cfp.english.upenn.edu

DANDELION
postgraduate arts & research network

CALL FOR PAPERS: FILTH

From the Wellcome Collection’s 2011 exhibition Dirt: the filthy reality of everyday life, via Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2012 nominee Pieter Hugo’s images of Ghanaian refuse tips, to Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers (2010), filth is having its cultural moment.

Filth has a wide range of material associations, including dirt, waste, rubbish, and the human body. Filth has moral connotations: of sexuality, but also in the context of political discourse. Filth is unstable and insidious; definitions of what constitutes filth are subjective and its boundaries are impossible to circumscribe.

The Dandelion editors seek submissions on the theme of filth for our next issue.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Materialist readings of filth: waste, dirt, dust, and rubbish in art and literature
• Dirty cities: sewers, soot, smog, etc. and / or rural dirt (the generative properties of soil)
• The subjective nature of filth
• Filth and the human body
• Sartre’s visqueux; Kristeva’s abject; Bataille’s informe
• The social, political or environmental implications of filth
• Filth as matter out of place - displacements, borders and boundaries.
• Filth and affect
• Cultural representations of disease / narratives of infection or contagion
• Dirty literature, images or films
• Soiled, ruined or unclean: sexual activity and notions of impurity
• Trashy or low culture

We welcome both long (6000w) and short (1000-1500w) articles. We also encourage conference and event reports, blog posts, reviews, podcasts and artwork.

Send your piece to the editors by 11 January 2013 to mail@dandelionjournal.org or through the Dandelion website. Complete instructions for submissions can be found at http://dandelionjournal.org/

All referencing and style is required in full MHRA format as a condition of publication and submitted articles should be academically rigorous and ready for immediate publication.

Dandelion is an online postgraduate journal and research network, supported by Roberts Funding and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It aims to bring together a diversity of works from researchers in the arts, to offer collaborative research and training possibilities, and to promote an independent, cross-institutional space for professional development.