Bennett sees a related opportunity in the Anthropocene to extend our conception of material geology to include human bodies, noting that humans “are made of the same elements as is the planet,” and that, “Like wind or river, human individuals and groups are geologic forces that can alter the planet in countless and, as the concept of the Anthropocene marks, game-changing ways” (“Making the Geologic Now”). Bennett proposes an ethic of “self” as coextensive with other geologic material as crucial to promoting human survival: “For me, one of the effects of a heightened awareness of the interpenetration of the human and ahuman geologic is that it stretches my definition of ‘self’-interest to include the flourishing of the complex system of bio-geologic processes. This enriched understanding of ‘self’ would then, I hope, enable a more extended pursuit of our conatus, the endeavor to persist in being.” In contrast, in a most apocalyptic take, Roy Scranton argues that the “biggest problem we face” in the era of climate change “is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead” (“Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene”). Nothing can rescue our doomed species. The time has come to rethink what it means to be human on a planet imperiled by human presence.

The aim of this NANO special issue is to explore what shape this new humanism is taking and how literature, film, art, philosophy–really the breadth of the humanities–are responding to the Anthropocene’s challenges. What does art made for a dying planet look like? Do artists, intellectuals, and critics see our species as moribund? What moral, ethical, and political challenges face citizens of the Anthropocene? What stories do we tell ourselves about civilization’s (inevitable) end? What value or purpose do such tales have? Can a new humanism save us?

This issue of NANO welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to the Anthropocene, including but not limited to the following:

art and the Anthropocene
philosophy and carbon consumption
the rhetoric of “sustainability” and “green living” in American consumerism
ecocriticism, ecopoetics, and the Anthropocene
narratives of resource depletion
resetting civilization: the Anthropocene’s possibilities for renewal
climate change and the American novel
the future of criticism in the age of the Anthropocene
extinction anxiety and popular culture
“prepper” and aftermath/cataclysm fiction
ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene
teleology, the apocalypse, and the environmental end-game
new worlds: science fiction stories of species relocation
charting time in the Anthropocene
waste, wreckage, and industrial decay
posthumanism and the Anthropocene
the Anthropocene in the age of Trump

Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Kyle Wiggins [[email protected]] and Brandon Krieg [[email protected]].

For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: [email protected].

NANO uses modified 8th Edition MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style. See NANO’s Submission page for more information.

Please use the Submission Form on the top left of this page.

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

Submission deadline: JANUARY 12, 2018
Pre-production begins February, 2018
Publication: Spring 2018

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

*Image: Crosetto, Paolo. Cava abbandonata amiantifera de Balangero, Torino, Italia. 2006. Wikimedia Commons. JPEG.

Issue 12

NEW DEADLINE: March 5, 2017

Special Issue: Star Wars: The Force Awakens: Narrative, Characters, Media, and Event

Guest Editors: Jason W. Ellis, Alan Lovegreen, and Sean Scanlan

This thing [Star Wars] communicates. It is in a language that is talking to young people today, and that’s marvelous.

—Joseph Campbell in conversation with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (1988)

There are certainly many more themes in The Force Awakens that speak to us, and help us to learn more about these characters and what makes them tick.

—Dan Zehr, “Studying Skywalkers” column on starwars.com (May 18, 2016)

It is the aim of this special issue of NANO to address the significance of the latest installment of Star Wars by exploring its narrative, characters, media, and event. Across nearly four decades, audiences spanning generations have experienced Star Wars through films, television programs, books, video games, special events such as the annual “celebrations,” and other storytelling media, including action figures and LEGO. Following Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm, George Lucas’ production company, audiences experienced a new transmedia event and a continuation of the old stories with the release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens in 2015. Joseph Campbell’s earlier observations about the first film raises new questions that deserve to be answered about the latest: How does this new film communicate? What language does it use? And, to whom is it speaking?

One way to approach these issues of communication and language is through the convergence of the film’s narrative and characters, especially how the transmission of this convergence gets revealed through a variety of media as an event. For example, how does the film’s narrative respond to, continue, and challenge those that it follows? And what about the cast of characters—some returning and some new? What do these characters and their performance of the narrative have to say about the here-and-now as well as the past? Of course, the narrative is told through media, which includes different film technologies, digital distribution, DVD and Blu-Ray discs, websites, video games, and apps. And stepping back for a larger perspective, the release of the film and its transmedia supporting elements inform The Force Awakens as an event, in part orchestrated by Disney/Lucasfilm, and in part connected to contemporary events, including #oscarssowhite, #womeninfilm, and #paygap. Furthermore, how does its event(s) relate to those of the past, including specifically those centered on the release of the earlier films and subsequent events awakening fans’ nostalgic enthusiasm. The Force Awakens’ considerable box office performance and tie-in successes signal how significant this film (and its progenitors) is, and it is the aim of this special issue to explore the promise and pitfalls of its cultural influence.

