Call for Papers: Boundaries, Flows, and the Construction of Muslim Selves through Architecture, International Journal of Islamic Architecture.
This special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture takes as its starting point how a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-nineteenth-century dissolution of large, heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of ‘boundary’ has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship, but also redefines relationships between the nation, citizenship, cities and architecture. Whereas political debates today question the compatibility of Islam with the concept of the nation-state, the construction of the twentieth-century Islamic world was embroiled in debates around the nature of the modern state itself. Such debates oscillated between Islam as a political ideology and Islam as a personal belief system. These debates were often troubled by novel uses of ‘boundary’ in both physical and conceptual forms linked to the phenomenon of the nation-state. These boundaries were further challenged by flows of persons, materials, and ideas that destabilized the political configuration of the nation-state itself.
Hence, this special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture invites papers that bring critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies, and within the global Muslim diaspora. This special issue seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define, enable, obstruct, accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities. More generally, it proposes to explore how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries.
The full call for papers can be downloaded here and accessed following this link.
Please send a 400-word abstract with essay title to the guest editor, Farhan Karim, University of Kansas (fskarim@ku.edu), by 30 October 2017. Those whose proposals are accepted will be contacted soon thereafter and requested to submit full papers to the journal by 15 May 2018. All papers will undergo full peer review.
For author instructions regarding paper guidelines, please consult: www.intellectbooks.com/ijia