Category: Call for Papers

Call for Book Chapters: Memory Studies – An Anthology of Perspectives

Chapter proposals are invited for a volume on contemporary memory and literary studies edited by Dr. D. Sudha Rani ( VNRVJIET ), Dr. Rachel Irdaya Raj ( VNRVJIET ), Dr.Shashibhusan Nayak (GP Nayagarh& MLA).

Memory studies is an increasingly diverse, interdisciplinary, and dynamic field of knowledge that spans multiple disciplines. Sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, media, cultural studies scholars, and natural and applied scientists have been exploring the concepts and application of memory to evolve a theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework to investigate this emerging field of study. Memory—personal, collective, cultural—is crucial to the formation, conservation, and preservation of the identity of an individual, community, society, and nation. The act of remembering involves narration, and storytelling is a form of storing. As narration moves from oral, written, and visual records to the digital, it becomes imperative to understand the interface between and among the human and the non-human, digital and analog, and its impact on memory and its narrativization.

The explosion of technology allows us to know what we need to know and preserve what we want our future generations to know. To study and document certain forms of knowledge that are crucial to defining who we are, this interdisciplinary edited collection aims to bring together researchers, academics, technologists, corporates, and students to discuss, debate, and understand the various storytelling strategies adopted by different communities, regions, and nations to record and preserve their identities and collective memories. Since technology has assumed a vital role in this endeavor, it is necessary to assess the impact of technology on both the content and form of memory and its narration. The edited collection attempts to understand how the past, present, and future are formed, framed, mediated, and remediated through various forms of storytelling. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological approaches offered by literary, cultural, and media studies, history, sociology, psychology, as well as science and technology, this edited collection hopes to investigate the artistic representations of languages, communities, regions, and nations in oral histories, life writings, testimonies, and fictional and nonfictional narratives. The edited collection would examine issues related to memory, identity, representation, and narrativization and the impact of digital technology on memory studies and storytelling.

The edited collection invites papers on the following themes but is not limited to:

• Memory studies—theories and praxis

• Modes and methods of storytelling—of languages, communities, nations, and regions

• Impact of digital technologies on memory and memory studies

• Language, literature, and memory

• Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality of memory and memory studies.

• Memory and oral history

• Memory and life writing

• Memory and archive

• Memory and erasure

• Memory and marginality

• Memory and textuality

• Memory, cognition, and critical theory

• Memory and the Medium of fiction

• Memory and (mis)representation

• Memory and production of identities

Submissions

Abstracts of about 200 words, along with up to six keywords, a 50-word bio-note, institutional affiliation, and contact details, should be emailed by 30 July 2023 to shashienglish@gmail.com as a single MS Word document attachment.

Chapter requirements: A chapter should be max. Eight thousand words, including footnotes and bibliography adhering to the MLA 9th edition.

Important Dates:

Deadline for abstract submission: 30 July 2023

Abstract selection notification: 30 August 2023

Complete Paper Submission: 30 October 2023

Contact :

Dr. Shashibhusan Nayak

MLA Bibliography Fellow

email: shashienglish@gmail.com

CFP: Archives of Revolution:  A Conference About How We Make the Past

June 20-22, 2024
The John Carter Brown Library
at Brown University

As we approach a series of 250th anniversaries, the histories of the American Founding have never been more hotly contested. In the United States, historians regard 2026 with some trepidation and a lot of determination to educate a wary public about the importance of evidence to the interpretation of the past. With nationalist movements—who tend to appropriate founding narratives for their own political purposes—on the rise around the world, histories of the international revolutionary era are equally fragile and fraught elsewhere. Indeed, the difficulty of addressing these pasts might lead to avoiding history altogether in a lot of the 250th commemorations.

In this challenging context, the archives of revolution pose both opportunity and imperative for 2026. Creating, exploring, promoting, preserving and most of all critically engaging with the nature and process of archives and archiving helps us to understand the past that we’re making. As archivists, literary scholars, librarians, historians, and more, we all interact with and help shape the past through its material and textual remains. Sharing more about the process of making archives of revolution, of using them, and of their changing nature in the twenty-first century, prompts new conversations about the past.It is also a way, we hope, of engaging scholars, archivists, and the public in a civil conversation about who owns it, has owned it, and who shapes it.

Just as the bicentennial of 1976 set in motion an array of documentary editing projects, we now find ourselves in a new and dramatically different evidential landscape, one shaped by the digital humanities, a more capacious Atlantic context for the American Revolution, and a half century of fresh scholarship. Archives of Revolution—a hybrid gathering of historians, curators, archivists, and educators—will be a forum for a major reconsideration of the foundation of Revolutionary history.

