Abstracts will be received and reviewed by the Diffractions editorial board who will decide on the pertinence of proposals for the upcoming issue. Authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full article. However, this does not imply that these papers will be automatically published. Rather, they will go through a peer-review process that will determine whether papers are publishable with minor or major changes, or if they do not fulfill the criteria for publication.

Please send abstracts of 150 to 250 words and 5-8 keywords as well as a short biography (100 words) by MAY 15th, 2024, to info.diffractions@gmail.com with the subject “Diffractions 10”, followed by your last name.

The full papers should be submitted by SEPTEMBER 30th, 2024, through the journal’s platform: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions.

Every issue of Diffractions has a thematic focus but also contains a special section for nonthematic articles. If you are interested in submitting an article that is not related to the topic of this particular issue, please consult general guidelines available at the Diffractions website at https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions. The submission and review process for non-thematic articles is the same as for the general thematic issue. All research areas of the humanities are welcome.

XIV Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture

CULTURE AT WAR

Lisbon, June 24 – 29, 2024

Extended deadline for submissions: February 29 March 14, 2024

We are living in times of war. Now, more than ever, war occupies a central role in both national and international affairs and pervades various spheres of our societies and cultures.

The 21^st century has been marked by violence of different varieties and levels. Having started with a massive terrorist event, the attacks of September 11, 2001, the last two decades have witnessed many examples of aggression that have come to dominate both the media and public discussion. Acts of terrorism of various kinds, revolutions and wars, with the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East among the most recent, are illustrative of contemporary warfare, its characteristics, and challenges. While new military technology such as high-tech weapons and attack drones promote more remote, noncontact operations, the ever-present media strive for immediacy and proximity and thus contribute to a new and distinctive experience of war. Their continuous, play-by-play coverage promotes the illusion of a 360º view and allows audiences to follow the events in near-real time. However, their omnipresence has also turned them into desirable instruments of warfare. They not only inform about the war but also have the ability to mobilize for/against it. Furthermore, the rise of social media and its pivotal role in both documenting conflicts and generating and disseminating misinformation cannot be disregarded. As military conflicts unfold, a parallel war is also fought between communication mechanisms. It can even be argued, with Paul Virilio (War and Cinema, 1989), that war, or its experience, is becoming increasingly a product of visual media construction.

Wars are not circumscribed to military conflicts, though. Contention has become an intrinsic part of everyday life, leading to social and cultural movements that call out misguided practices, injustices, and violations of basic laws and rights. On the one hand, bottom-up mobilizations such as #MeToo, the gilets jaunes, or Fridays for Future, reveal a world in crisis, responding to systemic violence with dissent. On the other hand, the dismantling of structures of oppression by means of decolonizing processes clashes with the incapacity to effectively deal with past wrongdoings and the tendency to forget or avoid uncomfortable discussions. These movements may, at times, also represent a dynamic of destruction based on the collective readiness to criticize, denounce, hold accountable, and ultimately cancel what or who is considered to have behaved in an unacceptable way.

This culture of war, of diverging opinions and interests, extends also to the relationship between man and nature, and more specifically the ongoing environmental emergency. One rhetorical device used to stress the escalating effects of climate change is precisely the war metaphor (employed also in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic). The use of military language and the idea of a war against climate change, widely used in public speeches and in the media, is meant to spark a fighting spirit and incite action. There is, however, the risk of having the opposite effect if the enemy remains abstract, the message is not made understandable, and governments and individuals fail to take responsibility for the current situation.

The XIV Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture is dedicated to the study of the relationship between culture and war. Papers are welcome on the following topics, amongst others:

• Culture and conflict 
• Ancient and modern warfare 
• Culture in modern warfare
• War and the creation of modernity
• The cultural construction of terror/terrorism
• Rules of war and humanitarian law
• The ethics of war
• The forensics of war
• Rituals of the fallen
• Battlefields and landscapes of war
• Media and war, media at war: (mis)communication, (mis)information, and fake news 
• Representations of war 
• Art and artists at war
• Art and reparations
• (De)Colonizing discourses and practices/asymmetric conflict
• Conflict escalation and conflict resolution 
• Cultural wars and language
• Dialogue and tolerance/Soliloquy and intolerance 
• Culture of violence 
• Warrior culture: between heroes and villains 
• War as metaphor 
• Environmental emergency and war against climate change 
• War-induced uncertainty and instability 
• Epistemologies at war/theories at war

We encourage proposals coming from the fields of culture studies, film and the visual arts, literary and translation studies, history, anthropology, media, and psychology, among others.

