The theme of this issue, Tours and Detours, is intended to provoke a wide variety of topics and approaches.  For some, it seeks to examine the interplay between identity, space, history, and memory, exploring the ways in which identities and communities are created, formed, and informed by spatial and temporal contexts.  For others, it conjures up ideas of travel, tourism, and critical heritage, seeking to actively exchange, share, and challenge ideas on information technologies, place-making, and digital economy.  Yet another group of scholars and artists might interpret the topic as rhetorical strategies around impasses of knowledge (what Barthes called the punctum and the situationists referred to as détournement).

This issue is open to all forms of interpretation.  It aims to bring together a host of disciplines, methodologies, perspectives, and case studies that explore changing places, identities, and historical narratives in our current cultural milieu.  It seeks experimental essays and projects that attempt to intervene in political processes, bureaucratic procedures of the tourism industry, and traditional narratives maintained by church, state, and university of the past.

For this issue, the editors seek traditional essays, audio/video essays, and related multimedia projects that explore the tour (and the detour) as a trope for the possibilities of rhetorical invention and practice in the digital age.  Some possible topics for this issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The deconstruction or appropriation of an existing monument;
• Commemoration and Counter-monuments;
• Mourning, Sacrifice, and Protest;
• The democratization of monumentality and local, regional, or national narratives, slogans, symbols, and signs;
• Displacements and borders;
• Experiments with maps and critical geography;
• Narrating/confronting the past: memorialization, contestation and re-enactment;
• Philosophical approaches to memory and forgetting (Nietzsche, Ricoeur, Nora, Halbwachs, etc.);
• Digital media, literature, the arts, popular culture and memory/forgetting;
• Silence(s) and Erasures;
• Archival forgetting, neglected books, burial places (graves, cemeteries, and catacombs), ruins, and other forgotten places;
• The Mystory (Career, Family, Entertainment, and Community);
• Spatial stories:  The rhetorical network of childhood homes, hometowns, and city spaces, tourism and sight-seeing;
• The built environment—housing, architecture, and community identities;
• The 15-year Anniversary of 9/11 & the various memorials, activities, and acts of mourning;
• Remembering “unremarkable disasters”;
• The roles, responsibilities, and blunders of the Fourth and Fifth Estates;
• Electrate citizenry, public policy, and self-knowledge;
• Sample lesson plans, descriptions of classroom experiences, and MeMorial experiments;
• The intervention of tourism and creation of new tourist destinations;
• The recovery of chora and the potentials found in detours, misdirection, and incongruities.

Topics and formats are open, and artists and scholars alike can address a range of ideas in museum and memory studies, composition & rhetoric, digital culture, electronic media and experimental pedagogy.  We are especially interested in topics appropriating tourist sites and industries and exploring what Gregory L. Ulmer refers to as “unremarkable disasters,” those events that are unnoticed but that have a strong impact in the social, political, and economic lives of millions of citizens (e.g., gun violence, car accidents, and domestic abuse). 

More information is available at http://textshopexperiments.org/.

Submission files and preliminary queries should be sent to the editors, K. A. Wisniewski & Felix Burgos, at: ulmertextshop@gmail.com.  Please provide your name, institutional affiliation, and a short bio in the text of the email.  Submissions are due September 30, 2016.