CALL FOR PAPERS: Aesthetics and World-making
A special issue of ENRAHONAR: An international journal of theoretical and practical reason
ed. by Adam Andrzejewski
Aesthetics is often perceived as something detached from the world we live in. Although beauty and sublime make the world a more desired place, philosophical aesthetics is perceived as a discipline designed to study art for its own sake. That is, many claim that aesthetic properties of objects and artworks are disconnected from their other properties and values such as moral, political and social ones. In that respect, the common view on aesthetics is still fueled by the Kantian tradition according to which an aesthetic experience of objects must be achieved through contemplation and is marked by its disinterestedness.
However, this traditional picture has constantly been undermined by the arts and everyday practices. Emergence of new artforms clearly shows the inner dynamic within the artworld. Already established rules and patterns are always temporal in nature and subject to change. Moreover, it seems that aesthetics nowadays is open for fruitful collaboration not only with other academic disciplines but — and more importantly — with matters that matter in the outer world. Sustainable growth, urban and cityspace planning, political and social sphere, natural environment or education are only a few areas where the aesthetics is much desired. A rapid development in the everyday studies mirrors a long-lasting interest in mundane, ordinary and ongoing aspects of human existence. Aesthetics is no longer a nice addition to our life: it becomes the center of it. Personal tastes, cultivated manners, artistic styles and aesthetic choices are not only very important for human agents but are also ways of manifesting ourselves. Coherent aesthetic choices need to be connected with aesthetic forecasting and planning and through them we shape our identities as well as the environment around us. The indisputable power of aesthetics has been shown recently in social activism where aesthetics is one of the most important tools in fighting for social justice.
This thematic issue of Enrahonar is devoted to aesthetics and world-making. It invites contributions researching aesthetics as a tool for social, political, economic and environmental changes as well as promoting aesthetics as having serious consequences for human everyday life. The deadline for submissions is the 1st October 2021. Please follow the editorial guidelines when preparing your manuscript: https://revistes.uab.cat/enrahonar/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions
Contact to the Advisory Editor: Adam Andrzejewski, a.andrzejewski@uw.edu.pl
Submissions may address these and related questions/areas:
- How can aesthetics become a tool for social and economic change?
- Radicality of the aesthetic during the pandemic
- Is aesthetics able to address such issues as climate change, democracy, LGBT+ rights?
- Aesthetics and future generations: do we have aesthetic obligations to people who have not been born yet?
- Everyday aesthetics and aestheticization of life
- Aesthetics and emancipation
- To what extent can aesthetics be a manifestation of personal autonomy?
- Moral values and their aesthetic expressions in designs and applied arts
- Are restored objects aesthetically mistaken? And what factors determine the fact that a given restored artwork is aesthetically rewarding whereas another is just a huge failure?
- Newly emerged artforms (video games, TV series, culinary arts)
- Erotic and pornographic art
- Body and communication
- Fashion
Call for Papers
POPULAR CULTURE
AND FEMINISM
Special issue of Popular Inquiry 2/2022
Guest editors: Dominika Czakon (Jagiellonian University in Krakow), Stefano Marino (University of Bologna) & Natalia Anna Michna (Jagiellonian University in Krakow)
During the 20th century and especially in the last decades crafting a theory to fit the different forms of popular culture has probably become one of the major preoccupations for contemporary intellectuals, including philosophers, art theorists, sociologists, cultural anthropologists, fashion theorists, scholars of cultural studies, etc. Popular culture must be understood indeed as a central phenomenon for contemporary intellectuals to address, due to its role in compelling us to broaden and rethink a part of the vocabulary and conceptuality of certain academic disciplines, due to its leading role in shaping our taste preferences and aesthetic criteria, and more in general due to its undeniable impact and influence on people’s ideas, opinions, choices as consumers of commodities of all kinds, including ethical and socio-political views at a global level. For these and still other reasons, popular culture definitely deserves serious attention at various levels, including a philosophical level, inasmuch as philosophy (also profitably intersected with different research approaches, such as sociology, psychology, literary criticism, art history and theory, mass media studies, and cultural studies) may prove to be able to offer significant and fruitful conceptual tools to decipher in original ways such defining phenomena of our time.