A collaboration between the John Carter Brown Library on the campus at Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies and Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts this conference will be a forum for scholars, archivists, and educators from around the Atlantic to address the state of the archive, its interpretation, its preservation, and its dissemination.

We invite proposals for papers and roundtables, and panel discussions around the following three themes:

  1. Collecting and privilege: What is an archive and how do archives come to be?  How do archival priorities shape Revolutionary histories? How do the unequal resources of institutions around the Atlantic affect our ability to write global Revolutionary histories? 
  2. Interpreting the archive: How has the nature of the archive or our understanding of what constitutes an archive shaped histories of Atlantic Revolutions? How does any archives’ focus relate to effort to write transnational or global Revolutionary histories? What has been the impact of scholars’ “archival turn”?
  3. Access and discovery: How has the expansion of archives, especially digitally, impacted our understanding of the Atlantic’s age of revolution? What are future directions for expansion—transnationally, multi-lingually, intercontinentally—as archives become more accessible and as archival datasets yield new insights? What strategies can we use to improve access and discovery beyond the Global North? What were the historic barriers for diverse scholars trying to access archives and in what ways is access still unequal?

SUBMIT A PAPER OR SESSION
Deadline: August 15, 2023.

The conference is chaired jointly by Emma Hart of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Sean Quimby of UPenn Libraries, and Karin Wulf of the John Carter Brown Library.

For more about Archives of Revolution:
https://ageofrevolutions.com/2023/03/20/archives-of-revolution/ 

CFP: Journal of Open Humanities Data

Call for Papers for 2023

The Journal of Open Humanities Data (JOHD) features peer-reviewed publications describing humanities research objects with high potential for reuse. These might include curated resources like (annotated) linguistic corpora, ontologies, and lexicons, as well as databases, maps, atlases, linked data objects, and other data sets created with qualitative, quantitative, or computational methods, including large language model prompts and prompt engineering strategies.

We are currently inviting submissions of two varieties:

  1. Short data papers contain a concise description of a humanities research object with high reuse potential. These are short (1,000 words) highly structured narratives. A data paper does not replace a traditional research article, but rather complements it.
  2. Full length research papers discuss and illustrate methods, challenges, and limitations in humanities research data creation, collection, management, access, processing, or analysis. These are intended to be longer narratives (3,000 – 5,000 words), which give authors the ability to contribute to a broader discussion regarding the creation of research objects or methods.

Humanities subjects of interest to the JOHD include, but are not limited to Art History, Classics, History, Library Science, Linguistics, Literature, Media Studies, Modern Languages, Music and musicology, Philosophy, Religious Studies, etc. Research that crosses one or more of these traditional disciplinary boundaries is highly encouraged. Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories. More information about the submission process, editorial policies and archiving is available on the journal’s web pages.

Submissions are still open for our special collection, Humanities Data in the Time of COVID-19. This collection includes data papers that span various areas of enquiry about the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of the Humanities. Data from this period have far-reaching and impactful reuse potential, so we encourage you to share your data by submitting to this growing collection. JOHD provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

We accept online submissions via our journal website. See Author Guidelines for further information. Alternatively, please contact the editor if you are unsure as to whether your research is suitable for submission to the journal.

Authors remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons licence agreement.

CFP: Writing Artifacts (Edited Collection)

Call for Proposals: Writing Artifacts 
Co-Edited by Cydney Alexis and Hannah J. Rule

In our first edited collection The Material Culture of Writing (2022), we call for others to join us in addressing a gap in writing studies: scholarship on the histories and uses of writing artifacts that reveal the material lives of those who work with them. This CFP extends that effort. For this edited collection titled Writing Artifacts, we invite scholars in writing studies and material culture studies, as well as those across disciplines who study writing or writing artifacts, to help us build a rich archive of the objects and possessions that matter to the study and practice of writing–broadly construed. 

What is a writing artifact? For the purposes of this collection, we mean any material thing taken up in acts of writing: tools, implements, possessions, objects–material and immaterial (such as digital objects)–that can teach us about writers and writing. Any mundane human thing can be an artifact when we approach it as worthy of study. Artifacts might be one writer’s personal possessions or heirlooms or those that communities rely on to achieve communal tasks or goals. They could be small objects or large ones, artifacts that uncover the histories of marginalized groups, forgotten or lost objects, or writing tools that we know little about, but about which we want to know more. We are interested in range, from a nineteenth-century “secretaire” desk to the library card, the writing on which could be used to trace sociomaterial inequities across communities. By writing, we signal both alphabetic scribal acts and acts of multimodal, symbolic meaning-making. Our hope is to see the lives, writing histories, and writing practices of everyday people reflected in the artifacts documented in this volume. 

To help writers and scholars in diverse disciplines and from diverse professional writing backgrounds envision topics, we offer the following non-exhaustive list of potential focal objects: 

  • An heirloom, historical artifact, or object in your writing practice or home that you’re curious about researching 
  • Objects that have undergone “shift” in use during the pandemic or other times of flux/crisis 
  • Objects that undergird the writing process, even if they’re not traditional writing “objects” 
  • Sentimental or talismanic objects, those that sustain writing habits 
  • Objects that gatekeep, surveil, regulate, or impede writing  
  • Marginalized objects, ones that traditionally have not been showcased or preserved 
  • Literacy artifacts 
  • Writing identity artifacts 
  • Objects that might not at first glance seem like writing tools, but trigger writing and writing identity performance in public or private 
  • Objects that sustain or tell the stories of members of marginalized communities  
  • Mundane or vernacular objects 
  • Objects relevant to specific disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, or discourse community practices 
  • Objects related to research and lab practices  
  • Medical or health-related writing objects 
  • Workplace objects related to writing practice or production, including workplace sites such as businesses, libraries, and printing presses 
  • Writing and research tools, including AI-created/informed artifacts; coding, citation, and research management software; and revision tools  
  • Any object, really: such as office or desk objects, tools, digital files, good luck charms, art, music, devices, a rolodex, old communication technologies, new communication technologies, dining room tables, a laptop, family heirlooms, thrifted objects, an item housed in your university or workplace archives, hacked or modified objects, photographs that involve writing, quilts, typewriters, and assistive technologies such as screen readers. 

Each shorter form chapter (3,000-5,000 words) in this volume should center on one writing artifact–or related set of them. Our emphasis on shorter pieces is to encourage fresh, new scholarly work–a space to test novel ideas. We hope this CFP generates broad interest and will allow scholars/writers interested in writing objects an opportunity to engage (or re-engage, post-pandemic). 

We encourage work that utilizes varied qualitative and hybrid research methodologies and theoretical frameworks, as long as authors demonstrate a core interest in writing artifacts and the lives of the people who use or rely on them. Methods might include, but are not limited to, life-span interviews, autoethnography, consumer research, narrative, phenomenological approaches, observation and thick description, and historical secondary research. Contributors looking for methodological direction might consider undertaking a version of Prownian analysis, as described by Kenneth Haltman in American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture (2000).  

If the project includes research on human subjects, we ask authors to follow the best practices of the research protocols of their discipline.  

Proposal Submission Guidelines

  • Please submit a proposal by Sunday, September 25, 2023, with:
    • 250-400 word abstract that identifies the artifact(s) you’ll study and the research methods you’ll use. Please include a tentative title for your proposed chapter. We will also accept full chapter draft submissions for consideration, provided authors to edit their work down to the 3,000-5,000 word count. 
    • Your name and short bio with institutional/professional affiliation or writing/work background to provide context for your submission.  
  • Submissions are encouraged from all disciplines and backgrounds. Submissions that highlight the artifacts of marginalized communities and cultures welcomed. 
  • Ideally, authors will engage with material culture and/or consumer research scholarship, and we are happy to assist authors at the proposal or acceptance/revision stages. See list of touchstone work below for possible connections.  
  • We invite a wide range of genres/sub-genres, and favor work that is rich and complex in ideas, but written in a clear prose style that is accessible to a broad audience. 
  • If your project involves human subject research, please indicate the IRB timeline or share the procedure specific to your discipline.  

Touchstone Work 

  • Alexis and Rule, The Material Culture of Writing 
  • Haltman and Prown, American Artifacts: Essays in Material Culture 
  • Jules Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method” (Winterthur Portfolio) 
  • Henry Petroski, “Why the Pencil?” (American Scientist) 
  • Laura Micciche, “Writers Have Always Loved Mobile Devices” (The Atlantic) 
  • Henry Glassie, Material Culture 
  • Epp and Price, “The Storied Life of Singularized Objects: Forces of Agency and Network Transformation” (Journal of Consumer Research) 
  • Lesley Bartlett, “Identity Work and Cultural Artefacts in Literacy Learning and Use: A Sociocultural Analysis” (Language and Education) 
  • Gouge and Jones, “Wearables, Wearing, and the Rhetorics that Attend to Them” (Rhetoric Society Quarterly) 
  • Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, Why We Need Things 