Paper proposals

Proposals should be sent to lxsummerschool@gmail.com no later than February 29 March 14, 2024, and include paper title, abstract in English (max. 200 words), name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation, and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning ongoing research.

Applicants will be informed of the results of their submissions by March 29 April 8, 2024.

Full papers submission

Presenters are required to send in full papers no later than May 31, 2024.

The papers will then be circulated amongst the participants. In the slot allotted to each participant (30’), only 10’ may be used for a brief summary of the research piece. The Summer School is a place for networked exchange of ideas, and organizers wish to have as much time as possible for a structured discussion between participants. Therefore, in each slot, 10’ will be used for presentation, and 20’ for discussion.

Registration fees

Participants with paper – 300€ for the entire week (includes lectures, master classes, doctoral sessions, lunches and closing dinner)

Participants without paper – 60€ per day (lunches and closing dinner not included)

Fee waivers

For The Lisbon Consortium students and CECC researchers, there is no registration fee.

For other UCP students, students from institutions affiliated with the Transform4Europe Alliance, the Critical Humanities Network, the European Summer School in Cultural Studies (ESSCS), and the European PhD-Net in Literary and Cultural Studies, the registration fee is 80€.

This edition of the Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture will function as the 2024 Critical Humanities Network Summer School and the 1^st  Transform4Europe Summer School.

Organizing Committee

• Isabel Capeloa Gil
• Peter Hanenberg
• Alexandra Lopes
• Adriana Martins
• Diana Gonçalves
• Paulo de Campos Pinto
• Rita Faria
• Annimari Juvonen

Assessment Committee

• Peter Hanenberg
• Alexandra Lopes
• Adriana Martins
• Diana Gonçalves
• Paulo de Campos Pinto
• Rita Faria
• Ana Margarida Abrantes
• Luísa Leal de Faria
• Joana Moura
• Rita Bueno Maia
• Verena Lindemann Lino
• Sofia Pinto
• Luísa Santos

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Conjunctures of Hospitality:
Conditions, Articulations, and Affects of Border Encounters

7-8 November 2024

Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon, Portugal

The “Conjunctures of Hospitality” conference aims to provide a space for an interdisciplinary inquiry into the conditions, articulations and affects of hospitality in different temporal and geographical settings. Inspired by Stuart Hall’s work, we are interested in broadly defined “conjunctural analysis” that shed light on or map the cultural-historical contexts in which cultural artefacts, artistic practices, activism or theories take shape. The conference will take place at the Universidade Católica Portuguesa, in Lisbon, Portugal, on the 7-8 November 2024.

Hospitality has been an object of reflection and debate for centuries. And yet, in a world of increasing border anxieties, perpetual “migration crises”, “culture wars” and the renegotiation of the human/nonhuman divide, the encounter and welcoming of strangers continues to be of utmost topicality. Despite an ongoing or even increased academic interest, the definition and theorization of hospitality are anything but obvious. Research on hospitality ranges from the research on the accommodation, food or drink industries in Tourism and Management sciences to philosophical inquiries about its relation to citizenship, human rights and the encounter with others in the Humanities and Social Sciences (Lynch et al. 2011). However, the difficulty of defining the concept and practice of hospitality stems not only from disciplinary diversity, but also from its intrinsic polyvalence and contradictions. Hospitality bears on many problematics: from identity, difference, and belonging to the relationship between host and guest, individual and collective, as well as questions of inequality, human rights, and (political) power. Drawing on the etymological study of Benveniste, Derrida emphasized that hospitality is structured by a paradox: in order to welcome the stranger, one must be the master of one’s own home. Beneath its welcoming surface, hospitality thus inscribes not only forms of violence in the encounter with strangers, but also the limits of its own unconditionality (Derrida). As it regulates the relationship between inside and outside, hospitality is not only at stake when borders are crossed, confused or readjusted, but also in the very process of their drawing (Still 20210). Since, as Sara Ahmed suggests, it might well be “the processes of expelling or welcoming the one who is recognised as a stranger that produce the figure of the stranger in the first place” (2000, 4).

