theory

Theorizing about the body has never been more urgent than in our current era of climate change. Stacy Alaimo has compellingly argued that “potent ethical and political possibilities emerge from the literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature.” In the decade or so since she first penned those words, these ethical and political possibilities have become even more urgent, and the borders of the contact zones themselves have become more blurred. Climate change has had increasingly intimate corporeal implications (especially in the Global South), and the widening gap between the rich and the poor has only exacerbated these matters, as has the global rise in right-wing extremism.

Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies on Hybridity and Star Trek

Guest Editor: Jackie Hogan (Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, Bradley University) Editor: James M. Decker (Professor of English, Illinois Central College)

Contact email:

 jlhogan@fsmail.bradley.edu or jdecker@icc.edu

Call for Papers:

Special Issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory (www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_ILS.html).

Goa, and the rest of the erstwhile Portuguese Estado da Índia, was the first part of the modern Portuguese empire in Asia to be decoupled from the Portuguese state (East Timor would follow in 1975 and Macao in 1999). The integration of Goa into the Indian Republic, following its annexation by the latter in 1961, has resulted in a certain opacity in terms of understanding Goa, and by extension Portuguese colonialism in Asia. This is the result of a variety of reasons. To begin with, the specific history of the Portuguese territory has been written in terms of British India.

In an age of technological growth, globalization, and neoliberalism, the ways we build trust are being dramatically transformed. Simultaneously, funding for education has become subject to market- and data-driven directives, neglecting the needs of vulnerable communities and ecologies. How do we learn to trust and trust in learning when our communities and connections are increasingly distant, ephemeral, and mediated? How do we avoid falling to game-theoretically governed social, economic, and informatic relations? What aspects of trust are under-considered in efforts for learning and change? Where are the flows of trust in above/below-ground networks (institutions, organizations, grassroots movements, communities of practice, etc.)?

A threshold marks the end of one space and the beginning of another. Therefore, we may conceptualize a threshold as either a border or an entrance. Borders need not be physical or geographic: they may be ideological, linguistic, economic, psychological, or identified by another theoretical approach. For example, we may consider physical borders between countries or the boundaries between texts, identities, or communities. Boundaries may be immobile and limiting, or they may be transgressed and manipulated; for that reason, a threshold is a paradoxical space where meanings connect or collide. We may examine thresholds within textual content, or outside of the text with regard to literary response and interpretation (e.g.