Call for Papers: Spaces of Tolerance, Architecture and Culture, Vol. 7, Issue no. 1, March 2019.
Igea Troiani and Suzanne Ewing, editors.
Academic journal publishing worldwide has become increasingly watched over and policed by funding bodies and institutions demanding that scholarship be seen to have direct and maximized impact for economic gain or return. As Wendy Brown notes, “the move to judge every academic endeavour by its uptake in non academic venues (commerce, state agencies, NGOs), as the British Research Excellence Framework (REF) does, is […] damaging” because “academic practices have been transformed by neoliberal economization”. This monitoring, counting, measuring and quantifying frames assessment of the validity of architectural research and limits the exchange between architectural practice and publishing. Within academic institutions, organizational adjacencies of disciplines create conditions of more or less tolerance in judging the value of a wide and diverse range of architectural outputs and the limits of the form/s original and creative architectural research may appear beyond a building design or a traditional 7,000 word scholarly journal article about a building’s history or performance that is double-blind reviewed by expert peers in architecture.
In an effort to recover architectural publishing as a more liberal, yet rigorous, space of production and imagination, this issue of Architecture and Culture seeks to reveal nuances in publishing and associated academic practices which might exceed or distil conventional and accepted disciplinary limitations. It seeks to instigate more openended relationships, interpretations and iterations between theory and practice – between textuality, visuality and aurality – to sway between and across more or less disciplinarity with empathy and insight. Contributions are sought from a range of cultural and geographical positions and perspectives that examine any aspect of the discourse, practice and research of architecture as an exploration of spaces of tolerance.
Submissions are sought that involve ungendering, unacculturating (in disciplinary terms) and hybridising the architectural writer, editor, reviewer, and reader, and retooling the instruments and tactics of architectural scholarship. Contributions with formats that reflect on or revisit significant hybrid architectural publication within the discipline (such as Hedjuk, Gideon, Le Corbusier, Venturi Scott Brown) and formats that experiment with alternative forms to the conventional journal article are welcome.
Full paper submission deadline: 15 January 2018.
The full call for papers (with more information and instructions for authors) is available here.