This conference aims to bring together interdisciplinary inquiries into particular articulations, conditions, and conjunctures of hospitality. While we welcome a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches, we particularly encourage a reflection about hospitality and its relationship to processes of bordering and hierarchization. This also implies a particular interest in “histories of determination” (Ahmed 2000) and their affective dimensions.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Hospitality and (anthropological) difference
• Hospitality and border(ing)/border regimes
• Hospitality and (im)migration
• Hospitality and affect
• (Linguistic) hospitality and translation
• Hospitality and the politics of translation
• Queer hospitality
• Aesthetics of hospitality
• Politics of hospitality
• Ethics of hospitality
• Arts of hospitality
• Hospitality and violence
• Hospitality and biopolitics
• Hospitality and governmentality
• Hospitality and Posthumanism
• Hospitality and memory
• Hospitality and area studies

| Keynote Speakers

Michel Agier (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales)
Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Alexandra Lopes (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)
Alexander Ghedi Weheliye (Brown University

| Scientific Committee

Diana Gonçalves
Annimari Juvonen
Andreas Langenohl
Verena Lindemann Lino
Marília Lopes
Adriana Martins
Rita Bueno Maia
Paulo de Medeiros
Joana Moura
Dzifa Peters
Sofia Pinto
Luísa Santos
Loredana Polezzi
Márcio Seligmann-Silva

| Practicalities

Abstracts should be sent to hospitalityconf2024@gmail.com no later than 15 March 2024 and include
paper title, abstract in English (max. 250 words), name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation, and a brief
bio (max. 100 words) mentioning ongoing research. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 31 April
2024 at the latest.

We invite abstracts for individual and joint presentations and also welcome artistic interventions and cocreative, performative presentations. Accepted participants will be asked to register for the conference
and provide some personal details for that purpose.

The conference will take place on site, at Universidade Católica Portuguesa. For more information about
the conference please consult: https://conjuncturesofhospitality.wordpress.com/

| Costs

Registration fees

Early Bird Regular
Graduate/Student/Post-Doc Early bird: 70 € Regular: 90 €
Senior Scholar/Researcher Early bird: 100 € Regular: 120 €
*Fees include coffee breaks, lunches, and conference materials.

The Organizing Committee may consider reducing or waiving a limited number of registration fees in
case of documented financial difficulties. CECC researchers are exempted from the registration fee but
will need to officially register.

| Organizing Committee

Annimari Juvonen
Verena Lindemann Lino
Sofia Pinto

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II Lisbon Spring School in Translation Studies

the translator, the author, the editor, the client & their others

3-8 June 2024

Call for Papers

The Lisbon Spring School in Translation Studies aims to provide an open space for the exchange of ideas, methods, and best practices.

The II Spring School addresses the topic of translation and agency in multiple forms, from age-old analogies of the past [the translator as matchmaker, as slave to the original, as a cannibal] to the most recent debates on translator intervention and collaborative efforts (see Munday 2008; Cordingley and Frigau Manning 2017) via the decade-old discussions on the (in)visibility (Venuti, 1992, 2018), and voice (Hermans 1996, Andermann 2007, Alvstad et al. 2017). Most recently, attention has focused on the role of the translator and its absolute centrality (see Zethsen and Korning 2009; Milton and Bandia, 2009; Kaindl, Kolb and Schlager, 2021), leading to the emergence of a branch of inquiry aptly named Translator’s Studies. Translators, however, do not exist in a vacuum, and the context they live in, the people they work under or with, the constraints and blindspots of their individual existence do matter and need to be scrutinized. Within this framework, contributions on the historical, political, socioeconomic and imaginative loci of translators, adapters, editors, publishers, proofreaders, reviewers, patrons, clients, etc. are welcome.

The Lisbon Spring School, which invites fruitful discussion and dissent, results from a twofold goal: on the one hand, to do justice to the nature of TS understood as an interdiscipline (SnellHornby, Pöchhacker, Kaindl, 1994; Chesterman, 2017) and, on the other, to welcome (and learn from) young scholars working in TS, regardless of topic, preferred school of thought, language(s), and/or country of origin. Ideally, this week-long event will highlight contemporary research interests and paths, resulting in a tentative mapping of an inclusive and plural field from the perspective of emerging scholars and their fresh insights and inputs. Students and early-career researchers from around the world are invited to submit their ongoing work, and to discuss it with their peers, as well as with internationally renowned TS scholars.

The Spring School is a six-day event, comprising lectures by national and international scholars, paper sessions (PhD students and early career researchers) and poster sessions (MA students), translation workshops, and a cultural programme.

We welcome contributions on:

• translation agents: voice, visibility & other forms of presence;
• agency in translation;
• fictional translators and their impact on the conceptualization of translation;
• translator’s memoirs, diaries, autobiographies and the emergence of autotheory;
• translation and activism;
• translation and creative practices;
• translation as conservatorship;
• translators as revolutionaries;
• the relationship between translating and gender, race, power, and minorities;
• translation, mobility & ‘extraterritoriality’ (Sela and Amir, 2016);
• the creative interplay of TS and knowledge production in other fields of enquiry, such
  as Literary Studies, Culture Studies, Cognitive Studies, Media Studies, History,
  Philosophy, as well as in the hard sciences.
  
  Other topics will also be considered.

Confirmed Keynote Speakers include:
Paul Bandia | Kathryn Batchelor | Karen Bennett | Klaus Kaindl | Susan Pickford | Loredana Polezzi | Manuel Portela | Michelle Woods

Scientific Committee:
Ana Margarida Abrantes | João Brogueira | Rita Bueno Maia | Maria Zulmira Castanheira | Jane Duarte | Gabriela Gândara | Peter Hanenberg | Alexandra Lopes | Joana Moura | Marco Neves | Isabel Oliveira | Hanna Pieta | Teresa Seruya

Organizing Committee:
Maria Zulmira Castanheira | Alexandra Lopes

Practicalities
Fee: 350€ (includes lunches, coffee breaks, materials, and closing dinner)
Free for CECC and CETAPS members.

Venues:
Faculdade de Ciências Humanas – Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas – Universidade Nova de Lisboa

Important dates:
Call for Papers: 31 January 2024
Deadline for abstract submission: 29 February 2024
Notification of acceptance: 2 April 2024
Early bird registration: 2 April – 1 May 2024 [350 euros]
Late registration: no later than 15 May 2024 [450 euros]

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4th Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication

Media and Ambivalence

9-12 JANUARY 2024

The 4th Lisbon Winter School for the Study of Communication takes a comparative and global approach to the study of media and ambivalence. Jointly organized by the Faculty of Human Sciences (Universidade Católica Portuguesa) and the Center for Media@Risk at the Annenberg School for Communication (University of Pennsylvania), in cooperation with the School of Journalism and Communication (Chinese University of Hong Kong), and the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (University of Helsinki), the 4th Lisbon Winter School offers an opportunity for doctoral students and early career post-doctoral researchers to strategize around the study of media and ambivalence together with senior scholars in the field.

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS

It is perhaps paradoxical that media scholars tend to regard ambivalence in ambivalent ways. Many maintain that ambivalence undercuts and undermines the media environments it inhabits, introducing a level of uncertainty that obscures not only multiple aspects of the media’s workings—including its messages, roles, technologies, practices and effects—but also what is most patterned and exceptional about the media writ large. Others see ambivalence as a necessary complication of the tired and overused binaries of late modernity, sustaining what the American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald described as the “test of a first-rate intelligence,” whose “ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” would produce generative opportunities built around the “the improbable, the implausible, often the impossible.”

Regardless, then, of how positively or negatively scholars feel about ambivalence, its presence is a clear component of media environments everywhere. But what kind of presence does it have? What are its primary attributes and pitfalls? In what ways does ambivalence make media environments better or worse? In what ways does it foster or complicate widely-adopted notions of media practices, processes, production, consumption and effects? How does it foster resistance and under which conditions?

This Winter School will examine the pairing of media and ambivalence in all its recognizable forms. Orienting to the broad spread of ways in which ambivalence can be understood to inhabit the media, it aims to develop a fuller understanding of why ambivalence is such a longstanding inhabitant of media environments. Possible questions stretch across the wide range of entry points for contemplating the media that allow for media representation and processing, media use and media refusal, media production and consumption. They include, how do the media and ambivalence shape each other? What role do the media and associated technologies play in structuring ambivalence, and what role does ambivalence play when associated with the media? Under which conditions does ambivalence emerge? How is it represented and where? How is it recognized and by whom? What impact does it have on media fare, the representation of marginalized groups or the shape of audience engagement? How does it affect the capacity to form identities, make informed decisions or embrace polarization? How does it figure in decisions to refuse or reject the media? How is ambivalence being weaponized in current political climates, and to what end? How has it been weaponized in the past?

