Heteroglossia - 22 - CfP - Personal and Political
Call for papers Heteroglossia 22, 2025
Heteroglossia was born in 1985 as the journal of the Foreign Languages Institute at the Macerata University Faculty of Law – degree course in Political Sciences – with the aim of offering an instrument for linguistic and metalinguistic research in the field of foreign languages for non-strictly humanistic faculties, inside the larger area of Cultural Studies. It has gradually widened its scope and it now includes, besides applied linguistics and Cultural Studies, comparative literatures, semiotics, media studies, cultural anthropology, sociology and political studies. It is published in open access by the Edizioni dell’Università di Macerata (EUM).
PERSONAL AND POLITICAL
Edited by Ronald Car
Democratic culture is expressed not only with the secret vote, but also with other forms in which the personal sphere opens to the political dimension. Historically, the privileged channels of informal communication have been the petition and the letter sent by citizens to the leading exponents of the institutional system; with the disintermediation of political communication in the digital age, the various methods of online messaging have acquired ever greater relevance, also due to the repercussions on institutionalized forms of dialogue between governors and the governed. Compared to the organised, professional, and therefore also closed and hierarchical character of today's representation, these forms undoubtedly appear more chaotic, inexperienced, but also more open and potentially egalitarian. The intentions of those who write may depend on their naivety, on their refusal to accept the rules of dialogue established by those in power, or on the feeling of marginality of individuals and social groups who are discriminated against, fragile or without a vote. Quite telling, in this sense, was the slogan “the personal is political,” popularized in 1970 by the feminist Carol Hanisch.
A letter, a short post or a collective petition, structured according to traditional or online methods, on platforms such as change.org, tell us about the personal experience of an individual or a social group and can add colour and incisiveness to democratic participation. They often denounce the restriction and ossification of institutional channels, as well as the feeling that the individual voter, although a key element of mass democracy, acquires a voice only in the aggregate form of the electoral result. This aspect requires the citizen to accept his own “triviality,” as Hegel complained, denouncing the reduction of the individual voter to an “abstract individual” whose vote “hangs in the air.”
It is therefore no coincidence that modernity, understood as the progressive massification, rationalization and depersonalization of the relationship between the ruler and the governed, nourishes a widespread nostalgia for a more affective and personalized dimension of political communication. The anonymity that characterizes the moment of declaration of vote can be understood favourably, as a shield protecting the citizen's personal sphere. But it can also be experienced with discomfort, as a sign of alienation from a distant power that directs us without truly knowing us.
Hence the escape into the pre-modern direct relationship with the powerful, to the point that we often assign to these voices from below a liminal position within the framework of modern democracy. Citizens' attempts to establish a more personalized communication channel are in fact imbued with ambiguous and ambivalent aspects, which call for a more nuanced reflection on the evolution of political culture. The clear distinction between modernity and pre-modernity often appears lost between the lines of those who, while writing to the holder of institutional offices, combine theoretically incompatible linguistic registers. We should not be surprised to see the citizens of a modern state claim their rights towards the public service in terms compatible with a modern understanding of citizenship, and at the same time resort to pleas, flattery or personal threats, which characterized the attitude of the pre-modern subject, and today re-emerge as online hate speech.
The call for papers aims to compare in an interdisciplinary perspective the semantic, linguistic-literary and mediatic reflections with sociological, psychological, anthropological and gender studies, as well as political-philosophical ones and those in history of political doctrines and institutions. Along these lines, we will welcome contributions that intend to investigate some aspects of interest, such as:
- linguistic registers;
- media coverage;
- psychological and socio-cultural backgrounds;
- gender issues;
- different conceptions of democracy;
- the relationship with the institutional sphere.
We invite to submit a 300/500-word abstract in Italian, English, Spanish, French or German by April 15, 2025. Authors whose abstracts have been accepted will be notified by April 30 to send their article (of approximately 40,000 types, including spaces) by July 15, 2025.
Articles should be uploaded on the platform by logging in (after registration) at https://rivisteopen.unimc.it/index.php/heteroglossia/about/submissions.
For any question please contact ronald.car@unimc.it.
Contributions will be accepted in the following languages: Italian, English, Spanish, German, French. Typographical standards can be found at
https://rivisteopen.unimc.it/index.php/heteroglossia/about/submissions.
For any technical problem please contact Irene Arbusti: i.arbusti@unimc.it.