Current Issue

“Space is fundamental in any exercise of power.” - Michel Foucault

Space and place influence the (re)production of power dynamics (Foucault 1984; Beebe et al 2012). “The city” is a site of this power; it reflects the presence and co-existence of past and future, of history and the contemporary. The world is constantly re-examining its relationship to space. Now more than ever, the pandemic and ensuing lockdown in many parts of the world has sparked renewed public debates and academic reflections concerning people and the spaces they inhabit. The connection between bodies and spaces, both material and symbolic, is being re-imagined to accommodate regulations, social distancing, and crucially, new understandings of how people and places are allowed to function in relation to one another. 

The city spaces we inhabit - even as they are made from stone and metal - are not fixed and stable. Black and Indigenous activist movements calling for the destruction of colonial monuments have shown us how the city as a space is a social construction that is less static and objective than it purports to be. Buildings and spaces are an accumulation of different histories and societies, but we are finding ourselves in a transformative moment of interrogating the power dynamics reflected in these designs. Monument and building upkeep, for instance, raises questions about who and what is reflected within the city, and the political implications thereof. We also see the extent to which city structures dictate the oppression and displacement of homeless people through hostile architecture. 

What is the role in the history of the city in terms of how it reflects values and public identity? How can buildings, monuments, statues, and idols be repurposed and reclaimed? How does the infrastructure of the city facilitate protests? In what ways have cities been imagined, and how does the city configure in potential imaginaries? In other words: we are currently in a time where discussions into (re)building the city are opening up: the physical, the imagined, the radical, and the remembered. We invite graduate and postgraduate students of the Humanities to contribute to the upcoming issue of Junctions, titled: ‘(re)building the city’. We welcome submissions from all fields of the Humanities, and encourage authors to engage with (interdisciplinary) issues.

The submission length for original journal articles is 4000–6000 words, and 1000–2000 words for book reviews. Submissions should engage with the scholarly literature of the appropriate discipline and clearly identify its contribution to the field(s). A separate call for book reviews will be published at a later time. Manuscripts should be in Chicago author-date referencing style, following the official Junctions Word template and the prescribed author guidelines. Please submit a digital copy (as a Word document) via the submission system on our website by 25 June. Please omit references to the author in manuscripts to ensure anonymous reviews. After double-blind reviewing, accepted articles will undergo a revision process which will conclude with the publication of the journal issue. The journal does not accept manuscripts previously published by or simultaneously submitted to other publications.

For more informal questions, you can reach out to Junctions on social media at: @junctionsuu on Instagram and Twitter, or find us on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Download the full call for papers here!

“Depending on who you speak to, decolonisation is about interrogating, resisting, dismantling, reforming or transforming the university. It is about critically engaging with how the university has historically produced, sustained and justified violence and domination across the world… As we witness the co-option of decolonisation as a term, we see its potential to fit neatly with the agenda of Management to discredit old forms of organising the university. It can be harnessed to promote marketisation of Universities as companies competing for ‘clients’ (read: students)... In other words, humanities and social science degrees are cheap to run but fees are high – and Black Studies could attract a new ‘market’ of students”. (Bhambra, Nişancıoğlu & Gebrial 2020, 513-514) 

For the 10th anniversary issue of Junctions, we invite graduate students and recent graduates in the Humanities to submit position papers reflecting on the above quote from the point of view of their own discipline. As an interdisciplinary journal in the Humanities, we are interested in how different disciplines have or have not taken up the theme of decolonizing in recent scholarship and educational practices. We therefore ask authors to reflect and offer their personal stance on questions such as: What steps do you, as a student, take to engage with your discipline or within the larger space of the university through the lens of decoloniality? How is decolonizing approached in your discipline? In what way does your discipline (in)visibilise the (re)production of (de)coloniality? 

Position papers should be between 1000-1500 words in length, and should take the form of a personal reflection preferably, but not necessarily, rooted in a specific discipline. Manuscripts should be in Chicago author-date referencing style, following the official Junctions Word template and the prescribed author guidelines. Please submit a digital copy of your manuscript (as a Word document) via the submission system on our website by March 23. Your submission will be handled through open peer review by our managing editors, and notifications of acceptance will be sent on March 30. Accepted submissions may require revisions. Junctions does not accept manuscripts previously published by or simultaneously submitted to other publications.

For more information and questions regarding the publication process, please contact the managing editors at: editor@junctionsjournal.org. For more informal questions, you can reach out to Junctions on social media at: @junctionsuu on Instagram and Twitter, or find us on Facebook and LinkedIn.

To download this call for papers click here!

In 2017, Achille Mbembe wrote: ‘[t]oday, the decolonizing project is back on the agenda worldwide’ (36). He was writing in reference to the Rhodes Must Fall protests at the University of West Cape Town, South Africa, where in 2015 protests against a statue of Cecil Rhodes received global attention and saw ‘decolonizing’ institutions of higher education propelled back into mainstream discourse. Calls for decolonizing classrooms and curricula have abounded across the world since, with especially open letters directed at university boards gaining public momentum. Arguably, the call for decolonizing institutions has become even more urgent and overt in 2020, after the Black Lives Matter movement catapulted global anti-racism to the forefront of public consciousness following the murder of George Floyd. Indeed, local calls for decolonizing Utrecht University can be read as a direct result of ‘institutionalized racism’ as a concept being taken up by Dutch politics. 

Decoloniality, and decolonizing institutions, has consistently been a topic of debate within the academy, which has more recently taken issue with the multiplicity of defining decoloniality as a concept and a praxis – as well as the ethical considerations underlying such endeavors. The ‘metaphorization of decolonization’ has, for instance, been critiqued as a means to ‘recenter whiteness’ and ‘resettle theory’, regardless of how anti-racist, or social-justice-oriented critical engagements might be. Mbembe, amongst others, highlights the need for decoloniality as praxis from within: a critical reflection amongst disciplines themselves is crucial to enable the decolonizing of both knowledge and the university as an institution. This entails that decoloniality exists in the realm of multiplicities and pluralities, encompassing both form and format. In that vein, this celebratory issue of Junctions is also turning inwards; we want to reflect on the university and the practices of the journal, as well as the call to ‘decolonizing’ itself, open up the dialogue between the stakeholders concerned, and contextualize the university within a larger framework of decolonizing institutions. 

We therefore invite graduate and postgraduate students of the Humanities to contribute to the 10th anniversary issue of Junctions, titled: ‘Decolonizing the University’. We welcome submissions from all fields of the Humanities, and encourage authors to engage with (interdisciplinary) issues.

Check out the full call for papers here! (Deadline 2 February 2021)