Project Timeline 

Deadline for proposal submission: Sunday, September 25, 2023 
Contributors notified of acceptance: Monday, October 30, 2023 
Full chapter submission: Sunday, March 10, 2024 

Please direct all queries and submission to both Cydney Alexis, cydneyalexis [at] gmail [dot] com and Hannah Rule, rulehann [at] gmail [dot] com 

CFP: Archival Science Special Issue on Provenance

Guest Editors:

Jeannette A. Bastian, Professor Emerita, Simmons University
Stanley H. Griffin, Senior Lecturer, University of the West Indies
James Lowry, Associate Professor, Queens College

Open call for abstracts

A new wave of theorizing the concept of “provenance” (for example; provenance in place, crip provenance, whiteness as provenance, provenancial fabulation, de-colonizing provenance) suggests that the archival field continues to explore and re-interpret both the affordances and inadequacies of what is generally considered a foundational principle (Ghaddar 2022, pp.49-86; Brilmyer 2022, pp.1-25; Lowry 2022; Lapp 2023, pp.117-136; Aarons et. al 2022).

With its roots in early nineteenth century European archival practice, provenance has undergone successive re-interpretations through the late 20th and into the early 21st centuries. In 1993, Tom Nesmith’s groundbreaking publication, Canadian Archival Studies and the Rediscovery of Provenance  (Nesmith 1993) not only re-awakened a recognition of provenance as the fundamental archival principle but presciently suggested that provenance will continue to evolve not only as a principle but as an interpretive lens.

These successive re-interpretations have moved provenance from the literal to the conceptual. Each step has contributed to the ambiguity of provenance but at the same time deepened and enriched archival representation and use by expanding the meanings and values contained in records. Today provenance can be understood “not so much as a method for organizing records, but as an intellectual construct created through the archivists’ analysis of the numerous relationships that exist between records, creators and functions” (Douglas 2017, p.33).

Such a definition invites creative application and interpretation.

In this special issue of Archival Science, the guest editors welcome articles that both reflect the current state of provenance and also push the boundaries, and that play with, criticize or de/re-construct “provenance”.

Possible topics include:

  • Decentering provenance as a key archival precept: what other ways of organizing and contextualizing records present themselves when we set aside inherited understandings of the centrality of provenance?
  • Historical or contemporary studies that surface non-Western ways of organizing and contextualizing archives or thinking about provenance.
  • Provenance’s interpretive possibilities: what meanings are made or obscured when different lenses are used to understand archives? How interpreting records through different provenances re-orients their meaning. (for example; through the lens of social justice, Indigenous communities, community archives, the records continuum, social history, gender, minoritized populations).
  • Provenance in different formats (for example: photographs, film, digital and analogue artifacts, oral records, manuscripts, institutional records, storytelling, social media) and what the materiality of records suggests for what is a theoretical construct.
  • Provenance in relationship to other archival functions (for example; appraisal, description, arrangement) and concepts (such as custody, authority, authenticity).
  • Is ‘provenance’ the word? A linguistic reflection on other ways of ascribing creativity, historical, cultural and societal connections to materials of enduring value.
  • Defenses or re-articulations of orthodox interpretations and applications of the concept of provenance.
  • Monetizing provenance? The influences of heritage market demand on questions of authenticity, origin, ownership and profitability of claiming, collecting, and owning archives.

Key dates

Abstract Submission deadline: August 20, 2023
Notification of acceptance of Abstracts: September 15, 2023
Article Submission deadline: December 31, 2023
Review time: January – June 2024

Submission Instructions

Abstracts (500–1,000 words) and a short bio (200 words) should be emailed to the guest editors at jbastian6@gmail.com by August 20, 2023. The editors will notify authors whether their abstract is or is not accepted by September 15, 2023. Authors whose abstracts are accepted should submit their full paper for peer review by December 31, 2023.

Acceptance of an abstract does not imply ultimate acceptance of the completed paper for publication, as articles for inclusion in the special issue will go through a rigorous peer review process.

• Full paper submissions will be made online via the Archival Science Editorial Manager system. Please select article type “SI: Provenance” upon submission of the full paper.