This issue welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring topics relating to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, including but not limited to the following:

transmedia storytelling and The Force Awakens (including “Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens” publications, such as Chuck Wendig’s novel, Star Wars: Aftermath, and comic books Star Wars: Shattered Empire and Star Wars: Poe Dameron
media transformation and adaptation (e.g., comparing the film with Alan Dean Foster’s novelization)
materiality and The Force Awakens (e.g., LEGO, play, and collecting)
Star Wars fandom and cosplay
Star Wars reference materials and publications
starwars.com and the official Star Wars app
Star Wars videogames including LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars Battlefront, and the now defunct Disney Infinity tie-ins
Jakku Spy VR experience
Star Wars Celebration and ComicCon special events
social and political movements’ coinciding/connecting with The Force Awakens
the hero’s journey and the heroes’ journeys
movement and storytelling
vehicles as characters
nostalgia and familiarity
inclusive casting/characters
droids and aliens
hidden bodies/cgi characters (e.g., Maz Kanata/ Lupita Nyong’o and Captain Phasma/Gwendoline Christie)
race and gender in The Force Awakens
terrorism, insurgency, war, and militarism
surveillance

Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Jason W. Ellis [[email protected]], Alan Lovegreen [[email protected]], and Sean Scanlan [[email protected]].

NANO is a multimodal journal. Therefore, we encourage submissions that include images, sound, or video in support of a written argument. These multimodal components may consist of objects and data sets that go beyond traditional media. The multimodal components of the essay must be owned or licensed by the author, come from the public domain, or fall within reasonable fair use (see Stanford University Libraries’ Copyright & Fair Use site, http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/ and the U.S. Copyright Office’s Fair Use site, http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html for more information. NANO’s Fair Use Statement is available on its submission page, http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/).

For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: [email protected].

NANO uses modified MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style.

Submission style guidelines: http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/style-guide-nano/

Submission form: http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/submission-form-page-nano1

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 150-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

Submission deadline: March 5, 2017
Complete comments and peer review June 2017
Pre-production begins August 2017

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

*Image by Jason W. Ellis

Call for Papers: Issue 11

DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 11, 2016

Special Issue: Economies of the Gift in an Age of Austerity

Gift exchange is odd, even paradoxical. Giving requires calculation; one must consider the recipient’s need and one’s capacities. And, after the gift is given, expectation sets in. Was it well received? Will it be reciprocated? As many have noted, the gift, though ostensibly selfless, is very much an interested activity. All the calculations leading up to and following a gift exchange reveal the rules that govern a society, even the tacit ones. The gift is an object and a process. The gift moves, and it also—as a keepsake or memorial—stays put. The gift is personal, social, and cosmic.

Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that “the only gift is a gift of self.” For him, the gift is about affinity and recognition: “The gift, to be true, must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.” Where for Emerson the gift is about love, for Marcel Mauss, the gift is about the circulation of social power. The gift invites prolific interpretation so much so that, for Georges Bataille, the gift itself is the sign of a general economy of expenditure in which excesses of wealth and energy are either sacrificed in the potlatch of war or formed into art. For Lewis Hyde, gift exchange is the model of all creative work; generosity of spirit is the artist’s permission to create, and that work is the artist’s gift. Jacques Derrida in his later years finds that the gift is about time: when one gives a gift, one gives the time in which the gift circulates—the delay in which to ponder the reception or to expect the return gift. Working in a contrary direction, Anne Carson and Maurice Godelier understand giving as a form of keeping. Carson suggests that the role of the poet is historically one of “memorable naming,” that the artist’s gift is memory. Godelier argues that, despite Mauss’s emphasis on circulation, many gifts are “inalienable.” They are not given into circulation but into sequestration, and social orders depend upon restricting the circulation of gifts we mark as sacred. More recently, feminist theorists such as Tracy McNulty and Rosalyn Diprose have explored ways in which the gift and generosity negotiate relations between the self and culturally different others.