Of course, the implications and consequences of all this are manifold, ramified and diversified, and they also include, for example, the relation between contemporary popular culture and feminism. As noted by Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya and Nancy Fraser in their outstanding “manifesto” from 2019 Feminism for the 99%, feminism today “risks becoming a trending hashtag and vehicle of self-promotion, deployed less to liberate the many than to elevate the few”, and precisely popular culture can sometimes play a role in this process: for Arruzza, Bhattacharya and Fraser, for example, in the modern age “norms of gender and sexuality [have been] broadly diffused, including via colonialism and mass culture, and they [have been] widely enforced by repressive and administrative state power. […] The mainstream media continues to equate feminism, as such, with liberal feminism [that], far from providing the solution”, for them “is part of the problem”. At the same time, however, it is clear that a feminism that fundamentally and powerfully aims to reach attention of the many and not only of the few cannot help trying to spread its message through all the available instruments, which may include nowadays – beside academic works, journal articles or other publications – pop music, film, TV series, comics, fashion etc., and also the extraordinary impact of social networks and media like Facebook and Instagram on our everyday life.
This evidently creates a problematic but at the same time stimulating dialectics, as it were, between the power and potentialities of popular culture today and the aims of contemporary feminism, including its most radical versions as in the case of Arruzza’s, Bhattacharya’s and Fraser’s explicitly anti-capitalist feminism. This kind of dialectics, so to speak, becomes even more intriguing if we consider how certain leading figures of contemporary feminism, such as Angela Davis or Judith Butler, have somehow become in the last decades veritable icons or “stars” of our time, with a decisive role in the process of their “popularization” that has been played by various forms of popular culture (as in the famous examples of the songs dedicated to Angela Davis by rock stars such as John Lennon or The Rolling Stones) and, again, by the widespread diffusion and impact of social networks and media in the last years.
In the present issue on the topic “Popular Culture and Feminism” we aim to offer to readers of Popular Inquiry a collection of original articles dealing with a wide range of experiences and practices characterizing the universe of popular culture today, with a specific focus on the question concerning the relation between popular culture and feminist issues, and especially the question as to whether popular culture can contribute to a critique of certain prejudices, stereotypes and negative situations that are still present in our time and can thus contribute to promote a significant improvement of the women’s conditions at various levels. On this basis, we encourage authors to seek original perspectives on the broad topic of popular culture and feminism. We are interested in articles that address this topic in innovative ways, including both historical and theoretical approaches.
We invite authors from various research fields to submit articles related, but not limited, to the following questions and issues:
* the role that popular culture played in disseminating feminist ideas also beyond feminist organizations and activism;
* the place of feminist theories within contemporary popular culture;
* what can feminist theory learn from popular culture and vice-versa;
* how feminism transformed popular culture form 1960s until today and vice-versa;
* the different ways in which feminist theories have engaged with popular culture;
* the concept of popular feminism as an expression of the wider circulation of feminist ideas across the popular culture;
* the question of domestic femininities in contemporary popular culture;
* the modern portrayals of gender in popular culture;
* the figures of girl, female teenager, young woman and old woman in popular culture;
* the image of feminist activists in popular culture.
Proposals must be sent to:
dominika.czakon@gmail.com; stefano.marino4@unibo.it; natalii26@gmail.com
Proposals must include:
- title and abstract (max 500 words);
-full paper (preferably no more than 8000 words);
- 5 keywords;
- short Bio of the author;
- e-mail address.
We only accept submissions written in English.
Deadline for submitting proposals: March 31, 2022.
Publication expected in December 2022
Submission guidelines: https://www.popularinquiry.com/submissions
FORGOTTEN EVERYDAYS
Expanding Everyday Aesthetics
Special Issue of Popular Inquiry
“When we go out in the morning to collect trash…” “When we fly with our private jets…” “At 6 AM, when all of us prisoners wake up…”
None of the aforementioned examples do sound like typical examples for the Everyday Aesthetics discourse. Looking critically at examples mentioned in articles on everyday aesthetics, one easily gets the feeling, that they touch mostly upon the aesthetics of the lives of the Western middle class. There are, of course, differing approaches too. Some touch upon issues like junkyards and roadside clutter (Leddy), and, of course, a lot in the discussion is just about theoretical frameworks, e.g. about seeing the everyday as a set of objects (Saito) or patterns that we are routinized to do and experience (Haapala).
This special issue of Popular Inquiry would like to explore perspectives in Everyday Aesthetics from this point of view: what is lacking in the discussion?