• Authors are encouraged to follow the journal suggestion for papers not to exceed 7,000-8,000 words and are expected to conform to the journal’s publication guideline

References

Aarons J et al. (eds) (2022) Archiving Caribbean identity, records, community and memory. Routledge, London

Brilmyer G (2022) Toward a crip provenance: centering disability in archives through its absence. J Contemporary Arch Stud 9:1-25

Douglas J (2017) Origins and beyond. In: MacNeil H & Eastwood T (eds.) Currents of Archival Thinking (2nd. ed) Libraries Unlimited, California. pp 25-52

Ghaddar JJ (2022) Provenance in place: crafting the Vienna Convention for global decolonization and archival repatriation. In: Lowry J (ed.) Disputed Archival Heritage. Routledge, London, pp 49-86

Lapp J (2023) ‘The only way we know how’: provenancial fabulation in archives of feminist materials. Arch Sci 23:117-136  

Lowry J (2022) Whiteness as provenance. Provenance in Place Symposium, Dalhousie University, 7 March 2022

Nesmith T (ed.) (1993)  Canadian archival studies and the rediscovery of provenance. Scarecrow Press, New Jersey

CFP: Records Management Journal

Records Management Journal – Call for themed papers

The carrot and the stick: the impact of legislation, regulation and inquiries on records management best practice, change and innovation

RMJ Co-Editors: Elizabeth Lomas (University College London) and Sarah R. Demb (Harvard University)

Call for abstracts
The delivery of our recordkeeping systems is inextricably linked with societal expectations as enshrined in law. Legislation and regulations influences every aspect of the design and delivery of our systems from record creation, retention and deletion requirements, through to stakeholder rights, transparency and accountability through time. Laws also impact the role of professional records managers (including job descriptions, demands on time, resourcing and salaries, status within organizational structures etc) with some records managers becoming in effect paralegal professionals. Legislation is often seen as the stick
that motivates records management delivery but rather, should perhaps be promoted as the carrot seeking to ensure records management enables and delivers a better, fairer society. In addition, legislation drives forwards and shapes innovation and change, dictating the parameters of research, technological advancement and delivery in practice.

At these new frontiers in the ‘information age’, records managers and other professionals are increasingly taken a lead in the evolution of legislative frameworks. Navigating legal structures is by its nature dynamic; laws can change at pace, at sector, national, and
international levels. In addition it is a complex space. When implementing legal requirements in the real world, there is a need to balance competing considerations and be mindful of shifting contexts. For example, individual human rights can conflict with societal and organizational rights so there is a weighing of differing considerations required. Furthermore, as technology and data are shared and managed across global boundaries, international law needs to be traversed.

We are keen to promote discussions, best practice case examples and areas for improvement in this arena, surfacing both the macro and the micro using person-centred and/or technological lenses. Submissions are invited from practitioners, researchers and educators. They can be in the form of opinion pieces/viewpoints, critical reviews, research, case studies or conceptual/philosophical papers. In order to draw in short and long case examples from across research and practice, submission lengths can be from between 3000-8000 words.

Examples might include (but are not limited to):

  • The impact of the 1948 Charter on Human Rights on recordkeeping thinking;
  • The role and influence of regulators on recordkeeping systems at local, national and/or
    international levels;
  • The development of legal recognition of oral traditions in recordkeeping systems;
  • Case studies on the implementation or legal requirements in practice, e.g. the use of data
    protection privacy impact assessments to improve records managers system delivery and
    protection of personal data;
  • The parameters needed for AI law, e.g. the requirements for pipeline development
    documentation;
  • Discussions of the impact of example inquiries on recordkeeping including on the space for human
    testimony;
  • The space for legislation for citizen participation in record creation and keeping;
  • The place of recordkeeping professionals in legal delivery;
  • The impact of equality laws on systems design;
  • The role of AI in legal cases;
  • The challenge of ensuring the authenticity of evidence in a deep fake world.

Submission deadlines

  • Extended abstracts (more info below): Monday 31st July
  • Abstracts accepted and authors notified no later than: Mid-August 2023
  • Full paper submitted: 1 October 2023
  • Review, revision and final acceptance: 1 December 2023

The Records Management Journal applies article-level publication, so within approximately a month of acceptance the article will be available online.

Submission Process
Extended abstracts should be a 500 word version of the Records Management Journal’s structured abstract, using the headings described in the author guidelines at:
http://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/author_guidelines.htm?id=rmj. They should be emailed to Elizabeth Lomas at e.lomas@ucl.ac.uk by midnight on the 31st July 2023. Please use the subject line ‘RMJ Legislation Themed Call’ in your email. For the final version, please note that shorter opinion pieces and practitioner case studies (3,000 words) may also be submitted for this themed issue. Your abstract submission should indicate the intended length of your piece.