With so many masks, the gift can be found in many exchanges. In what ways is the gift interested or disinterested in some form of compensation, as in the Marshall Plan, or the Koch brothers’ support of PBS and NPR programming? How is the gift functioning as an alternative to traditional capital campaigns on sites like GoFundMe.com? How is it a gift of self, as in the vulnerability and challenge in Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece? When is it about connection and communication, as in Marina Abramovic’s Silent Sitting? Are gifts like Christo and Jean Claude’s self-funded installations Gates and Running Fence somehow different in meaning from other public artworks? In what sense is the gift’s creation of a community also an exclusion, as we might see in various acts of patronage, such as Ezra Pound’s support of writers aligned with his own aesthetic agendas? To what extent does Mauss’s notion of giving as display of wealth live on in Gatsby’s parties or Musk’s SpaceX? Does the gift as expenditure appear in open-software movements, Sweden’s Pirate Party? What might be the role of the gift and related rituals of hospitality in the context of current debates about immigration and the refugee crisis?

This issue welcomes multimodal essays up to 4,000 words (excluding works cited) exploring such topics as gifts and:

literature and/or poetry
indebtedness
inspiration and talent
re-gifting and revenge
consumer culture
strangers/refugees
contagion/disease
death
gender
ethics
medical technologies (e.g., organ donation, fertility therapies, genetics)
social media
labor (e.g., unpaid/under-compensated labor, internships, academic publishing, the art market)
intellectual property and information sharing
Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Jennie Stearns [[email protected]] and J.P. Craig [[email protected]]. For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: [email protected]. NANO uses modified MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style.

Submission style guidelines: http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/style-guide-nano/

Submission form: http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/submission-form-page-nano1

Keywords and abstract: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords and a 250-word abstract to accompany their submission.

Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

Submission deadline: November 11, 2016

Pre-production begins January 2017

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

*Image: Detail of Pandora by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1871. Source: The Rossetti Archive

Call for Papers: Issue 10

Deadline: 3 April 2016

Special Issue: Originality in a Digital Culture

Originality as an ideal has occupied an august position in American cultural history, from Emerson’s injunction to “[N]ever imitate” to Apple’s “Think different” campaign. Yet the very proliferation of coffee mugs, bumper stickers, fridge magnets, and tablet cases bearing Emerson’s words and Apple’s slogan shows that not only objects but even the ideas they bear can be disseminated en masse. And in a digital culture in which information can be shared more quickly, easily, and cheaply every day, how do we—scholars, teachers, critics, readers—conceive of originality and theorize its value?

In popular practices of sharing, information is disseminated as widely as possible through networks of others. Influence can be quantified according to measures such as the number of likes, shares, reposts, retweets, subscriptions, downloads, and favorites. Scholarship has an analogous statistical method: tracking the number of citations and downloads of published scholarship.

But while scholarship relies on carefully edited systems of attribution, social media tends to embrace promiscuity. What are the consequences of wide-ranging, even haphazard sharing practices on the value of original work as commodity? If, as Stewart Brand once stated and others have adopted as a rallying cry, “Information wants to be free,” what becomes of the practice of original research? (Less quoted is Brand’s preceding line: “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.”) Recent disputes with Amazon over e-book prices prompted a letter of protest from nearly a thousand authors, ranging from Stephen Colbert to Mary Karr to Stephen King. Writers have skin in this game, after all—as novelist Jonathan Franzen writes, “When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.”

Those of us who teach must also reflect on these issues and how they inform our praxis. As students outsource the maintenance of content knowledge to the cloud, how do we revise our pedagogical strategies, either to adapt to this shift in students’ intellectual habits, or to ameliorate its effects? How do we teach originality (as both skill and ethos) to students unaccustomed to developing ideas in solitude?

In this special issue, we seek critical reflections or multimodal notes (up to 3,500 words) that sketch new ways of understanding originality in contemporary print and digital culture. Topics may include, but are not limited to, originality and its relationship to the following:

inspiration in collaborative relationships
historical views of collaboration and/or intellectual independence
the ethics of attribution in a collaborative environment
ownership of shared content
anonymity and legality
Snapchat, Yik Yak, and other evanescent media
meme generators
fan fiction
human tissue research and gene patenting
pedagogical emphases on research vs. the generation of original ideas
appropriation vs. plagiarism
open-access journals and research funding
open-source software and authorship
the Amazon-Hachette author dispute
valuations of research
intellectual property, publication, and royalties
Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Tara Robbins Fee [[email protected]] and Samuel B. Fee [[email protected]]. For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: [email protected]. NANO uses modified MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style.

Submission style guidelines: http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/style-guide-nano/

Keywords: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords to accompany their submission.

Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

April 3, 2016: Submission deadline
May 2016: Complete comments and peer review
June 2016: Begin pre-production

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Call for Papers: Issue 9

Submission Deadline July 19, 2015

Special Issue: Intoxication

Intoxication is the red-headed stepchild of social and academic discourse about psychoactive substance use. Whether framed as use, misuse, or abuse, intoxication reveals dangerous human desires for social disengagement, escape, or pleasure. Even as we experience and pursue what Lee Stringer refers to as “sprees of abandon,” our acts of intoxication are fraught with social tensions related to harm to the self, others, and the community. By linking intoxication with outcomes such as addiction, disease, incarceration, and death, we rarely look at intoxication as a valuable end in itself. Yet intoxication offers a tantalizing paradox: what looks like chaos, insanity, or simply a waste of time from the outside can feel like order, transcendence, or inspiration from the inside. The etymological origins of the term itself reflect the blurred boundaries between poison and elixir. As a point between experience and perception, interiority and exteriority, pleasure and pain, and acceptance and censure, intoxication is not simply a false consciousness to be discarded.

This issue of NANO seeks to move critical attention beyond one-dimensional discourses that frame intoxication in terms of criminality, disease, or excessive indulgence. NANO’s guest editors hope to inspire a multi- and interdisciplinary conversation about the possibilities and realities of intoxication that have been less explored in academic and public discourse. Further, we invite contributions that uncouple intoxication from what has been an almost-essentialist relationship with addiction. In particular, we seek contributions that examine or theorize intoxication from new or unusual perspectives.

In a period of decriminalization and changing public policy, how might we re-conceptualize intoxication to better understand its attraction, value, and expressions? What are the critical aspects of intoxication overlooked in the social construction of these experiences? What might we discover about intoxication if it were understood as a performance, an embodiment of subjectivity, or a sanctioned way of transcending social boundaries?

In this special issue, we seek critical reflections or multimodal notes (up to 3,500 words) that sketch new ways of understanding intoxication. Topics may include, but are not limited to, intoxication as:

social or political activity
spiritual ecstasy
cultural expression
transgression
intentional hedonism
self-medication
consumerism
love
protest
truth-seeking
therapy
Direct questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Alexine Fleck [email protected] and Ingrid Walker [email protected]. For questions about video, audio, or image usage, please contact NANO: [email protected]. NANO uses modified MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style.

Submission style guidelines: http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/style-guide-nano/

Keywords: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords to accompany their submission.

Revised Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

July 19, 2015: Submission deadline
October 2015: Comments and peer review complete
November-December 2015: Pre-production
We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Call for Papers: Issue 8

Submission Deadline March 15, 2014

Special Issue: Corporations and Culture

Power, in Case’s world, meant corporate power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shape the course of human history, had transcended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality. You couldn’t kill a zaibatsu by assassinating a dozen key executives; there were others waiting to step up the ladder, assume the vacated position, access the vast banks of corporate memory.

—William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)

The Court has thus rejected the argument that political speech of corporations or other associations should be treated differently under the First Amendment simply because such associations are not ‘natural persons...’

—Justice Anthony Kennedy, Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission (2010)

Speaking in two of the idioms through which corporations are most commonly articulated—the dystopian imagination and legal jurisprudence—Gibson and Justice Kennedy each suggest ways the corporation exceeds those discourses. The corporation is an evolutionary advance that even science fiction finds fantastical; it is something other than a person which can nonetheless speak like a person, even if it can’t die as one. The corporation seems to be omnipresent but elusive, structurally ubiquitous but materially ungraspable. It operates across a wide array of discourses and subject fields without being delimited by any of the spaces it inhabits.

This special issue of NANO seeks new understandings of the relationship between corporations and culture. Given the difficulties of conceptualizing the corporation, what new possibilities exist for art, narrative, activism, theory, criticism, or quotidian practice to produce fresh encounters with particular corporations or the corporation broadly speaking? What intersections and modes of relation between corporations and culture are thinkable in the present? What possible valences of the “and” in the title of this special issue—corporations vs. culture, corporations as culture, corporations within culture, corporations constraining or dictating or underwriting culture—might offer productive routes for analyzing the ways corporations operate?

Topics of particular interest include the following:

• The corporation and embodiment: how does the unified collective identity of the corporation reflect or intersect with postmodern understandings of the human self? If, as Walter Benn Michaels has argued, thinking of the corporate form requires thinking through the human form, how have shifting notions of humanity and posthumanity affected the possibilities for thinking the corporation? How are ideological understandings of the body shifting to make sense of corporate personhood, and how is corporate personhood shifting our sense of embodiment?

• The corporation and hegemony: when the primary means of mass communication, transmission, and distribution are with very few exceptions owned by corporate entities, what possibilities exist to critique, resist, or reshape the corporation within American culture? Academics and activists tend to imagine either that corporations encompass and constrain culture or that they are subject to resistance and critique from outside cultural forces, but what happens if and when corporations and culture are coterminous? Do particularly “corporate” mass cultural forms (top 40 radio, summer blockbusters, etc.) hold any interesting potential to generate critical traction on or against the corporations in which they are enmeshed? Does the corporation’s relationship to capital mean a necessarily sympathetic relationship to late capitalist hegemony, or is the corporate form itself potentially benign or counterhegemonic?