Everyone has an everyday life and everyone has an everyday aesthetics. What does the aesthetics of the everyday look like in rural areas in Sahel and Central Asia, in an Inuit village in the Artic, in the slum in the outskirts of Delhi or Lagos – or on a farm in Ukraine? What about refugee camps, prisons and hospitals? And what is the everyday for someone living in the streets, or for the mentally ill who does not share experiences with fellow individuals?
In what way does aesthetics and particularly Everyday Aesthetics make sense and offer theoretical concepts for characterising, analyzing, understanding, and improving different forms of the everyday, that we haven’t thought of yet?
We ask for reflections on the aesthetics of the everyday, in particular, but not exclusively, in relation to the Everyday Aesthetics debate, to discuss the critical potentials of the discussion (this includes the possibility to claim that there is no such thing). The editors of this special issue would like to challenge the Western middle-class approaches. We encourage authors to dive into history, unseen lifestyles, forced lifestyles (prisons, hospitals) and any other topics, that, through their examples, might also touch upon a string in the more theoretical frameworks typical for the topic.
We welcome contributions in different academic stylistic traditions.
For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the editors: Elisabetta Di Stefano, Carsten Friberg and Max Ryynänen
Deadline for articles: August 10
E-mail: popular.inquiry@aalto.fi
Manuscript Submission Guidelines: https://www.popularinquiry.com/submissions
Read our articles: https://www.popularinquiry.com/issues-articles
Image: David Henry Brown Jr., "Schitzo Salad Man"
SELF-IMAGING: IDENTITY, DISRUPTION, TRANSFORMATION
An Online Lecture Series by the theme group Pop Cultures of Shared Campus
From selfies to drag, superheroes to villainous politicians and beyond, never have issues around the creative engagement with self-image, disruptions of personal identity and liquid bodily configurations been so pressing, so public. Our global playground is a place where Instagram pictures lie and rhythms from various heritage cultures mash-up with technological modes to create utterly contemporary cultural forms. The self, and its mediation through the various platforms for imaging, sounding, speaking or feeling, is an important but by no means uncontested construct. With that said, the Shared Campus theme group Pop Cultures has invited international scholars and artists to provide insights into their research about “self-imaging” in pop global cultures. In six sections, our presenters will shed light on “Designing the Self”, “Creative Identities across Art and Science”, Staging the Self”, “Picturing the Self”, “Hearing the Self”, and “Writing the Self”.
The respective podcasts, vlogs and texts will be uploaded every Thursday, 7 pm, Central European Time, starting on October 1, 2020, ending in December 2020.
The sections are cureated by Joseph Imorde (University of Siegen), Jörg Scheller (Zurich University of the Arts/ZHdK), Judith Mair (ZHdK), Masahiro Yasuda (Kyoto Seika University), Daniel Späti ZHdK), Takuro Mizuta (Seika), Richard Reynolds (University of the Arts London)
Visit the Global Pop Cultures Online Lecture Series:
https://shared-campus.com/themes/pop-cultures/research-network/online-lectures-2020/
General information on Shared Campus: www.shared-campus.com
***
Guest Editor Paco Barragán
CfP
Special Issue of Popular Inquiry
STORYTELLING AND ITS NARRATIVE MODES: CONSPIRACY THEORIES, FAKE NEWS, POST-TRUTHS, NEW WORLD ORDERS, NEGATIONIST THEORIES AND INFODEMICS
Our 21st century society is characterized by a hyper-narrativity or exacerbated narrativity fueled by concepts like post-truth, fake news, conspiracy theories, new world orders, negationist theories and infodemics. The progressive integration of consumer society, mass media, technological innovations in the field of communications, internet and social media has created an extremely visual and narrative society.
From the traditional habermasian “public sphere” based on a conjunction of the spoken and written word, with the photographic or moving image as certifier that something had really happened, we have shifted towards a “mass-social media public sphere” where the hyper-narrative narrative word rules and where the image has ceased to be the notary of reality. It is also a society in which anyone can produce, manipulate and distribute alternative narratives which challenge (modernists) concepts like truth, reality and veracity. But has especially this more democratic social media public sphere brought about a more emancipated and participative society?
In this storytelling society conspiracy theories, fake news, post-truth, new world order, negationist theories and infodemics have become common parlance among citizens, celebrities and even politicians who try to come up with a logical and comforting explanation for the origin of a virus or the control that the elites want to impose through vaccines on the world population.