Under the design/methodology/approach heading, please include the following as appropriate to the type of paper:

  • What is the approach to the topic if it is a theoretical or conceptual paper? Briefly outline existing
    knowledge and the value added by the paper compared to that.
  • What is the main research question and/or aim if it a research paper? What is the research strategy
    and the main method(s) used?
  • If the paper is a case study outline, include its scope and nature, and the method of deriving
    conclusions.
  • If the paper is an opinion piece, outline its focus and key highlight points.

Please send your extended abstract to: e.lomas@ucl.ac.uk

Full papers (for accepted abstracts) should be 3000-8000 words (excluding references) and prepared using the RMJ guidelines which can be found at:
http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/journals/journals.htm?id=rmj. Papers will be reviewed following the journal’s standard double-blind peer review process.

The editor(s) are also happy to receive informal enquiries before submissions of abstracts.

Call for Abstracts: Special Issue of Comma on “Training and Education in Archives and Records Management”

Comma’s Editorial Board plans an edition devoted to the analysis and discussion of training and education in archives and records management around the world. This follows on from the special edition of Comma on “New Professionals in Archives and Records Management”. The abstracts for this demonstrate the importance that new professionals, and those concerned to support them, attach to training and education and their eagerness to critique and discuss their experiences. Training and education play a vital role in developing competent and confident archivists and records managers. Life-long learning and continuing professional development are crucial in both the maintenance of existing and the acquisition of new expertise, skills and knowledge for all individuals in the archives and records management workforce throughout their careers. 

ICA’s Train the Trainer Resource Pack defines education as “a systematic kind of instruction or intellectual and moral training designed to give participants a broad and/or deep understanding of the topics covered”. ICA’s Section on Archival Education and Training has a long tradition of international cooperation and support of ICA’s capacity building work. It also provides a forum for archival educators to network and start initiatives on international education and research. The Train the Trainer Pack describes training as “the transfer of knowledge and skills that enable participants to carry out their work”. ICA’s Training Programme, established in 2018, is currently undergoing its first significant review. Its primary goal has been to provide training opportunities and resources for those members in parts of the world without access to education and training. These two ICA entities are collaborating to provide guest editorship of the Comma special issue. 

To explore these important topics further, the International Council on Archives’ journal Comma invites abstract submissions for a special issue dedicated to the topic of “Training and Education in Archives and Records Management”. We encourage contributions on:  

  • Training themes and content, training delivery methods and styles 
  • Designing and delivering archives and records management education programmes 
  • Academic curriculum and/or on-the-job training 
  • Comparative surveys of education/training in archives and records management around the world  
  • Artificial intelligence and computational approaches in archival science 
  • Decolonizing archival curricula  
  • Translation and comparison of archives and records management terminology and concepts 
  • Competency frameworks, professional accreditation/certification 
  • Life-long learning and continuing professional development 
  • Developing collaborative international training and education programmes 

Articles comparing training and education traditions and cultures around the world are particularly welcome.  

The Guest editors welcome articles by: 

  • Trainers and training providers 
  • Educators and academics 
  • Apprentices and trainees 
  • Students and recently qualified professionals 
  • Employers, managers, mentors 
  • Professional associations 

The Guest editors especially wish to attract authors from all of ICA’s regions. We also encourage new professionals and first-time authors and are open to expressions of interest and draft abstracts which we are happy to review and discuss via email or virtual meetings prior to a final submission. Note that articles can be peer-reviewed at the request of authors. 

Abstracts for articles should include the author’s name(s), the article title, an abstract (of between 250 and 350 words) which describes what the article will be about, together with the main focus, any relevant research, and conclusions. Abstracts should be sent by 1st September, 2023, to Editor-in-Chief for Comma, Bethany Anderson (comma@ica.org), and special issue editors, Margaret Crockett (crockett@ica.org) and Andrew Flinn (a.flinn@ucl.ac.uk). Authors submitting abstract proposals will be notified during the first week in October. 

