Call for Papers — Writing | Architecture, Special Issue of TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses
Editors: Professor Eleni Bastéa and Dr Patrick West
The long, entangled and fascinating association of architecture with writing has always been interwoven with concerns pertaining to the well-being of individuals and communities. Writing and architecture connect the self to others, and as much as we are shaped by the structures, cities and landscapes we inhabit, the stories that flow through our built and natural environments transform us. At the same time, traversing these connections and transformations, architecture and writing are molded by distinct disciplinary traditions, cultural imperatives and artistic and creative affordances, even in their synergistic co-existence. Furthermore, complicating and enriching the historical narrative of writing’s dialogues with architecture (and its imbrications with issues of human well-being), the emergence of the new materialism and related trains of practice and thought has served to expand the possibilities of re-inventing the human form through interaction with the diverse and challenging energies of the non-human. Through divergent, shared and holistic approaches, writers, scholars and designers are describing new and old types of practice that connect and re-connect the animate and the inanimate, the living and the constructed.
TEXT is a fully refereed journal focused on the processes of writing and the teaching of writing, and this special issue aims to continue, interrogate and elaborate the conversation between architecture and writing that has preoccupied so many authors and architecture practitioners over time. Contributions may adopt a variety of scholarly and literary modes so as to support, expand, or challenge established positions. Submissions on individual writer-architects or architect-writers, or on individual texts, are most welcome, along with papers that use the writing-architecture nexus as a springboard for open-ended investigations into a range of thematics and disciplinary areas, including, but not limited to: material human-non-human relations, identity, imagination, urban studies, memory, space, place, thing theory, practice-led research, unbuilt architecture, built writing, design studies, cross-artform practice, paper architecture, and embodiment.
Up to eight images may be included in each complete paper at the discretion of the author. Enquiries about submissions in hypertext or other experimental forms are very welcome.
Potential contributors are invited to send Patrick West a title and 250-word abstract, along with a brief biographical note, by 15 February 2018.
Email contact: patrick.west@deakin.edu.au
Invitations to submit complete papers will be sent by 28 February 2018. Complete papers of between 6 000 and 7 000 words will be due by 31 August 2018. All complete papers will be subject to a double-blind peer review process.
The special issue Writing | Architecture will be published in April 2019.