And yet while average Joe is getting accustomed to ideas like conspiracy theories and fake news, we still lack a historical perspective that frames and contextualizes today’s hyper-narrativity and its narrative modes.
In this special issue on today’s hyper-narrativity and its narrative modes we welcome original articles from fields as varied as (but not exclusive to) visual arts, philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, political sciences, history, anthropology and literature.
List of possible topics
—(Historical) Contextualization of today’s hyper-narrative nature of society
—To what extent did post-modernism’s discredit of grand narratives and science and their motto ‘the are no facts, only interpretations’ contribute to today’s narrative modes?
—Social media and the proliferation of post-truth, fake news, conspiracy theories et al
—Narrativity in visual arts and its relationship to politics and society
—In what ways can we understand the relationship between narrativity, pop culture and neoliberalism?
—The shift from a word-based to a visual-based society and the role of narrativity
—In what ways can we theorize/propose a filter or alternative for today’s hyper-narrative nature of society?
Deadline for submissions 150 words abstract: 15 December 2020
Deadline final accepted essays: 15 March 2021
For questions regarding this issue, please contact pacobarragan11 (at) gmail.com
CALL FOR PAPERS
Romanticism and Popular Music
Edited by Donald Burke, Colin J. Campbell,
Thomas Laughlin, Jonathan Luftig and Stefano Marino
It is probably trivial to say that twentieth-century popular culture was marked by a “romantic” streak. The “romantic,” after all, is widely associated with the assertion of the individual against the group, ranging his (the presumed subject is more often than not male) powers of imagination, inspiration and intuition against reason and logic, valuing nature and the natural over and against culture – all criteria which have long since degenerated into the clichés of the modern culture industry. In other words, the problem is that, with such broad and shallow parameters, it would be hard to say what part of life has not been touched by the romantic or “romanticism” with a small ‘r’, and how any of it can be distinguished from the general commercialization and industrialization of culture. To make the claim, then, that not merely the ‘romantic’, but Romanticism in its proper sense – invoking the aesthetic and cultural movement which fomented at the end of the eighteenth century in close cultural proximity with the events of the French Revolution – has relevance to twentieth-century and contemporary popular music would call for more precise as well as profound premises. What we now refer to as the Romantic movement, with a capital ‘R’, escaped triviality because it was just as much concerned with community and the collective as with the individual. For Romantic artists (and critics) the imagination and intuition were valued precisely because of the way they both served and consummated reason and logical thinking.
The subject of Romantic art, often depicted in sublime images of the ruination of culture, was primarily the relation between culture and nature rather than ‘authentic nature’ in itself. Romantic imagery contested the growing ascendancy and hegemony of commercial interests and industrial capitalism over both human and non-human natures, helping to give shape to a budding anti-capitalist and ecological counter-culture and politics (which was sometimes extended to the arena of sexual politics as well, in Mary Wollstonecraft’s call, for example, for a complete “revolution in female manners”). At the beginning of the twentieth century, the surrealists eagerly embraced this revolutionary side of Romanticism. In the first Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton cited “romantic ruins” as a good reason to “smile” at the “incurable human restlessness” that would also buoy the Surrealist movement and revolution. Surrealism, in turn, exerted a pronounced influence on Francophone-Caribbean artists and anti-imperialist politics, most notably in life and work of Aimé Césaire and the concept of Négritude. Romantic anti-capitalism, however, has had proponents on both the left and right, was not in any way predetermined from the start with a liberal or radical orientation, and has sometimes even been a vehicle for fascist and racist ideologies. Of the two most famous theorists of the sublime, the first, Edmund Burke, was an archconservative and antagonist of the French Revolution, whereas the second, Immanuel Kant, was an enthusiast of the Revolution and a champion of the Enlightenment project more generally.
