Infrastructuralism
This special issue is dedicated to thinking about the centrality of infrastructure to the humanities. We define infrastructure broadly to include economic structures and systems, ecosystems, material state formations, institutions, computational and web-based materialities (including servers, fiber-optic cables and code), various forms of labor, forms of textuality that exceed representation, as well as all that more regularly goes under the name of infrastructure.
Call for papers
Transparency
Vol. 33, No. 1-2 [2025]
Focus Editors: Jeremy Hamers, Ingrid Mayeur, François Provenzano, Élise Schürgers, and Jan Teurlings
Transparency is one of the buzzwords of today’s political and organizational discourse. At heart an aesthetics of the becoming-visible, transparency is at once an injunction to communicate, as well as a moral imperative. It posits itself as the necessary but also sufficient condition of a number of mediatic and political virtues that are ardently pursued but rarely questioned. This special issue explores the notion of transparency using the tools of the Humanities, following three axes of critical inquiry. The first considers transparency as an epistemic scenography, a carefully crafted mise-en-scène that is supposed to guide us to the truth. The second considers transparency as a rhetorical device, aimed at effectively settling controversies, and establishing consensus. The third considers transparency as a media affordance, by which technical devices cultivate the illusion of a complete grasp of their representational objects and the signifying dispositifs involved. These three axes – transparency as truth, settler of controversies, and media affordance – are in practice regularly combined, so we invite submissions that explore overlaps between the three lines of inquiry, and shed light on the ways transparency shapes multiple relationships to knowledge.
Deadline for submissions: May 15, 2024.
Learn more about the submissions process.
Insurrection
Vol. 34, No. 1-2 [2026]
Focus Editors: Jeffrey Di Leo and Sophia A. McClennen
In the summer of 2020, US President Donald Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to curb the mostly nonviolent Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. Less than a year later, he would encourage a mob of angry protesters to attempt to violently seize control of the US government and disrupt the peaceful transition of power. One movement sought to radically reform structural inequality. The other sought to enshrine it. One was largely peaceful. The other was unabashedly aggressive. Does it make sense to refer to both of these movements as insurrections? And how does the term change contingent on who is using it and to what end? This issue aims to theorize, contextualize, and envision the concept of insurrection in contemporary political life. Today insurrections are everywhere, but are these social disruptions real efforts towards systemic change or are they nothing more than performance? And what of current insurrectionist movements that seek not to overthrow political authority but, rather, reinforce and fortify it? Insurrection today may be revolting, but is it revolutionary?
Deadline for submissions: December 15, 2025.
Learn more about the submissions process.
Book series: Anthem Symplokē Studies in Theory.
Winner of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals’ Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement