Deadline: Mar 31, 2015

Issue 8: Space, Alterity, Memory

PLEASE NOTE: Deadline extended until 31 March 2015.

In recent years, public protest movements such as Occupy and
#BlackLivesMatter have demonstrated the ways in which political power,
economic and ethnic identity, and cultural memory are closely linked to
questions of space. The assembly of non-hierarchical oppositional
communities in Zuccotti Park, the mass demonstrations across American
cities countering police-enforced racial segregation, and the
construction of precarious counter-monuments to the victims of state
violence (such as the recently-destroyed memorial for Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Mo.) exemplify how efforts to resist and commemorate are
entangled with the unequally distributed access to public space in
post-Civil Rights America.

Analogous issues are at the fore throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia,
the Middle East, and Africa where new forms of local belonging and
transnational immigration have revealed systematic patterns of racism
and exclusion. Increasingly, public displays of xenophobia rely on
essentialist notions of place and identity, which threaten fragile
multicultural agreements. What happened to the utopic future of
progressive cultural inclusiveness envisioned in our popular culture?
Is this turn part of a cyclical longer history? What are the markers of
state power, familial legacies, capital, fear and an empowered populace
that allow for resistance and how do they manifest in the public arena
whether virtual or real?

This special issue of Shift takes a broad view of these recent
developments by exploring the interrelationships of space,
alterity/identity and memory in visual and material culture. We accept
papers, as well as exhibition and book reviews from a range of
visually-oriented disciplines that explore such issues as:

The status of the public monument or assembly
Ephemeral, archival and other non-monumental forms of public
memorialization
The fate of established art historical categories such as
site-specificity or monumentality
The figure of the migrant in visual culture/the relationship
between art, migration and urban space
The contestation and occupation of public and private space
The architectural construction of race
The city versus the nation as art historical or museological
framework

All submissions should be sent by email to editors@shiftjournal.org by
31 March 2015. The journal launch will take place 01 October 2015.

For submission and style Guidelines, please visit:
http://shiftjournal.org/call-for-papers.