Despite this political diversity, Romanticism was oriented around a shared preoccupation with the aesthetic as a crucial dimension of human experience. In his Aesthetic Theory, Th. W. Adorno specifies that it was during the Romantic period that the dimension of ‘the aesthetic’ and of art as a distinct, secularized entity was first explicitly formulated. More than a bucolic celebration of ‘nature,’ Romanticism, with the notion of the cultural landscape, conceived art as a site of reconcilement and mutual in-formation of the natural and the cultural. Romantic artworks, above and beyond a murky reflux of “feeling,” are held to convey meanings or ideas, albeit not ones objectified in significative language. “This,” Adorno writes, “is the locus of one dimension of romantic experience that has outlasted romantic philosophy and its outlook”. It was Romantic art, furthermore, where the “inwardly infinite comportment of art” – the aesthetic expectation of what Adorno cites in French as the apparition, the spiritual vision – distinctly appeared and could be formulated as a concept: “Romanticism wanted to equate what appears in the apparition with the artistic. In doing so, it grasped something essential about art, yet narrowed it to a particular… romanticism imagined that through reflection and thematic content it could grasp art’s ether”. Following Adorno’s reflections and further developing them, it can be thus claimed that in Romantic art the idea of artistic genius crystallized in the idea of the new, appearing as the re-discovery of the archaic, and that Romantic works, properly speaking, were marked by a distinct resistance to neoclassical ideas of mimesis (as a delimited and contained imitation of the universal in the particular). This is what accounts for Romantic art’s sublime aspect and for the richness of its formal innovations and new forms of mediation. From this perspective, Romanticism appears not as an endorsement of the ‘more natural’ or ‘authentically individual,’ but rather as a field of contradictions and tensions between feeling and reason, formlessness and form, individual and collective, nature and history. It is therefore also possible to associate in different ways the concepts of Romantic and Romanticism, broadly understood, to phenomena of contemporary culture, in general, and contemporary music, in particular, thus inquiring into the sometimes concealed but nevertheless present and indeed important legacy of the Romantic movement and worldview in popular music of our time.
In adopting a broad and open philosophical approach – the only one which can do justice to the multiform and complex character of both Romanticism (as a concept and an artistic movement) and popular music– we invite authors to submit articles which investigate twentieth-century and/or contemporary popular music as reflective of the Romantic impulse in artistic production. We welcome proposals addressing (but not limited to) the following aspects:
- To what extent does popular music popularize the “inward-infinite comportment of art” for a mass audience?
- In what ways did a notion of art as contradictory mediation of the immediate find itself expressed in popular music forms?
- In what ways have key popular music works spoken emphatically in the “wordless syntax” and “intentionless language” of art?
- How did (and does) popular music embody the demand for formal innovation in the embrace of formlessness and dissonance?
- In what ways does a recurrent embrace of noise become recuperated and ultimately form new aesthetic, academic, and/or commercial codes?
- How does Karl Kraus’ dictum, cited by Adorno, that “origin is the goal” – that the new is always ultimately the rediscovery of the old and the outmoded – become thematic in the works of popular musicians?
- In what ways has popular music extended the aesthetics and politics of Romantic anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, ecology, and/or sexual revolution?
We encourage authors to seek original perspectives on the possible connections between romanticism (or Romanticism in the specific meaning clarified above) and popular music. We are interested in articles that address this topic in innovative ways, including both strictly aesthetic perspectives and philosophical approaches of different kind.
Proposals should be sent to both stefano.marino4@unibo.it and waterinwater@gmail.com, and need to include:
- title and abstract (max 500 words);
- 5 keywords;
- brief Bio;
- email address.
We accept submissions written in English or Italian.
We invite authors to use the author/year/page quotation system (e.g. “Campbell 2019, p. 74”; “Marino 2020, p. 44”) and to provide full references only in the final Bibliography.
Deadline for submitting proposals: December 30th, 2020.
Notification of acceptance: February 1st, 2021.
Deadline for submitting full article (min. 30.000 / max 50.000 characters, including footnotes): March 1st, 2021.
Call for Papers
CfP for Book Proposal // Article Proposals for an edited collection
Tracing Disgust: Cultural Approaches to the Visceral (edited by Max Ryynänen, Susanne Ylönen & Heidi Kosonen)
We often recoil at the thought of mold gathering at the dishes used for eating, of bad breath on a person we do not specifically like, or of a spider walking across our body. Disgust, exemplified in these classic illustrations, is probably the most visceral of the basic human emotions. Some argue that it engages in particular the so called lower senses — taste, smell and touch —with a function for an organism’s preservation. It is also one of the recognized ”moral emotions,” functioning symbolically on social and cultural scales and serving, for example, as an instrument of political discourses. This can be traced in different examples, such as the discrimination of sexual minorities or the populist rhetorics of racist and fascist movements.
In a more deconstructive vein, disgust has also facilitated the criticism and resistance of prevailing norms and hierarchical constitutions often reiterated in its moral uses. In countercultural movements, such as artistic avant-garde or punk, or in children’s culture, disgust, disgustingness and varied kinds of disgust-objects from slime toys to disgust-evoking sweets serve also as sources of pleasure. In art and popular culture disgust has proven to be a welcome enhancement to spectacle-seeking entertainment. Disgust, manifested not only in our instinctive recoiling from danger and decay, but also in these varied kinds of symbolic discourses and cultural products aiming to provoke, agitate or bring about enjoyment, is thus more than the biological mechanism seeking to protect animals from particular kinds of dangers, or a negative emotion negatively felt.
We now invite researchers from a variety of fields ranging from arts and cultural studies and philosophy to sociology and anthropology to reflect on the different varieties and functions of disgust. We especially welcome unexpected approaches that consider the topic from perspectives that are novel both methodologically and content-wise. The themes may consider but are not restricted to:
disgust’s relationship to other emotions and affects
disgust’s moral, social and/or biological aspects and uses
disgust, decay and biological, cognitive, socio-cultural or symbolic dangers
disgust and it’s uses as low or high culture
disgust and disgust-objects as humour or art
disgust and disgust-objects as pleasure and entertainment, for instance in popular cultural phenomena, transgressive art, extreme cuisine or children’s culture
disgust’s and disgust-objects’s relationship to cultural change, for instance in political discourses, hate speech and their rhetorics
countercultural disgust and its potential for change
disgust, ethnic minorities and refugee crisis
disgust, gender, sexuality and LGBTQI
disgust and death
disgust and climate change
disgust, foodways, food identities and food economies
disgust, social class and social hierarchies
disgust and identity
The proposals for an article (300 words) and additional information (such as contact details, affiliation and a short biography), should be sent to editors via email (tracing-disgust@jyu.fi and max.ryynanen@aalto.fi) by August 15th, 2020. Notification of acceptance will be sent by September 15, 2020. Full texts (max 9000 words) are expected by December 15, 2020.
We seek to widen our networks to find as interesting article propositions for our book as possible. Thus, although we already have some great authors with interesting papers on board, we have decided to also open this CfP for article propositions beyond our current range of authors. We are currently negotiating with several high profile publishers, and aim to put forward a more detailed book proposal, based on the abstracts we receive, in September 2020.
If you have any inquiries, you may contact us through email: tracing-disgust@jyu.fi.
Call for papers (for a special issue of Popular Inquiry)
CARS
A part of many people’s everyday routines, traveling in cars offers an immersive aesthetic experience as well as a transformative one. Yet discussion of its impact on and role in our lives is relegated to television advertisements or programs, films and magazines for tuning or modifying cars that tend not to critically analyze the meaning and significance of this aesthetic relationship.
The experience of being in a car could be considered as at once an extension of the body and a separation between self and outside world. The transformation of our sense of physical body is extended into the structure of the car, while our manners of relating to other individuals and surrounding environment is changed as a result of this bodily extension. Speed itself is transformative as an experience, in the ways it changes perceptions as well as our relations to the landscape. New ways of seeing and relating to landscape develop out of such aesthetic experience. The separation and anonymity that this moving enclosure affords us also transforms our relations to other drivers on the road, leading to cases of road rage, or counteracted through the specialization and customization of the appearance of the car to express an individual’s personality.
The aesthetic experience of cars is one that has developed along multiple parallel lines. Manufacturing, industrial materials, changing landscapes and ways of living, and the social relations that have come about as a result of and in response to our use of cars, offer a complex ecology of ideas. This edition will explore the transformative affordances of the automobile. Topics of speed, mobility, vision and perception, the body, and social relations may be addressed.
We welcome articles from many fields, including but not exclusive to: creative practice and artistic research, philosophy, sociology, cultural studies, human geography, science and technology studies.
List of possible topics
- Embodied and/or extended cognition and technological extensions of the body
- Tuning/hotrod/motorhead culture and its aesthetic considerations
- Disembodiment and separation from surroundings
- The aesthetics of the everyday
- Individuation, expression and symbolic objects
Deadline for submissions: July 15th, 2020
For questions regarding this issue, please contact scottandrewelliott (at) gmail.com
Call for papers
Tracing Disgust
International seminar 18.-20.3.2020
University of Jyväskylä, Finland
We often recoil at the thought of mold gathering at the dishes used for eating, of bad breath on a person we do not specifically like, or of a spider walking across our body. Disgust, exemplified in these classic illustrations, is probably the most visceral of basic human emotions, with a function for an organism’s preservation, and some argue that it engages in particular the so called lower senses: taste, smell and touch. It is also one of the recognized ”moral emotions,” functioning symbolically on social and cultural scales and serving, for example, as an instrument of political discourses. This can be traced in different examples, such as the discrimination of sexual minorities or the populist rhetorics related to the recent refugee crisis.
In a more deconstructive vein, disgust has also facilitated the criticism and resistance of prevailing norms and hierarchical constitutions often reiterated in its moral uses. In countercultural movements, such as artistic avantgarde or punk, or in children’s culture, disgust, disgustingness and varied kinds of disgust-objects from slime toys to disgust-evoking sweets serve also as sources of pleasure. In art and popular culture, instead, disgust has proven to be a welcome enhancement to spectacle-seeking entertainment. Disgust, manifested not only in our instinctive recoiling from danger and decay, but also in these varied kinds of symbolic discourses and cultural products aiming to provoke, agitate or bring about enjoyment, is thus more than the biological mechanism seeking to protect animals from particular kinds of dangers, or a negative emotion negatively felt.
We now invite researchers from a variety of fields ranging from sociology, cultural studies and philosophy to biology and other natural sciences to reflect on the different varieties and functions of disgust in a three-day seminar at the University of Jyväskylä 18-20 March 2020.
Themes addressed may vary, including yet not restricted to:
conceptualizations of disgust
disgust’s relationship to other emotions and affects
disgust’s moral, social and/or biological aspects and uses
disgust, decay and biological, cognitive, socio-cultural or symbolic dangers
disgust and it’s uses as low or high culture
disgust and disgust-objects as humour or art
disgust and disgust-objects as pleasure and entertainment, for instance in popular cultural phenomena, transgressive art, extreme cuisine or children’s culture
disgust’s and disgust-objects’s relationship to cultural change, for instance in political discourses, hate speech and their rhetorics
countercultural disgust and its potential for change
disgust, ethnic minorities and refugee crisis
disgust, gender, sexuality and LGBTQI
disgust and death
disgust and climate change
disgust, foodways, food identities and food economies
disgust, social class and social hierarchies
disgust and identity
The proposals for a presentation (no more than 300-500 words) and additional information (such as contact details, affiliation and a short biography), should be sent by using our abstract system by December 11th, 2019. Notification of acceptance will be sent by December 20th, 2019. The language of the 20 minute presentations will be English. You may access the abstract system through these web-pages starting November 1st.
The conference is organised by the Disgust Network and the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies, University of Jyväskylä. If you have any inquiries, you may contact us through email: tracing-disgust@jyu.fi.
Helsinki Airport in July 2017
CFP, International Assocation for Aesthetics (IAA)
MARGINS, FUTURES AND TASKS OF AESTHETICS
July 5-7, 2018
Organizers: International Association for Aesthetics, The Finnish Society of Aesthetics & The Department of Art at Aalto University
Invited Keynotes:
Yuriko Saito (Rhode Island School of Design)
Elisabetta di Stefano (University
of Palermo)
Jack Halberstam (Columbia University)
Department Keynotes: Ossi Naukkarinen & Kevin Tavin (to be confirmed)
Aesthetics is a marginal discipline. We often have to defend its existence in departments, where the main focus is on literature, philosophy or art history. It is not surprising that the margins of aesthetics have not been thoroughly discussed. What are the schools of philosophical thinking or the
methodologies we haven’t yet turned enough of our attention to? Who and where are the outsiders who will, in the long run, leave an interesting trace on the profession?
The aforementioned questions are of course future-oriented. The future of aesthetics has been discussed in various conferences and books. Aesthetics in them is still often seen as more autonomic that it actually is institutionally speaking. What if the future of our discipline was more about collaboration with other disciplines? What are the research topics of future aesthetics? What kind of challenges and possibilities does the changing world pose upon aesthetics? How does aesthetics react, for example, to the increasing
pervasiveness of technology or to the challenges of climate change?