We welcome proposals by doctoral students and early career post-doctoral researchers from all over the world to discuss the intertwined relation between media and ambivalence in different geographies and temporalities. The list below illustrates some topics for possible consideration. Other topics dealing with media and ambivalence are also welcome: 

• Ambivalence towards media platforms, content, practices or effects
• Ambivalence and AI
• Techniques to counter ambivalence 
• Ambivalence and identity formation
• Ambivalence and human rights
• Promoting ambivalent representations of the past
• Ambivalence in the public arena in specific national or regional contexts
• Ambivalent discourses on science and climate change
• Ambivalent discourses on racism, misogyny, classism, settler colonialism 
• Ambivalence and journalism
• Ambivalence and popular culture
• Resistance to media, including media rejection, media detox, pushback on social media, news avoidance or domestic practices to control media usage
• Children and media ambivalence 
• Ambivalence, media and imaginative future 
• Ambivalence and conflict
• Ambivalence and overload
• …​

​

Proposals should be sent to lisbonwinterschool@gmail.com no later than 30 September 2023 and include a paper title, extended abstract in English (700 words), name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning ongoing research. Applicants will be informed of the result of their submissions by mid-October

Presenters will be required to send in full papers (max. 20 pages, 1.5 spacing) by 15 December 2023. 

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 Issue 9 | Beyond the Object: Immaterial Pasts, Immaterial Futures 

Diffractions

The next issue of Diffractions explores immateriality in artistic and cultural practices as a form of both expression and resistance. For centuries, the histories of artistic practices (as well as historiographies and historicities) have been anchored to materiality and the production of objects. As Michel Claura argues, “[t]he history of art is the history of the technique of art” (1969, 83). Indeed, curatorship as we know it today initially developed around objects and their need of care.

However, artists have constantly been questioning and deconstructing the need to produce objects, shifting the focus from physical artworks to their assigned concepts and intentions. These practices include performances, happenings, participatory and socially engaged artistic movements, and Nicolas Bourriaud (2002)’s relational aesthetics in one of the best-known examples. While artistic production has challenged the dogmatic authority of materiality and its exhibition and conservation practices (from private collections to national archives, among many others), cultural institutions and political bodies (and the so-called Western ones in particular) have only recently started to value the immaterial artistic expressions of individuals and communities.

For instance, the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage only dates back to 2003, and is still today a source of discussion for its polarising nature and limitations (Van Damme and Jacobs 2002). A very discussed case is the 2010 inscription of the Mediterranean Diet in the 2003 UNESCO Convention, which comprises as geographically and culturally different cuisines as the Cypriot, Italian and Portuguese culinary traditions.

However, it has emerged that the description of the Mediterranean diet has turned out to be complex and almost impossible (Ferro-Luzzi and Sette 1989), while “[r]ecent investigations of the dietary patterns and health status of the countries surrounding the Mediterranean basin clearly indicate major differences among them in both dietary intake and health status” and therefore “the term “Mediterranean diet” is a misnomer” (Simopoulos 2001, 3065). To fit the limits of the Convention, the inscribed object ended up being broad and even generic, as a result of the absence of a specific domain of culinary heritage and the significant territorial differences between the co-signatory countries.

Despite the western centric idea that Marcel Duchamp’s conceptual turn caused an unprecedented shift in the artworld by allowing intentional acts to be technically considered art, the presence of immaterial practices as both cultural artefacts and tools for the production of knowledge has long existed in multiple cultures over millennia. Described by Brandt as the art of “picking up an object and displaying it, or even of merely declaring the intention to do so” (2004, 210), Duchamp’s ready-mades (but also Isamu Noguchi’s practice of rock placement, for instance) have long and improperly been addressed as a first example of physical and technical abstraction. Not only has the dematerialization of art been explored in different periods and geographies as a way of criticising art systems and challenging institutional structures (Osborne 2018; Ramírez 1993; Stimson 1999), but certain cultures have rarely or even never resorted to physical media, favouring, for instance, orality over the use of writing.

On this subject, in her book Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss comparative literature scholar Jenny Sharpe addresses “the paucity of documentary evidence concerning the lives of people who were immaterial to the archiving process, but not by treating contemporary art and literature as an alternative archive” (Sharpe 2020, 3). Here, she continues, immaterial “refers to the intangible quality of affects, dreams, spirits, and visions that art and literature introduce into material archives” and, in particular, “to the degraded status of African-derived knowledge, languages, and cultures within colonial archives, as well as the diminished status of the humanities in an information-based society today” (2020, 4). If these phenomena are made up of visions, affects, mythologies, dreams and even silence (and much more), Sharpe asks, are they something or nothing? Do they have substance even though they have a different relationship to traditional Western archival practices and written records?

