The Schuylkill Graduate Journal
Special Issue on (Re)Constituting Publics
Call for Papers – 2013 Issue
Submission Deadline: January 15, 2013

"The very fact that the public depends upon consequences of acts and the perception of consequences, while its organization into a state depends upon the ability to invent and employ special instrumentalities, shows how and why publics and political institutions differ widely from epoch to epoch and from place to place." John Dewey, Public and its Problems

"The point here is that the public sphere is a space necessarily (not just contingently) articulated by power. And everyone who enters it must address power's disposition of people and things, the dependence of some on the goodwill of others…" Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular

The concept of "the public" as a singular community, bound by a particular national identity and empowered by access to and control of public space, has become increasingly contested. From battles over citizenship and public memory to occupy movements and the Arab Spring, people within and across national borders are engaging in efforts to redefine traditional ideas about the public sphere and who constitutes the public or publics. Additionally, information technology and the mass spread of social media have intensified this process of reconstituting publics. But even before the advent of telecommunications, communities within nations battled over issues of public identity and the power to define, control and exist in public space.

The Schuylkill graduate journal is seeking submissions from all disciplines for our 11th volume of critical essays and book reviews to be published in Spring of 2013 (online and in print) which seek to push against, transform, or invigorate traditional and standardized notions of publics and public space, exploring how these ideas act upon each other to produce layered and complex combinations. We are seeking papers on the topic of (re)constituting publics, 10-15 pages in length; double spaced; MLA format; no footnotes.

Current graduate students should send their work to Colleen Hammelman at skook@temple.edu by 15 January 2013. No simultaneous submissions please. All reviews will be anonymously reviewed by at least two staff members. Please e-mail submissions with author name and contact info on first page only. In an effort to minimize our environmental impact, copies of submissions not accepted for publication will be recycled.
The Schuylkill invites submissions from across the humanities and social sciences that reflect on (re)constituting publics in the broadest interpretation of these terms. We invite submissions from a diverse range of disciplines, critical perspectives, and time periods.

Topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:
Occupation of public space
Remembering space
Changing conceptions of public and private and the boundaries between the two
Border crossing
Post-secular and secularism
Digital public spaces
Social networking and public persona
Print culture
Monuments and public memory
Changing engagement with universities through online and distance learning
Identity topics such as recreating the self in public and private space
Cosmopolitanism and globalization
Privatizing public resources and the privatization of public space
The changing of media from publicly available information
Movement through space
Multiculturalism

The Schuylkill is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal founded, edited, and run by graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia. We are looking to publish the scholarly work of graduate students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences from around the globe. We are especially interested in work that, in presenting a rich and nuanced perspective on the topic of publics, blurs the boundaries of the disciplines (literary theory; philosophy; linguistics; sociology; history; political theory; religious studies; cinema studies; women's studies; classics; art history; geography and urban studies, etc.).