Call for papers

Hungarian Studies Yearbook, 2023

https://sciendo.com/journal/HSY

Hungarian Studies Yearbook is the latest intellectual venture of the Hungarian community from the Faculty of Letters at the Babeș-Bolyai University. The launch of this new platform comes after a long preparation and seems to be a natural and logical outcome both of the rich glocal scholarly traditions and the substantial impact this community had in Hungarian studies in the last decades.

The Faculty of Letters from Kolozsvár/Cluj/Klausenburg has a long tradition of outstanding and innovative publications related partially or wholly to Hungarian studies. To name just a few, from the first international journal of comparative literary studies, established by Samuel Brassai and Hugo von Meltzl in 1877 to the enthrallingly large historical lexicographic series of Attila Szabó T., are all long-lasting and globally relevant performances.

Hungarian Studies Yearbook aims to be a continuation of these innovative and rich scholarly traditions that offered both a local sense and a transnational framework for Hungarian studies. Its purpose is to serve as a new academic hub and focal point for Hungarian studies oriented both towards methodologically challenging experiences and evidence-based, resource-oriented studies that excavate and foreground new sources and novel interpretations. The publication seeks to bring forward new voices from or upon Transylvanian Hungarian studies, even though its focus is not primarily on Transylvania or the Hungarian literature, language, or ethnology of Romania. Hungarian Studies Yearbook will seek and accept proposals that fall entirely within the conventionally defined borders of Hungarian studies with a particular focus on Hungarian literary history, comparative literature, literary theory, theoretical and applied linguistics, ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology.

The Hungarian Studies Yearbook is a scholarly publication of the Hungarian line of study at the Faculty of Letters, the line of study being an official administrative representation of the Department of Hungarian Literary Studies, the Department of Hungarian and General Linguistics, the Department of Hungarian Ethnography and Anthropology, and the Doctoral School of Hungarian Studies. The yearbook is published in association with the Sciendo platform from de Gruyter and indexed in several relevant international scholarly databases (including Scopus, EBSCO, DOAJ and ERIH PLUS). All papers must be submitted in English.

The forthcoming issue of the yearbook will be published in November 2023.

The editors of the HSY welcome both research papers on every aspect of Hungarian Studies covered by the journal and articles focused on the special topic of this year’s issue contributing to the fast-expanding interdisciplinary area of research characterized by an awareness of ecological embedding in humanities and social sciences, with a special focus on environmental literature/ecocriticism, eco-linguistics and environmental anthropology.

The ecological/environmental focus has been of major importance in cultural anthropology almost from the very beginnings, but definitely since the seminal work of Julian Steward. However, the scholars who followed Steward, stepped beyond his original ideas by rethinking and renewing his approaches. As an ever-expanding field, environmental anthropology benefited from the results of other disciplines from ecology to linguistics, and also inspired these disciplines, becoming one of the most flourishing domains of present-day cultural anthropology.

Within linguistics, since Einar Haugen’s ‘ecology of language’ paradigm introduced in 1972 the concept of ecology has seen a dynamically widening range and scope of application. Haugen adopts a sociolinguistic perspective when he defines language ecology as the study of interactions between a language and its environment, where the environment of a language is the society that uses that language. The re-orientation from structural models to “external landmarks” proved to be a prolific path, and led to a variety of sub-fields investigating language in the social and ecological contexts of an environment. We use the term ecolinguistics/linguistic ecology here to comprise all these approaches, addressing matters of social, educational, historical and developmental nature as well.

Ecocriticism cannot be regarded as a new phenomenon in literary studies. Since the nineties it has provoked a considerable rethinking of the paradigmatic critical tendencies and methods challenging any anthropocentric reduction of the nonhuman participants in our ecosystem. After examining the way how literature is engaged in a symbolic construction of nature, we have to deal now with the ways how nonhuman agents (places, landscapes, plants, animals or hyperobjects like climate change) take part in „our” „subjective”, „social” or „cultural” enterprises, including the art of writing and reading. The topic of human-nonhuman intersubjectivity is raised here in the context of the recent forms of eco-critical thinking including, but not limited to Bruno Latour's Actor Network Theory and different versions of Object-oriented ontology which reveals the unsustainability of the subject-object division and our dependence of being ecological (Timothy Morton). We encourage any critical inquiry regarding these new proposals as well.

For the special issue of this year’s HSY theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions are welcome, including (but not limited to) the following topics:

- (alternative) forms of collectivity

- human-nature, human-animal relationship

- human-nonhuman intersubjectivity (case studies)

- agency and/in the human-nature, human-animal interaction

- redistribution of agency in the practices previously considered exclusively social and cultural

- translation, mediation, association, substitution – historical, temporary and current networks between human and non-human participants

- environmental discourse

- ecocritical discourse analysis

- how our way of talking constructs our ‘environmental reality’

- how environmental factors come to shape language/linguistic conventions

- perception of environment and environmental change

- language and societal change, language endangerment

- (declining) biological and linguistic diversity

- how multiple languages co-exist in a geographical area or social institution

- traditional ecological/environmental knowledge, knowledge about local ecosystems contained in language

- traditional ecological knowledge and landscape management

- ecological movements from urban gardening to radical actions

- what does literature do to the non-human environment, and what does the non-human environment do to literature (case studies)

- linguistic environment and its importance for language acquisition and language development

Please, remember the following important dates:

• Abstract Submission Deadline: February 20th, 2023.
• Notification of Acceptance/Rejection: February 28th, 2023.
• Paper Submission Deadline: May 31st, 2023.

After a double-blind review process authors will have 4 weeks to elaborate the final version of their paper. 

The abstract will contain (1) the title of the paper, (2) 5 keywords, (3) the main text, and (4) references. The main text of the abstract should not exceed 500 words and should contain the research question(s), the theoretical background of the research, the approach/methodology applied, the objectives and/or hypotheses, the description of how these objectives are (to be) achieved, and the relevance of the contribution.

Abstracts will be sent to hungarianstudiesyearbook@gmail.com. Should you have any inquiries, do not hesitate to contact the editors of the HSY.