This role, task or maybe even responsibility aesthetics could take up is of course quite pedagogical to some extent. How to distribute the vast knowledge of philosophy of art to disciplines and practices which could have more use of aesthetic theory? And what could aesthetics itself learn
from other disciplines, which actually use aesthetic theory in their own way: cultural geography, media studies and art education are examples of disciplines where aesthetics already has a role, but often in a practical way, in a way which differs from what professional aestheticians think of as
aesthetics. Could aesthetics find new strategies for survival in the changing academic world through new interactions and could those interactions broaden the scope and community of aesthetics itself?
We aspire to bring together different ways of approaching aesthetics, using aesthetics and being in dialogue with theories of aesthetics, and invite anyone interested in these issues to send an abstract (max 200 words) to us no later than 15.1.2018 (aesthetics@aalto.fi).
The selection of abstracts will take place no later than January 31. The accepted participants will get information about hotels, spaces and other practicalities no later than March 15. The deadline for the fee is May 15 and the final schedule will be published in the end of May. The fee of the conference is 160€ (PhD students / unemployed 80 €). The fee includes a lunch on each day of the conference and coffee during the breaks. There will be a separate conference dinner (cost not included) organized for those who are interested in it (50€).
Note: The conference hosts three special sessions. 1)
Rediscovering Russian Aesthetics, organized
by the Russian Society of Aesthetics. 2) A separate track for the session on Environmental Aesthetics. For this one: please send abstracts with an e-mail titled ”ICA2018: Environmental Aeshtetics” directly to sanna.t.lehtinen@helsinki.fi if you are interested to present a paper in this session. (The proposals should otherwise follow the general instructions. N.B. The papers sent for
the special track might become accepted also in the general sessions. 3) There will be a session dedicated to traditional Indian Aesthetics, chaired by S. Bhuvaneshwari. If you are interested to send an abstract to this session: please use the normal mailing address (aesthetics@aalto.fi), but
write “Indian Aesthetics” in the subject area.
The organizers:
International Association for Aesthetics: http://iaaesthetics.org/
Finnish Society for Aesthetics: http://www.estetiikka.fi/introduction
The Department of Art at Aalto University’s School of Art, Design and Architecture:
http://taide.aalto.fi/en/about_new/
Call for Papers
AESTHETICS OF POPULAR CULTURE
4th-6th May, 2018
University of Warsaw
Keynotes: David Davies (McGill University, Montreal), Tomas Kulka (Charles University, Prague)
Granting that we are constantly bombarded with various forms of popular culture with little room for reprieve, how is it that the popular discourse of philosophical aesthetics seems to offer little insight to the increasingly pervasive artist renderings of the ‘lower’ art forms? Recently, aestheticians and philosophers have been turning their gaze to new domains of human creative activities, i.e., comics, advertisements, pornography, popular music, video games, etc. Yet – the question still burns regarding the relationship between aesthetics of the canonical, high culture and low, popular culture. Do they have different methodologies or just different subjects of inquiry? We warmly invite papers that reconsider the value and methods of aesthetics of popular culture and art – broadly understood – by exploring new concepts and fields of inquiry.
Given the explorative mandate of the papers — no specific methodology or philosophical orientation is required in submissions.
Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the newly emerged peer- and blind-reviewed open access online journal Popular Inquiry: The Journal of Kitsch, Camp and Mass Culture.
The conference will be hosted by the University of Warsaw, Poland and it is co-organized with the department of art of Aalto University, Finland.
Suggested topics (which should not be seen as restrictive, but more as an invitation):
– avant-garde popular culture
– art from the point of view of popular culture studies
– aesthetic properties and concepts of popular culture
– popular culture, aesthetic education and art schools
– official popular culture (nazism, socialism, etc.)
– popular culture in post-communist countries
– the relation of aesthetics and cultural studies
– popular culture as a shared outsider (Americanization)
– European aesthetics of popular culture
– kitsch, trash, camp
– video games, digital art, popular film & television
– urban/public space
– the art/craft distinction
Please send a title and a 500 word abstract, suitable for blind review, in either Word or PDF format, to popularculture.uw@gmail.com. For each talk, there will be time for a 30-minute presentation, with another 15 minutes designated for discussion. The deadline for submission is February 1, 2018. Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 20, 2018. The conference fee for both established academics and PhD students is 40 Euros. There is also a separate (optional) fee for the conference dinner of 50 Euros.
Committee: Adam Andrzejewski (University of Warsaw), Karan August (independent scholar), Max Ryynänen (Aalto University), Mateusz Salwa (University of Warsaw)