Current Issue

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)

For the upcoming issue of Junctions, we are looking for graduate and recent postgraduate students to submit book reviews, especially related to this issue’s theme ‘Bodies in Disarray.’ As Utrecht University’s Graduate Journal of the Humanities, Junctions provides students the opportunity to gain valuable publishing, editing, and reviewing experience. Some excellent student research unfortunately never reaches outside of a particular class. We aim to help you get this out into the world. Academic book reviews, especially, provide an excellent way for (post)graduate students to display their active engagement with current scholarship in their field, and to enrich their CV with a journal publication. 

Our journal aims to connect the different disciplines of the Humanities by collecting disciplinary and interdisciplinary texts that are accessible to readers from across the Humanities. We thus offer a space for worldwide graduate scholarship from all fields in the Humanities, and welcome reviews of recent academic publications on any topic in the Humanities. We especially welcome submissions related to the theme of the upcoming issue, ‘Bodies in Disarray.’ This subject encompasses such issues as: precarious bodies, vulnerability, and grief; individuality, privacy, and the collective; acceleration and deceleration in times of crisis; and histories and discourses of public health and political economy. There are many more potential topics of interest, and we encourage you to look at the way your discipline relates to the theme.

Submissions should be 750-1500 words in length, and the reviewed book should be published within the last 24 months. Please send a digital copy (as a Word document) of the complete manuscript in Chicago author-date referencing style, following the prescribed author guidelines which are provided at https://junctionsjournal.org/about/submissions/, to editor@junctionsjournal.org by November 1st, 2020. 

Check out the full Call for Book Reviews here!

As we write this call for papers, both human and inhuman forces threaten the bodies of millions with severe illness and death. Massive #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations calling for racial justice and an end to police brutality are sweeping across the world while a pandemic spreads among the populations of all continents—hitting hardest at the most marginalized and vulnerable communities, both in terms of infection rates and economic consequences. News cycles in the Global North during the first half of 2020 featured uncontrollable wildfires in Australia, the locust plague in East Africa, the accelerated destruction of the Amazon and the consequent threat to its indigenous peoples, escalating violence against Kurds, Palestinians, Yemenis, Uyghurs, and others, the official exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and of course the heavily mediatized racist murder of George Floyd that sparked the current global anti-racist protest movements. Surely, even a casual observer cannot escape the anxious feeling that something is coming to a head; yet, what this “something” might be is not always immediately obvious, nor is it accurate to speak of a singular “thing”. Systems, cycles, feedback loops, discourses, identities, species, temporalities, and bodies intersect in innumerable ways. They are mutually constitutive and interdependent, but they can also disrupt each other’s configurations—they can be thrown into disarray. For instance, we see this paradoxical dynamic with the COVID–19 crisis: it came about under the current conditions of global capitalism, but has also called the future of that same system into question.

We invite graduate and postgraduate students of the Humanities to contribute to the next issue of Junctions, titled ‘Bodies in Disarray’. From all fields, we welcome submissions that engage with this subject and the issues that stem from it.

Check out the full call for papers here! (Deadline 11th of September 2020)