Announcements

CFP Announcement:

Wreck

On the threshold

In recent decades a number of disparities have underscored inadequacies of justice, capital, medical, and sociopolitical conditions that we now must grapple with as our relationship to space and time has been upended. We remain in a space of negotiation within society and are at a threshold for how we want to continue forwards. For this comeback issue of Wreck, we contemplate the generative possibilities of what a threshold is and what comes after it as we mediate this new world that the events of this new decade have ushered in.

In Wreck’s newly revived issue we want to explore this idea of what a “threshold” is and the possibilities of transition as our own journal transitions into a new phase of its history. The space of a threshold and what it represents is difficult to define, especially as the “other side” is often undetermined and in flux. What does it mean to be on a threshold? How have images and other artifacts of visual culture responded to thresholds in present and past times, and how have these been framed historically?

A marker of time, space, and ideas, the threshold is a place of transformation; a marker of metamorphosis from one state to another. However, it can also function as a limit, a border marker where “things” can be held back or pushed through into a different state. How do two vantage points (or things) become thinkable through the space between them? How have thresholds, such as the change of a century, been communicated visually? How do anxieties of the unknown on the other side of a threshold become visualized? What imaginative possibilities do the unknowns of thresholds offer artists? How do thresholds provide spaces of negotiation for artists in times of difficulty? 

Wreck invites submissions that focus on art history, visual art, and theory, but also welcomes various interdisciplinary approaches, including but not limited to media studies, critical curatorial strategies, and other related fields. Contributions should consider the ways in which notions of the “threshold” as a place of disruption and of beginnings, both across present and past time periods. 

Possible topics might include: 

  • Liminality, thresholds, and barriers/boundaries
  • Expansion beyond, mediation of and failure at the threshold
  • Thresholds between the mundane and supramundane
  • A point of departure or transition 
  • Framing divisions in perceptions, states of being, worlds 
  • Transition or horizons between historical periods 
  • Breaking or making of worlds
  • Friction(s) in space and time
  • Felt time vs Industrial time
  • Eschatologies
  • Waiting, stasis, and suspension
  • Art and activism
  • Futurisms  
  • Discourses surrounding decolonization, LANDBACK, and Indigenous sovereignty
  •  Immigration, migrant workers, food justice
  • “Border thinking” (Gloria Anzaldúa, ‘Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza’)
  •  Abjection 

 

Submission Guidelines

 

All submissions should adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed., and should include an abstract of maximum 250 words at the beginning of the submitted document. Wreck accepts submissions in English and in French. 

 

  • Academic papers: 3,000–6,000 words
  • Exhibition essay: 2,500 words
  • Artist profiles: 1,500 words 
  • Exhibition/book reviews: 1,000 words

Submission procedure

  1. To submit your work please visit https://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/wreck/index or
  2. Register for an account with OJS (Open Journal System) as an author
  3. Please only fill out the required information indicated by an asterisk
  4. Confirm your account
  5. Login to your account to submit - Submit here

Submissions are due May 31, 2021, 11:59 PST. Confirmations of acceptance will be sent out by the beginning of July 2021, with a publication date of Fall 2021. Please direct any questions to ahvagraduatejournal@gmail.com.

Wreck is a peer reviewed, student-run interdisciplinary journal published online and is open access format. We are focused on themes that are evolving within Canadian academic spheres, although the topics do not need to relate directly to Canada.