If accepted, articles can be up to 6,000 words but may be less if appropriate to the subject matter. The deadline for submitting the full article is 1st February 2024. Comma welcomes submissions in any of the seven languages of the journal: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish. The guidelines for submission of articles can be found here 

CFP for a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History on ‘Personal documents and ephemera as sources for interdisciplinary Holocaust scholarship’

Personal documents and ephemera as sources for interdisciplinary Holocaust scholarship

Edited by Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh) and Amy Simon (Michigan State University)

Since the 1970s, and proliferating in the 1980s, works of life-writing and of academic scholarship have sought to reconstruct the experience of individuals during persecution, and as refugees in different parts of the world. In the past decade micro-historical research has drawn increasingly on personal documents from the Holocaust. Branching out from works on Holocaust testimony and memoirs, literary scholars have engaged with diaries, letters and other ego-documents, and sociologists, linguists and ethnographers have shown interest in personal archives of families affected by the Holocaust. At the same time, the past two decades have seen a rise in publications of memoirs and other forms of life writing that engages specifically with such sources. Typically, such works proceed from one disciplinary perspective and rarely engage with scholarship working on similar sources but with a different scholarly method. Yet, a conversation of scholars in different disciplines working on the same documentary evidence is still lacking. Volumes such as The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life models a different approach by bringing together literary and cultural scholars with historians in the exploration of diary writing.

The proposed special issue seeks to facilitate a similar conversation and bring together scholarship on personal documents from the Holocaust. The aim is to develop and test multi- and interdisciplinary work regarding the value of different ways of approaching and interrogating these sources. We expect historians, literary scholars, linguists and translation scholars, historical anthropologists and sociologists among others to contribute to this special issue. We also encourage those working on documents from hitherto unexplored archival collections of Jewish refugees to majority-world locations, to propose contributions.

To this end we are inviting proposals for research articles of 7,000-12,000 words (incl. references and bibliography), annotated translations and research notes. We expect to host two gatherings during the writing process to engage in productive conversation about the  links between topics and cross-disciplinary approaches. The finished articles should act both as stand-alone research papers and model a methodological conversation across the entire special issue suggesting new directions for research in this field.  

Possible themes engaging personal documents and ephemera from the Holocaust could include, but are by no means limited to:

  • Multiple approaches to the same sources to explore gains of multidisciplinary research and opportunities for interdisciplinary work
  • The role of emotions for writing about personal archives
  • The relevance of materiality
  • Space and place in personal documents
  • Gender as an analytical category
  • Connecting micro- with macro-history
  • Language, translation and genre 
  • The value of engaging one collection of documents or a single diary
  • The value of working across a number of collections or different sources
  • Ethical considerations of writing about the lives of ‘private’ individuals 
  • Sociological, anthropological, historical, literary theory arising from engagement with personal documents

​​​​Timeline:

  • 300 word proposal with 100 word bio by 31 August 2023. Please send this to h.holtschneider@ed.ac.uk and simonamy@msu.edu.
  • Notification to submit full article by 30 September 2023.
  • Publication is envisaged by the end of 2025.

Contact Info: 

Dr Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh, UK

Contact Email: h.holtschneider@ed.ac.uk

URL: https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/hannah-holtschneider

CFP: The Image on the Page: A Study Day Around Illustrated Print Culture 

Concordia University Library, Montréal (Québec), Canada, 13 October 2023 (in-person) 

This study day aims to gather researchers around the subject of the printed image since the 1880s. A significant milestone of this era was the widespread implementation of halftone printing, a photomechanical process that eventually enabled the reproduction of subtle hues and gradients in publications with large-scale print runs. 

With particular attention to material bibliography and production techniques, we seek to better understand how illustrations contribute to the formation of meaning and discourses within different contexts from illustrated newspapers to etiquette manuals, from scientific journals to children’s books. As literacy levels continued to rise throughout the twentieth century, this vast array of publications was directed at increasingly diverse communities of readers whose expectations and needs influenced the development of visual culture in print. In turn, the intimate relationships that played out between image and text significantly shaped people’s impressions of the world around them by collating all manner of leisurely, professional, and political information within the space of the page. 

Straddling the disciplines of literary studies, art history, bibliography, and library sciences, the field of illustrated print culture is a privileged inroad to social history. We are inspired by the foundational work of Richard Benson’s The Printed Picture (MoMA, 2008) as well as recent scholarly interest in vernacular media, such as Sarah Mirseyedi and Gerry Beegan’s important contributions on the development of photomechanical reproduction and the Thierry Gervais-edited volume The “Public” Life of Photographs (The MIT Press, 2016). Heeding the call of rare books specialist Roger Gaskell, who has identified the need to develop a “bibliography of images,” we invite contributions in French and English that address any aspect of mass-produced visual materials as well as the diverse industrial or manual processes that enabled their production. 

