Call for Papers: Footprint #23, The Architecture of Logistics
Editors: Francesco Marullo and Negar Sanaan Bensi
Neoliberalism is a many-headed monster. It can hold different drives without altering its internal coherence. It grows through crisis and instability. Within its flexible order, drastically opposite forces are able to coexist and mutually stimulate each other: globalisation expands at the same pace as nationalist and populist movements; the circulation of people increases alongside the intensification of migratory policies; shared economies and collaborative consumption develop apace with the multiplication of copyrights and patents; common knowledge and resources proliferate as does the parasitism of private entrepreneurship.
Integrating differences within a homeostatic system of economic competition, the monster of neoliberalism turns whatever it devours into commensurable and exchangeable quantities. Any equivalence becomes possible. Any juxtaposition becomes profitable. Any connection becomes valuable. However, the further this dismembered body enlarges, while assimilating new forces and exchanges, the more it needs to improve its nervous and circulatory system to stay alive: boats, containers, trucks, warehouses, department stores, harbours, train yards, airports, cargo terminals, communication centres, satellite stations, and all the material conditions that improve flux and trade while ensuring the integrity of commodities across its distant limbs.
This issue of Footprint meditates on logistics and its architecture of exchange as the essential lymph of neoliberalism. Registering and managing the circulation of people, goods and information across the planet, the architecture of logistics could be considered the litmus paper from which one could read and understand territories, populations and societal assemblages. Using textual and visual materials, our ambition is to unfold the multivalences of the logistical apparatus, dissecting its buildings and spaces, its technologies and labour relations, its historical evolutions as well as its future projections.
Footprint 23, to be published in Autumn 2018, accepts both full papers (6000–8000 words) and review articles or visual essays (2000–4000 words). Authors interested in contributing are requested to submit an extended abstract to the editors before 1 December 2017 (1500 words for full papers, 700 words for review articles and visual essays). Please also include a short bio (300 words). A guide to Footprint’s preferred editorial and reference style is available at http://footprint.tudelft.nl/index.php/footprint/about/submissions. Authors of the papers are responsible for securing permission to use images and copyrighted materials.
The editors will select papers that they consider thematically relevant, innovative and demonstrating an explorative academic level. Notifications of acceptance will be sent before 15 January 2018. After the first selection round based on the abstracts, authors will be asked for full essays. The deadline for selected contributions is 1 April 2018, after which the essays will enter a double-blind peer review process. Please note that the ultimate selection for publication will not be based on the abstracts but on the peer review procedure. For submissions and all other inquiries and correspondence, please contact editors Francesco Marullo and Negar Sanaan Bensi at fp23@footprintjournal.org
The full text of the call for papers and previous issues of Footprint are available at http://footprint.tudelft.nl