Current Issue

Memory, history, and narrative—these forces, distinct but strongly interlinked, have shaped societies for as long as people have passed on stories, myths, and knowledge. Today, the relationship between these forces is more immediate than ever. The recent events in Ukraine have cast the importance of narrative, framing, and the making of history into the limelight. With Putin’s invasion and the following conflict taking center stage in international media, the question of whose narrative will dominate the ensuing conflict has gained immediate importance. After all, those who control the narrative can shape history into what they wish it to be. However, while the shaping of history is often done through the lens of the party in power, memory can exist outside of a dominant narrative. The framing of events will lead to a memory of the conflict that is both personal and something lived, shaped, and transmitted by society more broadly, as a way of establishing a shared reality and a shared identity. So we see that the events in Ukraine, like so many other armed conflicts, are framed not only through the dominant narrative imposed from above, but also by the experiences shared by those whose suffering needs to be voiced in order to be processed. The Ukrainian teens who have taken to online spheres such as TikTok to document their experiences show how memory-making can serve as a way of contesting domineering narratives by highlighting the lived experiences of those affected by the war.

Moreover, documenting stories and memories is particularly relevant in times of trauma, broad or personal. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, storytellers around the world, professional and amateur alike, have taken to online media to document their experiences, shared and in many cases traumatic. How the memory of this period will be preserved in art and the cultural consciousness, time will tell. Furthermore, there are the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have been forced to flee their homeland in past weeks, like millions of refugees before them. The experiences of their traumatic displacement and the life they leave behind ripple outwards, creating a need for the documentation of stories, memories, as a means of ensuring remembrance. Memory, after all, is not just connected to larger histories, but in the basis tied to the individual. Memory scholar Maurice Halbwachs notes, ‘We preserve memories of each epoch in our lives, and these are continually reproduced; through them, as by a continual relationship, a sense of our identity is perpetuated’ (1992, 47). As such, the production and active preservation of stories from below can amplify the voices that may have once been silenced or made invisible.

We invite graduate and postgraduate students of the Humanities to contribute to the upcoming issue of Junctions, titled: ‘Producing Memory’.

The submission length for original journal articles is 4000–6000 words, and 1000–2000 words for book reviews. A separate call for book reviews will be published shortly. Submissions should engage with the scholarly literature of the appropriate discipline and clearly identify its contribution to the field(s). Manuscripts should be in Chicago author-date referencing style and follow the official Junctions template, which can be found on the author guidelines page. Please submit a digital copy (as a Word document) via the submission system on our website by May 30th. 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!

As ever, the 7.1 issue of Junctions is intended to give recent MA and RMA graduates the opportunity to publish their research and gain first-hand experience of the academic publishing process. However, on this occasion, instead of responding to a themed Call for Papers, we are inviting graduate and postgraduate students from all humanities subjects at research universities in the Netherlands to revisit their (Research) Master’s theses.

At Junctions we seek to provide an interdisciplinary platform for graduate scholarship. We do this by writing Calls for Papers that target very specific topics, like decolonizing the institution, our city spaces, or bodies in disarray. In doing this, we seek to contribute to the continued elevation of scholarly work at the graduate level. This has the advantage of providing an environment to delve into contemporary and relevant topics from multiple angles. However, we know that many (Research) Master’s students write amazing theses that often go unpublished and unread. These scholarly works that represent the culmination of months of effort should be given the platform they deserve. We are therefore dedicating issue 7.1 to recent graduates in the humanities and their theses. Through this showcase we give our scholars the opportunity to reach new audiences with their research and insights, and give readers the opportunity to engage with state of the art scholarship in the humanities.

While the purpose of this issue is to elevate thesis work, the platform is not intended to publish whole theses, but rather, academic papers. All submissions must fulfil the role of stand-alone papers and will therefore require adaptation from their original thesis format. It is important not only that submissions meet the word-limit requirements, but also that they are structured to suit this purpose.

Possible submission formats may include:

    Revised Introduction. A revised version of the thesis introduction; this should be shaped to form a rounded argument with conclusions drawn. Using this format, an author can present the ideas of their whole thesis in a condensed manner, including a summary of the theoretical background and an abbreviated version of some of the most important insights.

    Edited Chapter. One thesis chapter with a short introduction and contextualization of the overall project. This contextualization may be provided in a short summary prefacing the work (max. 500 words), explaining the purpose and scope of the thesis as a whole, and how this particular chapter relates to and supports the broader premise and arguments of the thesis.

    Full Paper. A full, standalone paper based on (parts of) a thesis or development of an idea or argument related to your thesis. This may include thoughts and reflections that have come about as a result of your thesis, but were not necessarily developed in the thesis itself.


For this issue we are seeking submissions from RMA and MA humanities graduates who have recently completed their thesis at a research university in the Netherlands.

The submission length for original journal articles is 4000–6000 words.  Submissions should engage with the scholarly literature of the appropriate discipline and clearly identify its contribution to the field(s). 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 10th January 2022. 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 LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, or find us on Facebook.

Download the full call for papers here!

For the upcoming issue of Junctions, we are looking for graduate and recent postgraduate students to submit book reviews, especially related to our upcoming issue’s theme ‘(Re)building the city’. As Utrecht University’s Graduate Journal of the Humanities, Junctions provides students the opportunity to gain valuable publishing, editing, and reviewing experience, and helps students increase the reach of their research beyond classroom walls. Academic book reviews in particular serve as an excellent way for (post)graduate students to showcase and display their engagement with current scholarship in their field, as well as to enrich their resume 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 across the humanities. We thus offer a space for global graduate scholarship from all fields in the humanities and also welcome reviews of recent academic publications thereof. For this edition of Junctions, we especially welcome reviews of recent academic works that engage with themes of the intersection of space, the city, and how power is negotiated. This may include works that broach subjects such as: the physical design and how it facilitates or works to the detriment of accessibility; the influence activism has on the possible redesign of the cityscape; the role of the city and space in the remembrance of its histories; and how different social and artistic imaginations of the city play into our understanding of its space.

There are many potential topics of interest, and we encourage you to look critically at the ways in which your discipline relates to the theme. Junctions has provided a list of books that can be selected for review here but you are welcome to explore further possibilities beyond what is listed thereon. Moreover, you are also welcome to submit reviews of books that do not immediately fit the theme of the issue as discussed above; for the general criteria regarding which books are suitable for review for this issue, please see below. For the list of books for review and more information on the upcoming issue, please look at our website: http://junctionsjournal.org.

Submissions of book reviews should be 1000–2000 words in length, and the reviewed book has to have been 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 December 28th, 2021. Your submission will be handled through open peer review by our book review editors, and notifications of acceptance will be sent on January 11th, 2022. Accepted submissions may require revisions, for which the deadline will be January 25th, 2022. Junctions does not accept manuscripts previously published by or simultaneously submitted to other publications. If you have any questions, for example for recommendations of books to review or if you want to make sure the book you have chosen is suitable for Junctions, please contact us at editor@junctionsjournal.org and we would be happy to think along with you.

For general guidance on how to approach writing a good book review, you can turn to https://tinyurl.com/ycwzx9wk or https://tinyurl.com/ya4kuqkd. For an example of a review published in a previous issue of Junctions, see Solange Vivienne Manche’s review of The Neganthropocene by Bernard Stiegler: http://doi.org/10.33391/jgjh.67, or the one of the other reviews in our Issue Archive.


To download this call click here.