• The corporation and representation: what do aesthetic and narrative representations tell us about the contours of the corporation in the American imagination? How might conversations about aesthetic and narrative representations of the corporation be informed by considering the forms of legal and political representation to which the corporation is now entitled? What are the limits to representing the corporation, and what lies beyond those limits?

We seek critical reports or multimodal notes (up to 3,500 words) that offer compelling ways of approaching these questions. Other potential topics can include, but are not limited to:

• the corporation before the 20th century

• corporations and corporate law outside the United States

• corporations and (post)colonialism

• genealogies of legal interpretations of the corporation

• treatments of corporations in visual art or graphic design

• norms and “corporate culture”

• branding and corporate aesthetics

• the process of incorporation

• the corporation from the inside; management perspectives

Direct submissions and any questions to the Special Issue co-editors: Jeffrey Gonzalez (Borough of Manhattan Community College; [email protected]) and Adam Haley (Penn State University; [email protected]).

Keywords: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords to accompany their submission.

Schedule: Revised deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

• March 15, 2015: submission deadline
• May 2015: Complete comments and peer review
• June 2015: Begin pre-production

NANO uses MLA (Modern Language Association) formatting and style.

Style Guidelines: http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/style-guide-nano/

For information on images, video, sound, copyright, and permissions, visit:

http://www.nanocrit.com/submissions-information/

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

www.nanocrit.com

Call for Papers: Issue 7

Submission deadline: 22 September 2014

Special Issue: The Aesthetics of Trash

This is why the properly aesthetic attitude of the radical ecologist is not that of admiring or longing for a pristine nature of virgin forests and clear sky, but rather of accepting waste as such, of discovering the aesthetic potential of waste, of decay, of the inertia of rotten material that serves no purpose.

— Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

This special issue of NANO begins with a question: in what new ways can trash and waste be acknowledged or conceptualized today?

Contemporary critics are eager to laud sustainability and to celebrate modern and postmodern arts and practices that make inventive use of the wastes of industrial production and the trash of consumer capitalism. These possibilities provide compelling ways to grasp late capitalist culture because it seems to offer a potential answer to an almost unimaginable problem: the ceaseless, ubiquitous, and disastrous production of waste. Some practices of collection and creative reuse in collage, collections, and found-object arts create stunning acknowledgements of the sheer and generally unacknowledged scale of waste (think, for instance, of work of artist Vic Munoz so well documented in the film Waste Land). However, endlessly celebratory emphases on isolated examples of re-use and recycling risk becoming profound disavowals, as if such reuse solved the problem and absolved us of responsibility. Put simply, is this celebration of arts or practices that incorporate or recycle waste simply making us feel better about waste problems that we cannot adequately solve by making some waste useful? Are there ways—through art—to acknowledge or conceptualize waste that would do more than celebrate such recuperations?

How can artists, philosophers, theorists, activists, and others produce new ways to acknowledge or envision events and phenomena like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, radioactive wastelands like Fukushima or Bikini Atoll, the animal wastes of feedlots, the water wastes of fracking, or the mountains of trash produced by consumer culture? How can such new conceptualizations address biopower, in which whole populations are controlled by the industrial production of waste or by the dumping of waste? How can new ideas address the ways in which some populations are themselves figured as potential waste or treated as waste, living out what Giorgio Agamben names “bare life.”

In this special issue, we seek critical reports or multimodal notes (up to 3,500 words) that sketch new strategies, modes, or practices of acknowledging waste.

Potential topics can include, but are not limited to:

Representations of waste
New trash aesthetics
Trash beyond the dialectic of recycling
Trash and populations
Mapping waste
Collections of trash and waste
Waste and the sublime
Populations and waste
Waste and abjection
Wastelands
Waste and power
Please refer to the sidebar on right side of this page for submission details and preferences. Direct any questions to the Special Issue co-editors: David Banash ([email protected]) and John DeGregorio ([email protected]).

Keywords: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords to accompany their submission.

Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

UPDATED DEADLINES:

22 Sept. 2014: Notes due
Nov. 2014: Comments and peer review complete
Dec. 2014: Pre-production begins
We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Call for Papers: Issue 6

Deadline: 28 June 2013

Special Issues: Cartography and Narratives

Building upon the extensive work on literary geography and cartographic cinema, a range of scholars in the humanities have endorsed mapping as a conceptual framework to improve our understating of narratives. Meanwhile, geographers and cartographers have recognized the importance of mapping personal stories and vernacular knowledge in order to better understand their contribution to the production of places. Examples of this fusion between maps and narratives range from GPS drawing to walking as a way of addressing the performative nature of mapping and from the political mapping of journeys and stories of illegal migrants crossing borders to mapping of feelings and emotions.