The link between materiality and extractivist colonialism first and accumulative capitalism later is not new. As sociologist Rolando Vázquez writes, the objectification of the world is needed in order to conquer it (2020). This economic interest-based attitude towards materiality traces back to the enlightenment rational belief that the natural world subsists only as an instrument for human ambition. In their article “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”, Karen Barad challenges this anthropocentric separation arguing that “«[w]e» are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity” (2003, 828). In fact, the idea that humans are outside nature is addressed by Anna Grear as a contributing factor to the “climate and environmental fallouts; the fundamentally colonial capitalist imperatives driving the continuing structural dominance of the fossil-fuel economy; extensive, and continuing, corporate enclosures in the Global South; and the pervasive and expanding commodification and technification of «nature»” (2020, 338). Within a context of fast-paced logic of industrial and cultural production (Bouteloup 2020) based on practices of human and non-human exploitation, how should we question the historically dominant focus on materiality in artistic and cultural practices today?

This issue of Diffractions wants to start a discussion about how multiple perspectives and fields of research and action have blurred the boundaries between binary conceptions such as human-nature, subject-object, and material-immaterial to acknowledge alternative narratives, existences, and temporalities (Bellacasa 2017; Krasny 2022; Vásquez 2020). These include, but are not limited to, posthumanist studies, decolonial and care practices, gender and feminist studies, artistic and activist actions, and many more. It intends to challenge materialist theories and reflect on the importance of non-materials such as ideas, emotions, sensations, and questions of being and becoming – what Elizabeth Grosz coined as the “incorporeal” (2017) – on our ethical and political existences and on the relationships between humans and other living beings. In fact, we believe that new materialities and immaterialities are particularly significant in their attempts to question and eventually overcome anthropocentrism, but also in the celebration of listening practices and oral traditions through the recognition of knowledge as discursive, embodied, and affective across “more than human materialities and existences” (Bellacasa 2017, 221).

We look forward to receiving proposals for contributions addressing these or related questions in several different formats (research paper, creative essay, documentation of art-based research and practices, …). Topics include but are not limited to:

● Immaterialities and new materialities in artistic and cultural practices;

● Alternative art histories, historiographies, and historicities;

● Documenting, archiving and collecting the immaterial;

● Curating the immaterial;

● Performativity and relationality in immateriality;

● Listening practices from the past, through the present, and towards the future: orality and transmission;

● Ancestral, virtual, hybrid: on non-physical bodies;

● Immateriality as decolonial and postcolonial praxis;

● Capitalism and commodification: immateriality as resistance;

● Dematerialization of artistic practices: the curatorial, research, dialogue, and knowledge production;

● Physicality and ephemerality: cultural spaces;

● Digital and virtual expressions;

● Immaterial existences: posthumanism and new materialism;

● Immateriality and alternative temporalities;

● Material and immaterial power dynamics.

● …

Submissions and review process

Abstracts will be received and reviewed by the Diffractions editorial board who will decide on the pertinence of proposals for the upcoming issue. After submission, we will get in touch with the authors of accepted abstracts in order to invite them to submit a full article. However, this does not imply that these papers will be automatically published. Rather, they will go through a peer-review process that will determine whether papers are publishable with minor or major changes, or they do not fulfill the criteria for publication.

Please send abstracts of 150 to 250 words and 5-8 keywords as well as a short biography (100 words) by DECEMBER 15th, 2023 to info.diffractions@gmail.com with the subject “Diffractions 9”, followed by your last name.

The full papers should be submitted by MARCH 31st, 2024, through the journal’s platform: https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions.

Every issue of Diffractions has a thematic focus but also contains a special section for non-thematic articles. If you are interested in submitting an article that is not related to the topic of this particular issue, please consult the general guidelines available at the Diffractions website at https://revistas.ucp.pt/index.php/diffractions/about/submissions. The submission and review process for non-thematic articles is the same as for the general thematic issue. All research areas of the humanities are welcome.

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Space Oddity: On Spatial Narratives

XII Graduate Conference in Culture Studies 25-27 January, 2024

Research Center for Communication and Culture (CECC) Universidade Católica Portuguesa – Lisbon

Call for Papers (deadline extension)