02 Nov Extended Call for Papers – Special Issue on Animal Alterity – Otherness: Essays and Studies 6.1
The peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for its special issue: Animal Alterity, Spring 2016. Deadline is January 15.
Otherness: Essays and Studies publishes research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that critically examine the concepts of otherness and alterity. We particularly appreciate dynamic cross-disciplinary study.
In recent years, scholars within the humanities and social sciences have shown increasing interest in relations between humans and nonhuman animals to a degree where many now speak of an “animal turn” within these broad fields and where a new interdisciplinary field – often termed human-animal studies – has emerged. A significant part of this has been the imagining – from various perspectives, not least literary and philosophical – of nonhuman subjectivities and what these may mean for our contemplation of human-animal relations, of nature, of humanity, animality and alterity within various disciplines. As Derrida has been moved by contemplating the significance of his cat’s non-human gaze on his naked body, so have scholars across various disciplines come to reassess the role of non-humans and animal alterity in culture, literature, media, ethics, and politics, and what that may mean for how we (should) think of ourselves as well as others – both human and nonhuman – and the world we live in.
While the concept of Otherness is often considered in light of the human – as a matter of the multi-, trans-, inter- or cross-cultural – its significance to human relations with the nonhuman should not be forgotten or underestimated. Indeed, as human relations to nature and nonhuman animals are the subjects of increasingly heated debate, their role in and for culture as well as the boundaries between the “human” self and the “animal” other should be continually interrogated and explored. How do our understandings of “animal” alterity affect our ideas of humanity or our relation to that which is not human? What contribution can intersubjective approaches focusing on the nonhuman make to our understanding of the world? How are our views of human others tied to our perspectives on nonhuman ones? How are ideas of the posthuman connected to thoughts on nonhuman otherness? What are the implications of technological and medical innovations and procedures that can be read as challenging human-animal boundaries (e.g. biotechnology, xenotransplantation etc.)? How can studies into the nonhuman further our understanding of otherness and alterity?
For this special issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies, we invite papers that explore these questions and any other issues that join together human-animal studies and the study of otherness and its theoretical foundations in various ways.
Welcome topics include but are not limited to:
Approaches towards and Discourses on Nonhuman Animals as Others in Public Spaces and Debates
Representations of Animal Otherness in Various Genres of Literature and Film, Fictional and Non-Fictional
Research and Analysis on Otherness and Nonhuman Animals Related to: Language, Space, Body, Time, History, etc.
Issues of Power: Perspectives on Nonhuman Animals in Dominant and Peripheral Cultures
Intersectional Alterities: Nonhuman Animals and Gender, Race, Class, etc.
Philosophy, Ethics and Nonhuman Otherness
New Technologies, Medical Innovations and Animal Alterity
Human and Posthuman Identities and Lifestyles Tied to Human-Animal Relations
Places and Spaces: Otherness and “Animal” Geographies
Nonhuman Otherness and Global Transformations
Critical Approaches to Otherness through Perspectives on the Nonhuman
Theory Formation/Conceptualization of Otherness in the Study of Nonhuman Animals
Articles should be approx. 5,000 – 8,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with Word document attachment formatted to Chicago Manual of Style standards to the guest editor Sune Borkfelt at otherness.research@gmail.com
Further information: http://www.otherness.dk/journal/
The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2016.
Feature image: DoriPili
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