In order to further explore these relationships between maps and narratives, the commission on Art and Cartography of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) organized and held a workshopon these themes in Zurich, Switzerland, in June 2012.

We are now seeking academic and artistic contributions to be published in two special issues of two academic journals.

The first special issue will be published in NANO – New American Notes Online (issue 6) and co-edited by Laurene Vaughan and Matthew Bissen. NANO is a peer-reviewed online journal capable of publishing a full range of media and designed to encourage new interpretations and new possibilities. We are particularly interested in submissions that explore and articulate representations of place via narrative structures, especially the different ways such places and structures are recorded, communicated, and critiqued. We invite submissions that address forms of these two broad questions: how do narratives traverse through a “somewhere”? And, equally important, how are real and imagined places narrated? Acceptable formats, sizes and lengths are listed below.>

The second special issue will be published in The Cartographic Journal and co-edited by Sébastien Caquard and William Cartwright. It will compile a range of academic papers providing more of a cartographic perspective on the relationships between maps and narratives. Both of these issues will be cross-referenced to give more visibility to the publications as well as to support the interdisciplinary dimension of this project.

To view The Cartographic Journal CFP, click here

Keywords: Each author is asked to submit 5 keywords to accompany their submission.

The following are some suggestions: Cartography, Mapping, Place, Space, Non-Fiction, Memoir, Critical, Documentary, Film, Representation, Realism.

Schedule: Deadlines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO:

Jan. 28th, 2013: Call for papers
Jun. 28th, 2013: Deadline to submit full papers & works to
Aug. 30th, 2013: Comments sent by the editors to the authors
Oct. 18th, 2013: Final version of the papers & works submitted by the authors to NANO for the review process (For the detailed instructions to the authors, please refer to NANO's Submission page.)
Nov. 15th, 2013: End of the review process
Jan. 31st, 2014: Final versions of the selected papers sent by the authors to NANO
May 2014: Publication of the special issue in NANO
(This will coincide with the publication of work in the the parallel issue on Cartographies and Narrative in The Cartographic Journal)

Submission Guidelines: Format Guidelines concerning the special issue to be published in NANO: Papers with images –3,500 words maximum; 15 images maximum in high resolution—JPEG format preferred; Film Shorts –5-10 minutes maximum using .mov, .mp4, or .wmv formats (min res = 426 x 400, max res 1920 x 1080); Sound Essays – 10 minutes maximum using .mp3 encoding at bitrates above 256 kbit/s (preferred). Electronic submission preferred. Text submissions should be sent as an email attachment using MS Word (doc.) or Rich Text Format (.rtf). Refer to the list above for multimedia submissions. Do not include your name on the attached document, but do include your name and the title of your note in the body of your email. All manuscripts should follow MLA guidelines for format, in-text citations, and works cited. Please send any questions that you have to Laurene Vaughan and Matthew Bissen (email addresses above).

Copyright and Permissions: NANO expects that all submissions contain original work, not extracts or abridgements. Authors may use their NANO material in other publications provided that NANO is acknowledged as the original publisher. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for reproducing copyright text, art, video, or other media. As an academic, peer-reviewed journal, whose mission is education, Fair Use rules of copyright apply to NANO. Send questions to the editor.

We would appreciate it if you could inform us in February if you plan to submit a paper or work to one of these special issues. Please feel free to contact Sébastien Caquard or William Cartwright concerning The Cartographic Journal, and Laurene Vaughan and Matthew Bissen concerning NANO.

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions for these special issues.

Laurene Vaughan, Associate Professor Design and Communication, in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Melbourne; Neirenberg Chair, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University

Matthew Bissen, Architect; PhD candidate in Geography at The Graduate Center (City University of New York); Part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design and Hunter College

Sébastien Caquard, Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment; Concordia University, Montréal

William Cartwright, Professor of Cartography and Geographical Visualization, School of Mathematical and Geospatial Sciences; RMIT University, Melbourne

Call for Paper: Issue 5

Deadline: 1 October 2013

Special Theme: Digital Humanities, Public Humanities

Scholars, artists, and new media practitioners—including Sharon Daniel, Erik Loyer, Alex Juhasz, Liz Losh, Tara McPherson, Kathleen Woodward, Sarah Elwood, Margaret Rhee, Kim Christen, and Alan Liu—have recently investigated the intersections of digital methods with cultural criticism, demonstrating how investments in technologies and computation are not necessarily antithetical to investments in critical theory and social justice. Building on these investments, this special issue of NANO asks how, when, and for whom digital humanities is also public humanities, with particular attention to project-based research. For instance:

• Which digital humanities projects are currently engaging contemporary politics and social exclusion, under what assumptions, and through what mechanisms?

