Fabrications: JSAHANZ invites papers for the forthcoming issue (Vol.27, No.3), titled “Way Out Down Under”, guest edited by Lee Stickells.
Papers are due by 14 March 2017.
Historical understanding of the complexities and legacies of the 1960s and 1970s counterculture has been significantly enriched in the last
decade or so. Familiar narratives of the birth, flourishing and decline of a naïve, failed, utopian hippie “dream” have been rethought.
Instead, the counterculture’s longer influence on the development of contemporary environmentalism, lifestyle branding, business thinking
and cyberculture has been recognised. A more detailed picture of an international, or transnational, counterculture that extended to South
America, Asia and Eastern Europe, with distinctive manifestations, has also emerged.
The expanded countercultural history of the last two decades has also reconsidered the intertwining of architecture and the counterculture.
While visions of psychedelically painted geodesic domes are imprinted on popular memory, the substance behind that clichéd image is that new
modes of building and dwelling were understood as critical to materialising alternative social forms. There is a growing body of
scholarship in architectural history that has sought more nuanced understandings of the ways in which countercultural challenges to
existing society affected the discipline’s knowledge base, pedagogical structures, and its representational and practice forms.
This issue of Fabrications invites contributions that add to the scholarship on countercultural ideals and practices explored outside
their traditional geographic imaginary, particularly in Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific and South-East Asian regions. It anticipates
papers that extend historical understanding of the diverse set of experimental and subversive architectural projects, conceptual work,
pedagogical initiatives, exhibitions and publications that can be connected to the countercultural radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s.
While American, particularly West Coast, spatial practices were highly influential, they were never absorbed wholesale, but rather as a
mediation between the local and the global. For this issue, we welcome submissions that explore the translation of concepts, attitudes and
practices – the sustained experimentation in new temporal localities, and local adaption.
Questions to be explored might include: How did local cultural legacies inform countercultural architecture? What was the role of
countercultural experimentation in defining and popularizing ecological ideals in architecture? How was fascination with South and East Asian
spirituality manifested in counterculture environments? What were the dynamics of cultural transfer between radical and mainstream
architecture practices? What role did alternative publishing networks play? How was spatial production important to an urban politics of
occupation and creative transformation? How might methodological and disciplinary innovations reconfigure narratives about countercultural
architecture, its heritage structures, and its cultural outcomes?
Guidelines for Authors
Papers should be submitted online at www.edmgr.com/rfab by the due date identified above.
The Editors consider essays of 6000 to 9000 words (including endnotes).
Papers should be submitted as Word documents with an abstract (200 words) at the beginning of the paper. Abstracts are published at the beginning of papers. Please provide images and image captions with the paper.
All papers published in Fabrications are blind peer-refereed by two readers.
Instructions for authors can be found on the journal homepage.
Proposals for reports or for reviews of books, exhibitions and other events of interest to the membership of SAHANZ can be made to the
editors, Stuart King [stuart.king@utas.edu.au] and Anoma Pieris [apieris@unimelb.edu.au].
Lecturer, Ph.D. Position/Assistantship, and Postdoctoral Fellowship in Urban Studies
Urban Studies at the University of Basel is rooted in disciplinary approaches of architecture, geography, anthropology, social and political theory, and history, and oriented towards global Southern and postcolonial questions. With a regional focus on Africa, Europe,...