LAND LABOUR LIFE [...]
Call for submissions for ellipses [...] special edition
Co-ordinated by
Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP)
Land, Labour, Life are commonly significant to different experiences of colonisation,
proletarianisation, and social, economic and political transitions away from them.
While the study of each, on their own (as concept, question, theme) has produced
(and continues to produce) important insights into the character of society, thought
together they provide different paths and windows to unravelling what has been and
become, what is, and what is yet, to come. At SWOP, this has been an important
shift in how research about society is imagined and undertaken, especially when
considering what is foreclosed when thinking them separately.
For this special edition of Ellipses, Land, Labour, Life becomes one thread through
which collaborative engagements amongst scholars from different experiences and
perspectives can produce differently, creatively, in multiple forms and formats. Key
sub-themes will include questions and focuses related to time; the everyday; care;
value; alternative forms of politics; alternative forms of life.
Call:
We are looking for contributions that unfold in the gaps and silences of traditional
academic publishing. This could take form in text, audio, visual or combinations of
different mediums.
The submissions will be published online and in print but may include physical or live
elements. We encourage applicants to consider working with the different forms and
the productive tensions that translation between them can allow.
Producing, writing and making differently cannot be separated from publishing differently. All participants will be asked to form a creative collective that will
together shape and edit the journal.
What to submit:
Proposals should not be more than 2 pages and include:
• Cover letter
• Conceptual description/abstract
• While proposals can include links or documentation of previous engagements
with the subject or medium, this is not necessary as the journal is a site for
new experimentation.
• We do not need CVs or portfolios.
Proposals should be sent to landlabourlife@gmail.com
Deadline for proposals 17th May 2024
About SWOP
The Society, Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) is one of two research institutes
in the faculty of humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), its
intellectual trajectory stretching back over forty years, its roots in the discipline
of sociology. Over the course of the last five years, however, work at SWOP has
been shaped by greater experimentation with comparativist and interdisciplinary
approaches to the study of society, and the strengthening and expansion of
collaborations within, across and beyond academia and South Africa. This has opened
up opportunities for the production of new knowledge about old questions and
problems that persist, and for creative engagements amongst diverse groups whose
members share a commitment to deepening understandings of a changing world in
order to craft alternatives in the interests of equality and justice. Land, Labour, Life
are three separate threads that run across SWOP’s long history of research, more
recently becoming a singular frame for a new research programme at the institute.
About ellipses […]
ellipses [...] was collectively founded in 2015 at the Wits School of Arts as a multi/
cross-disciplinary, digital, online and interactive journal for creative research. It
was launched in close conversation with political demands for the decolonisation
of knowledge and the university mobilised by #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall
in South Africa. So while ellipses [...] necessarily emerges from a moment where a
demand is made of the centre to accommodate the margins, ellipses [...] recognizes
that there is also a necessity for more spaces on the margins to exist.
It is a digital platform that seeks to develop and disseminate forms of knowledge that
are either on the edges of or totally omitted from disciplinary norms or conventional
scholarship. Initially responding to the problematics of creative research within the
South African Higher education knowledge economy, the platform has gone beyond
this to explore omissions or silences in broader and more varied senses, including,
narrative or political forms of silencing epistemic or otherwise.