• How are these projects articulating relationships with their publics and community partners, and through what platforms and forms of collaboration?

• How are public humanities projects being preserved, circulated, and exhibited through digital methods? By whom? Using what protocols and technologies?

• Does public humanities have “data”? If so, then how is that data defined or structured? If not, then what are some concerns about data-driven research?

• What might the histories of digital humanities (however defined) learn from social justice activism, participatory research, context provision, and witnessing?

• How are building, making, or coding activities embedded in social justice initiatives?

Across text, image, audio, and video, authors are invited to individually or collaboratively submit notes or brief "reports" detailing projects that work across digital and public humanities, including projects that do not identify with either term.

For this issue, a note or "report" implies a submission that, at a minimum:

• Focuses on an existing project, which is in development or already live;

• Provides screengrabs, screencasts, or snapshots of that project and (where possible) treats them as evidence for an argument about the project;

• Intersects questions of computation and technology with questions of culture and social justice; and

• Articulates a narrative for the project, including (where applicable) its workflows, motivations, interventions, management, and partners.

Invited by NANO, the editor of this special issue is the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria, including Adèle Barclay, Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Jana Millar Usiskin, Stephen Ross, Jentery Sayers, and Katie Tanigawa.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: For this special issue, we are accepting submissions across text, image, video, and audio. All submissions should be submitted to both [email protected] and [email protected] by 11:59pm on 1 October 2013 in your time zone. The body of the email should include your name(s), your affiliation(s), the title of the submission, five keywords describing the submission, and media type(s) and format(s) for the submission. Where possible, the submissions should be attached to the email. Should a submission exceed the email attachment limit, then the body of the email should also include a URL for the submission. The URL should not be discoverable on the web (e.g., it should be behind a passcode-protected wall, in a private cyberlocker, or not visible by search engines). Do not include your name(s) in any file name. Your name(s) should only be included in the body of your email.

If your submission is in text, then it should not exceed 3500 words (DOC(X)s and RTFs are preferred). Up to 15 high-resolution (at least 600 dpi) images are permitted (JPEGs are preferred) per submission. Video submissions should be 3 to 10 minutes in duration (MOVs and MP4s are preferred; minimum resolution: 426 x 400; maximum resolution: 1920 x 1080). Audio essays should also be 3 to 10 minutes in duration (MP3s and WAVs are preferred, encoded at 256 kbit/s or higher). Both audio and video can also be embedded in any text submission (no more than 5 instances of embedded media per submission).

All submissions should follow MLA guidelines for format, in-text citations, and works cited. Please email any questions about the submission guidelines to [email protected] and [email protected].

SCHEDULE: Below is a tentative timeline for this special issue:

April 2013: Call for papers

October 1, 2013: Deadline for submissions to [email protected] and [email protected]

October 2, 2013: Peer review commences

November 1, 2013: Comments by the editors sent to all authors

November 25, 2013: Authors return final, revised submissions to the editors

December 1, 2013: End of peer review process

December 1, 2013: Final versions of selected submissions sent by editors to NANO

December 6, 2013: Publication in NANO

COPYRIGHT AND PERMISSIONS: NANO expects that all submissions contain original work, not extracts or abridgements. Authors may use their NANO material in other publications provided that NANO is acknowledged as the original publisher. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for reproducing copyright text, art, video, or other media. As an academic, peer-reviewed journal, whose mission is education, Fair Use rules of copyright apply to NANO. Please send any questions related to copyright and permissions to [email protected].

QUESTIONS: Please do not hesitate to contact the Maker Lab in the Humanities (special issue editor) at [email protected] with any questions or concerns about this special issue.

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions to this issue of NANO.

The Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria

maker.uvic.ca | [email protected]

Special Issue Editors: Adèle Barclay, Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, Jana Millar Usiskin, Stephen Ross, Jentery Sayers, and Katie Tanigawa

Call for Papers: Issue 4

New Deadline: 26 April 2013

Special Theme: Competition

Last July, the world witnessed Olympic athletes perform at their limits for personal and national glory. But, London restaurants also competed for customers. Journalists from around the globe vied for the best story. Fans, too, formed an important part of Olympic competition, even if they were thousands of miles away from the physical action. Fans may not have competed on the track, but fans did compete against the fans of opposing teams.

Why do we feel compelled to compete, to watch competitions, and to pick sides?

