Call for Papers: Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration

Special Issue: 'Emotions and Emotionality: The Multi-Affects of the Global South'

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/transitions-journal-of-transient-migration#call-for-papers

Special Issue co-guest editors:

Associate Professor Giang Nguyen Hoang Le, Ph.D., Thompson Rivers University, Canada

Professor Ly Thi Tran, Ph.D., Deakin University, Australia

Ha Bich Dong, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Manitoba, Canada 

Rationale & Context

We propose a Special Issue that revolves around the scholarship of emotions and emotionality situated in the evolving context of the Global South. In the context of this Special Issue, we use the term ‘Global South’ to foreground emotional lives and expressions shaped by colonial legacies, development paradigms, migration, and transient precarity, especially in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, while recognizing the term’s diverse, situated and contested meanings. The Special Issue will include the burgeoning work on Global South studies as a potential publication outcome of the 3rd International Symposium on Global South studies – an integral part of the Global South Collective, a space of intellectual freedom exchange and research collaboration for scholars in the Global South. The volume is a collection of selected papers presented at the annual symposium, due to be hosted by Viet Nam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ho Chi Minh City, in the summer of 2026. Prior to the symposium, the volume is also open to proposals that explore various facets of emotion in relation to the Southern knowledge of emotionality in interdisciplinary humanities and social sciences, i.e. sociology, education and pedagogy, anthropology, language and the arts, development and transient migration work, and cultural and media studies.

Emotions are sophisticated but essential in constructing our understanding of the social world and framing our behaviours and ethical interactions with all natural beings. Emotions make us humans. Jennifer Greenwood, an emotion theorist writes ‘emotions are either predominantly inborn, biological or natural devices or predominantly learned, cultural, or nurtured devices’ (2015: xi), arguing that emotions could be both innate and socio-culturally constructed. Emotions evolve and shift and, perhaps, are always never static across places and spaces as we are attuned to the natural, technological and socio-cultural world that is never in stillness and at pause. Thus, emotions are experiences generated and informed through our engagement with such social locations as communities or cultural roots immersed in the values, beliefs, traditions, and practices of everyday life.

While emotions refer to our individual feelings and embodied experiences, emotionality is linked to the relational and socially mediated practice of feeling connected with the expression of emotions that shape particular ways of knowing, being and belonging. Drawing on Bourdieu as a conceptual frame, emotionality encompasses the feeling practices that foster connectedness and belonging, turning individuals into active agents of social knowledge. Our framework is also built on the grounds of affect theory in relation to transient migration to emphasize the influence of global movements on human and more-than-human experiences. The works featured in this volume examine emotions as critical attributes to the construction of emotionality that are shifting and contested in links to temporality and unsettledness of transience. Emotions once transcend bodily boundaries into affects, they become transient with more mobility and autonomy in that they can be involved in multiple processes, ideas, structures, times, spaces, and entities. This conceptualization reflects the migration of emotions as transient experiences in temporality and unsettledness.

Our Special Issue gathers the important work of Global South scholars and researchers who are co-constructing, reshaping, and transforming the scholarship on emotions and emotionality that are interrogated through Southern theories and traditional ontologies. Emotions and emotionality as intertwined, through this collection, are explored through multiple affective lenses and contextualized within and beyond the Global South’s rhetoric, languages, and practices, as well as foundational knowledge systems and pedagogies. The critical works featured in this volume stand collectively as a contemplative action and agent for change in today’s world, amid the humanity crisis and radical authoritarian threats that create cults in western culture and globally.

The issue aims to:

• disrupt and move beyond the dominant understandings of emotions and (non)expressional forms of emotionality in the non-linear context of temporality and unsettledness through Southern theoretical, ontological and epistemological lenses rather than Northern

• critically examine the re/presentations of emotions and emotionality that are allowed and not allowed in both academic settings and everyday life, particularly within the micro wordings (for Kathleen Stewart, micro-worldings as granular moments of living and being/becoming) where transient experiences, local knowledges and embodied practices emerge.

• illuminate the ways in which emotion(al) work through interdisciplinary perspectives and approaches that are used by Global South scholars and researchers in sociology, education, cultural studies, development and migration studies and beyond.

Focus

The focus of the Special Issue is on embodied and situated knowledges and research praxes of emotions meshing with emotionality through Southern theories (i.e. Global South traditional ways of knowing, Global South philosophies of being and becoming, and local cultural knowledge systems and practices). The scholarship in this volume is focused on emotions and the facilitation of emotionality in social relations that are theorized, contextualized, performed, instructed, translated, and transformed across spacetimes within the diverse socio-political, cultural, and historical realities of the Global South. Therefore, it is essential for the integration of interdisciplinary lenses and methods in Global South research work that allows a burgeoning and transgressive scholarship of sociology of emotions and emotionality in various contexts of knowledge creation.

We ask the following questions that help authors frame their ideas:

1. What is conceptualized as emotion in the foundational and burgeoning knowledge of the Global South? What has constructed emotionality ontologically in the Global South?

2. What kinds and forms of emotion are allowed and not allowed in knowledge creation and mobility in Global South onto-epistemological contexts?

3. How are emotions and emotion(al) work constructed and embodied/narrated in and within Southern theories and studies?

4. Once encapsulated in the Global South context, who owns narratives of emotions and emotionality? How have narratives of care been performed and transformed through means of knowledge re/production and reform (i.e. social media, pop culture, the arts, education and pedagogy, languages and literatures, AI & emerging technologies, pandemic, global conflicts, etc.)

5. What do emotions and practices/representations of emotionality mean to people and cultures in new Global South contexts and trends, e. South–North as borders, human migration and mobilities of knowledge, power, and culture, movements of people for study, work and life, inter and transdisciplinary humanities, post and transhumanism, and internationalization/transnationalism/neo-liberalism?

We encourage submissions of empirical and/or conceptual papers that address these topical issues around the scholarship of emotions and emotionality contextualized and theorized in the Global South:

• Onto-epistemologies of emotions and emotionality in the Global South research

• Qualitative inquiry of emotions via duo/auto-ethnography, arts-based approaches, PAR, narrative and memory work

• Emotional expressions in non-conventional platforms and settings (i.e. media, oral pedagogy, genAI & new evolving technologies in digital ethnographic humanities)

• Emotions in sensitive, sensory and intimate contexts and challenging spaces (i.e. gender and sexuality, non-conforming loveships, love of people with disabilities and sexually transmitted diseases, sex workers & parenthood, migrant workers and undocumented immigrants)

• Emotions to inform local and Global South ritual knowledge and narrative collectives and practices (i.e. in rituals, traditional beliefs, and other community-based activities)

• Philosophies of emotions in Global South knowledge systems

• Nurturing emotions and emotional wellbeing in social relationships (i.e. community mentoring and professional mentoring)

We are expecting the critical work situated in the Global South context done by Global South fellow scholars or those who share interests in the Global South studies. The best papers from the symposium will be peer reviewed and invited to contribute to this issue, approximately 7 to 10 papers (3 to 4 of these will be from the symposium), in addition to the editorial and a commentary from a senior scholar about ‘What’s next/the future of the Global South scholarship?’ for future issues.

Timeline

Deadline for abstract submissions: 1 August 2026 (the symposium usually takes place between 20–22 August annually)

Notification of acceptance:  15 September 2026 

Full manuscript submission: 30 January 2027

Peer review of manuscripts: 1 February–20 April 2027

Provision of feedback to authors: 21–30 April 2027

Submission of revised manuscripts: 10 July 2027

Final decision by guest editors: 1 September 2027

Abstracts submitted to guest editors: lead editor, Dr. Giang Le at kle@tru.ca