Proposals may consider topics such as: 

  • The development, usage, or impact of various print processes. 
  • The importance of the graphic arts, including layout and typography, in the study of visual culture. 
  • The historical significance of a given book, magazine, or other kind of illustrated publication. 
  • Mass-produced works that rely on printed pictorial sequences such as photobooks, comic strips, or photo-novels. 
  • Posters, flyers, postcards and other kinds of ephemera. 
  • The invisible intermediaries: designers, prepress specialists, printers, typographers, etc. 
  • The evolving roles and statuses of author and illustrator/artist. 
  • Readership and reception. 
  • Distribution and publishing networks. 
  • The study of variants in the context of printed pictorial material: seriality, different editions, and the (ir)relevance of the original image. 
  • Approaches to the rapport between text and image in print and their resultant meaning. 
  • The creation and mass-circulation of stereotypes or other visual tropes. 
  • Theoretical or methodological approaches to multimedia artefacts: how to categorize, characterize and interpret hybrid print objects. 
  • The institutional challenges faced by scholars, libraries, and archives alike in collecting, cataloguing, preserving, and making illustrated print culture accessible. 

Proposals for 20 minute papers can be sent to stephanie.hornstein@concordia.ca before 15 July 2023. They should include a title followed by an abstract (200 words max.) and a short biography (100 words max.). 

Contact Info: 

Organizing committee 

Stéphanie Hornstein, PhD candidate, Department of Art History, Concordia University and Concordia Library’s Researcher-in-Residence 2022-2023. 

Michel Hardy-Vallée, PhD (art history), Visiting scholar, Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art, Concordia University. 

Contact Email: stephanie.hornstein@concordia.ca

URL: https://library.concordia.ca/about/news/#guid=https://library.concordia.ca/about/news/#i28_Apr_2023_11:44:00_EDT

CFP: Visible Designs: The Arts of Race and Capitalism (Symposium)

Call for Papers

 “VISIBLE DESIGNS: The Arts of Race and Capitalism”

 Interdisciplinary Symposium
University of Chicago
October 12-13, 2023

Plenary Panelists: Ashlee Bird (University of Notre Dame), Aston Gonzalez (Salisbury University), Silas Munro (Vermont College of Fine Arts), Kinohi Nishikawa (Princeton University)

We are seeking paper proposals for Visible Designs, a symposium that is bringing together researchers in History, Literature, American Studies, and allied fields (e.g., design studies, art history, others) who are studying the aesthetics of racial capitalism in the United States from the seventeenth century to the present day. Central to our discussion is design as a category for analyzing how people use race to make (and unmake) social lives in spaces of economic production, exchange, consumption, and waste. Our goal is to interrogate the centrality of visual and material culture to better understand how racialized capitalism functions, when it shifts over time, and where it manifests across a multitude of social sites in the American empire.

We welcome proposals for presentations from graduate students, earlier career scholars, and contingent faculty in all areas of the humanities, social science, and the design professions. The conference is organized to foster conversations between established scholars and emerging researchers. Our program will consist of four panels composed of invited faculty and emerging scholars; presenters will be matched with invited faculty according to broad methodological and thematic affinities. We encourage graduate students to propose presentations which reflect ongoing dissertation research. Presenters will be given funding to support travel and accommodations nearby the University of Chicago.

Sponsored by the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture and supported by the Terra Foundation of American Art, Visible Designs will mark the ten-year anniversary of “Invisible Designs: New Directions in the Study of Race in American Consumer Capitalism,” a conference held at the University of Chicago in October 2013. Whereas our first conference emphasized the “hidden” dimensions of racial discrimination and inequality in the consumer economy, our sequel probes the overt, spectacular, and artful ways that Americans have crafted racial identities, maintained systems of racial domination, and built anti-racist social movements.

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

  • The social lives of racialized commodities (iconography, furniture, cuisine, clothing, etc.)
  • Racial divisions of labor in craft traditions and artisanal manufacture as well as newer industries of design, advertising, architecture, marketing, and social media
  • The lived experience(s) of technologies, algorithms, and systems of racial inequality
  • Concepts of work, value, matter, energy, and waste in racial discourses and critical race theory
  • The narrative, graphic, and architectural forms that govern the archiving, writing, and curation of histories of racial capitalism
  • The administration of race relations and/or racial conflict in cultural industries and institutions

We invite you to submit a 250-word abstract for 20-minute paper presentations, along with a one-page CV, to conference organizers Chris Dingwall (dingwall@wustl.edu) and Korey Garibaldi (Korey.G.Garibaldi.4@nd.edu) by no later than July 28, 2023. Successful applicants will be informed in early August.