Even if NANO invokes the royal “we” to describe who witnessed this competitive macro event, we do so in light of its scale and scope: 200 nations will send representatives to the XXX Olympiad.

Competition is old and vast. Some even argue that it is innate. People compete for housing, jobs, mates, political office, airtime, downtime, the biggest toys, the newest ideas, and the right sneakers. This special issue of NANO seeks submissions on competition writ large.

Three question tracks:

1. Are we competitive because we are animals, or, do we become animals through competition?

2. What do people compete for, and how do they go about it? Is competition cruel, sublime, or something in between?

3. What is new in competition theory? What new competitions are out there? What are the counter-narratives to competition narratives?

A partial list of possible categories/topics:

Business: stock markets, markets, jobs, ethics, globalization, protectionism

Economics: capitalism, Marxism, socialism, oligopoly, monopoly, other systems

Education: getting into college, testing, grades, scholarships, awards, grants

Games: gambling, casinos, cards, board games, schoolyard/informal play

Politics: presidential races, primaries, polls, long shots, running mates, the democratic process, democracy, monarchy

Science: competition theory, game theory, evolution, survival of the fittest, biology, mating

Sports: team, individual, popular, unpopular, dangerous, violent, official, unofficial

Sporting Events: Olympics, Tour de France, World Cup, Super Bowl, World Series

See Submission Guidelines (right sidebar of this page).

Call for Papers: Issue 3

NEW Deadline: 30 April 2012

Special Theme: Evaluation, Critique, Prizes, and Peer Review

What are the best and newest methods for creating, evaluating, and disseminating scholarly and creative work? This question motivates the next issue of NANO. As digital formats help to foster new ways to share and critique written and artistic work, as more people try to squeeze through the narrowing bottleneck of publishing, approval, and jobs, something has to give, or at least change.

Four guiding questions:

1. How have changes to the university, to scholarly publishing, and to digital publishing formats changed peer review? Will changes to peer review change the nature and methods of scholarship?

2. How have creative contests in the fields of poetry, short story, painting, sculpture, or design changed in terms of evaluation, prizes, and prestige?

3. What can the humanities learn from other disciplines in terms of evaluation and peer review?

4. How can we solve some of the current problems?

Possible Topics:

print/book/online culture, peer review, online peer review, poetry contests, short story contests, art and design contests, evaluation, judging, Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize, merit, approval, assessment, credit, collaboration and/or single author, contribution, attribution, plagiarism/remixing, authority/media bias, tenure and promotion, grading, popular culture evaluation, online discussion, digital/paper editing, marking up, peer-to-peer review, external linking, criticism, critique, crowd-sourcing, advice, monograph, scholarly electronic editions, Google, Google Scholar, e-books, e-journals, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, research tools, research blogs, editing tools, archiving, coding, open access

See Submission Guidelines.

Call for Papers: Issue 2

Deadline: 17 July 2011

Special Theme: Mystery, the Unknown, Surprise

What’s up? What went down? How are you doing? What happened? We all want to know what is going on. We want knowledge. We want to solve the crime. We want to get it right. Yet, we also get a thrill from being in suspense. We like surprise parties and a good mystery novel. This issue of NANO is dedicated to both the sleuth and the mystery maker.

Three question clusters:

1. Is storytelling a way to solve a mystery? Is the lyric the poetic mystery par excellence? Isn’t the chief characteristic of drama the unraveling of an intricate mystery that we call plot? Is art more about finding one’s way or creating enigma? What is the relationship between mystery and surprise?

2. Why are mysteries so powerful? Think of the prevalence of crime shows on television. Entire bookstores are dedicated just to mystery novels. Is there a business/profit angle to mystery? What might neuroscience say about the desire to seek answers to vexing questions? Are we hard-wired to be in mystery, or, are we hard-wired to figure out mysteries? And where does pleasure and desire enter into the equation?

3. The unknown and the future seem closely connected, but is the unknown also about the past? Religion is concerned with the unknown, and, perhaps, with making us comfortable with the unknown. Adventure and the unknown are correlates too. Does travel writing/cinema satiate our desire for the unknown, but in a safe manner? Do tourists simply like the soft surprise? Does the unknown help us frame ideas of difference and otherness?

Possible Topics:

suspense, ambiguity, who-done-it, secret, open secret, mystique, mysticism, crime novel, mystery novel, mystery theatre, mystery play, mystery shopper, getting/being lost, religion and the unknown, guessing, negative capability, mystery and cinema, obscurity, difference, the veil, cloak and dagger, magic, surprise attack, surprise party, shock jock, discovery, enigma, aphorism, allegory, Gordian knot, scientific method, reason and unreason