CFP: Special Issue on Field Theory (January 31, 2023)

Guest editor:
Jeff Diamanti, University of Amsterdam

This special issue of PMC seeks essays that develop practice-based methodologies and critical theories of fields of research. Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline. A forest, tribal territory, archive of literature, or body of water, for instance, yields data and patterns in need of an analytic. The data demands interpretation, theorization, and disciplinary vetting. In Kantian epistemology, the world is coherent and legible but not self-evident. In this orientation, the lab, library, or desk is the site where information becomes knowledge, and for this reason “the field” has remained an opaque realm for philosophical inquiry and epistemic habit (even as “the world” begins to force itself back into disciplinary reckoning). Any epistemic culture bears a determinate (and determined) relation to the field, but how exactly remains an under-examined question. Will time in the forest, the archive, or body of water modulate assumption, expectation, concept formation, or conclusion? Can the field write itself into our analytic disposition? Ought we assume a normative orientation toward what often bifurcates field frequencies, embedded relation, biosemiotic idiom (in short, the world) from the stylistics of disciplinary habit (what we make of it)? What might motivate the recent imperative in feminist science, new materialist philosophy, and ecological theory to find commensurabilities and reciprocities between the field and the interpretative apparatus, as for instance in the work of Edouard Glissant, Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing, Thomas Nail, Isabelle Stengers, and Elaine Gan?

Prospective contributors should submit completed articles to J.Diamanti@uva.nl by January 31, 2023.

The journal invites contributions that engage with field theory in philosophy, media studies, environmental studies, literary studies, anthropology, urban studies, and queer theory. Postmodern Culture does not have a specific word length requirement and can publish long pieces. Essays appearing in the journal tend to be between 6,000 and 9,000 words and could be non-discursive or non-traditional in format. Submission guidelines and more information can be found at https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern-culture.