CFP: ISSUES 6.2 AND 7.1, VERGE: STUDIES IN GLOBAL ASIAS

Issues 6.2 and 7.1

Verge: Studies in Global Asias

University of Minnesota

Issue 6.2: Infrastructure

The infrastructures of the modern world—from roads and railways to global communications, from codes of law to the code within computers—move things, people, and ideas and help craft regions and urban spaces while conveying the images that people use to shape selves and communities. In all these ways, infrastructures have been central to the historical and contemporary experiences of Asian communities. Across the humanities and social sciences, however, infrastructure has only recently emerged as a topic of focus, and questions remain about how to analyze infrastructures as material artifacts and media of the imagination, to read for their appearances in literature or interpret representations of them in film, and to understand their role in contemporary aesthetic, political, or ecological practices.

This special issue will gather new work from the humanities, arts, and social sciences examining “infrastructure” as concept or material reality in Asia, Asian America, and Asian diasporic communities around the world. We welcome scholarship that explores the relationships between real and conceptual infrastructures, concrete materials and codes of practice—both in particular parts of Asia and as Asian people, goods, and ideas circulate globally. We are especially interested in essays that use the concept of infrastructure to better understand questions related to development projects, technological changes, and emergent political and social realities. 

Our goal is to discover how infrastructure studies can renew classic approaches to Asian societies and their national or global histories, provide new insights into Asian and Asian diasporic literatures or arts, and help focus attention on current ecological and political concerns—for example, by mobilizing new concepts such as redundancy, resiliance, and repair. We seek close examinations of the evolution of the infrastructures that are fundamental to economic and political relations, and to the daily lives of billions of people, to reveal the ways in which material technologies, sociotechnical processes, legal forms, popular culture, and the natural environment interact to produce the physical and imagined spaces of city, nation, region, and empire.

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2019. 

Issue 7.1: Open Issue

This open issue invites essays related to the broader project of Verge: Studies in Global Asias, which showcases scholarship on “Asian” topics from across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, while recognizing that the changing scope of “Asia” as a concept and method is today an object of vital critical concern. Deeply transnational and transhistorical in scope, Verge emphasizes thematic and conceptual links among the disciplines and regional/area studies formations that address Asia in a variety of particularist (national, subnational, individual) and generalist (national, regional, global) modes. 

Responding to the ways in which large-scale social, cultural, and economic concepts like the world, the globe, or the universal (not to mention East Asian cousins like tianxia or datong) are reshaping the ways we think about the present, the past and the future, the journal publishes scholarship that occupies and enlarges the proximities among disciplinary and historical fields, from the ancient to the modern periods. The journal emphasizes multidisciplinary engagement—a crossing and dialogue of the disciplines that does not erase disciplinary differences, but uses them to make possible new conversations and new models of critical thought.

Submission Deadline: November 1, 2019. 

Guidelines for submission

Essays (between 6,000-10,000 words) should be prepared according to the author-date + bibliography format as outlined in section 2.38 of the University of Minnesota Press style guide, and submitted electronically to verge@psu.edu.

Authors' names should not appear on manuscripts; instead, please include a separate document with the author's name and address and the title of the article with your electronic submission. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them; any necessary references to the author's previous work, for example, should be in the third person.

Edited by Jessamyn Abel (Penn State University) and Leo Coleman (Hunter College)

Please direct all inquiries and submissions to verge@psu.edu