Dear list members,
Please find below the details of a call for contributions on the theme of
the contingencies and errancies affecting fieldwork and archival work in
spatially focused research.
CALL FOR PAPERS
*International Journal of Islamic Architecture* (*IJIA*)
<https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=204/view,page=2/>
Special Issue: Field as Archive / Archive as Field
Thematic volume planned for July 2020
Proposal submission deadline: 30 July 2018
This special issue of the *IJIA *focuses on the experience of carrying out
archival work or fieldwork in architectural research, including
research-led practice. How might this experience, with all its
contingencies and errancies, be made into the very stuff of the
architectural histories, theories, criticisms and/or practices resulting
from it? This question is rendered all the timelier due to recent and
ongoing developments across the globe, not least in the geographies
relevant to the *IJIA*’s remit. The fallout from the so-called ‘Arab
Spring’ has escalated social, political, and economic crises and, in
certain cases like Libya and Syria, has taken an overtly violent turn.
Major countries with a predominantly Muslim population, such as Turkey,
Egypt and Indonesia, have witnessed restrictions on civil liberties.
Moreover, the word ‘Islam’ has become embroiled in various restrictive
measures introduced in countries whose successive administrations have
otherwise laid claim to being bastions of democracy and freedom, such as
emergency rule in France and travel bans in the US. Others with significant
Muslim populations, such as India and Russia, have seen nationalist and/or
populist surges, often with significant implications for their minorities.
Such developments have engendered numerous issues of a markedly
architectural and urban character, including migration, refuge, and
warfare, protest and surveillance, as well as heightening the risk of
contingencies and errancies affecting archival work and fieldwork. Whereas
this risk and its materializations are typically considered unfortunate
predicaments and written out of research outputs, how might a focus on
architecture at this juncture help write them back into history, theory,
criticism, and practice? What might this mean for the ways in which
architectural research is conceived and carried out under seemingly
‘ordinary’ circumstances—those that appear free from the risk of
contingencies and errancies affecting archival work and field work?
As evident in the joint emphasis on fieldwork and archival work, these
questions are methodologically animated by a convergence between two
prominent venues of architectural research conventionally seen mutually
discrete if not antipodal: field and archive. In fact, when considered
spatially, both fields and archives have more in common than that which
separates them. Access to both is monitored by gatekeepers: fieldwork in
the anthropological sense demands a significant degree of rapport with
individuals controlling entry into the field, while archival research
requires negotiating access with archivists and involves official letters,
application forms, ID cards, stamps, and signatures. Findings of archival
work and fieldwork are then disseminated through academic knowledge
production; this is yet another realm characterized by gatekeeping
mechanisms, in which case researchers themselves are implicated as
gatekeepers. One way of thinking archives and fields together
*architecturally*, then, is to ask exactly what might be at stake in the
relationship between the mechanisms of gatekeeping involved in fieldwork,
archival work, and knowledge production?
Conventional approaches may limit this question to practicalities; they may
categorically celebrate the permission to enter the archive or
the field, and lament being denied entry. Doing so perpetuates received
wisdom regarding the epistemic authority of officially sanctioned
institutions, methods and communicative modes being greater than that of
others. Contrarily, contributions to this special issue are invited to
adopt a critical and self-reflexive approach by treating the *denial of
access* as empirical material to think with, or the *granting of access* as
a selective and politically charged phenomenon. This is to directly probe
how power structures shape what is accessible and inaccessible, placing
them at the heart of what it means to engage in archival work and
fieldwork. It is to ask, for instance in cases where access is denied: in
what ways was denial communicated; what reasons were given; how might these
be considered as part of the content of the research itself? Or, in cases
of seemingly trouble-free access: what documents or information were
required to gain access; who gave the final decision; what conversations
were had; what, if any, were the limitations and restrictions; in what ways
might the answer to these questions speak to the research itself? Such
questions may also apply to the notion of *participation*, which is central
especially to fieldwork. Participation is conventionally understood as an
instrument that enhances the extent to which research outcomes represent
the needs, thoughts and feelings of interlocutors or beneficiaries.
Instead, this issue invites contributors to approach participation as a
political mechanism through which power-knowledge structures are regulated
(rather than alleviated or invalidated) by various actors involved in or
impacted by the research, including researchers themselves. On a broader
level, thinking archives and fields together in such a way has implications
for how *time* and *temporality* are considered in architectural research.
The prevalent tendency in this respect is to associate archives with
history and fields with that which is recent or contemporary. Contributors
are encouraged to reconsider this tendency by showing how archives might
speak of the present and how fields might offer novel understandings of the
past. Finally, to scrutinize issues affecting fieldwork and archival work
critically and self-reflexively—that is, beyond such categorical
oppositions as permission versus rejection or compliance versus refusal—is
to avoid limiting the imperative for such scrutiny only to geographical
and/or historical contexts deemed ‘turbulent’. It means to posit the
obligation to account for power structures as the very condition of rather
than the exception to archival work and fieldwork.
Paper proposals should work from the framework outlined thus far to offer
insights relevant to the *IJIA*’s remit, which is defined broadly as ‘the
historic Islamic world, encompassing the Middle East and parts of Africa
and Asia, but also the more recent geographies of Islam in its global
dimensions’. Contributors should fully exploit the self-reflexive potential
of this framework by addressing the role of architecture and architectural
research as not just the product of the various issues affecting archival
work and fieldwork but also their instigator. Specific questions that
contributors might wish to explore include but are not limited to the
following:
1. What are the potentials and limitations of a research focus on
architecture when negotiating contingencies and errancies affecting
archival work and/or fieldwork?
2. How might architectural research help unpack the ethics and politics of
access to fields and/or archives beyond the question of physical entry or
the lack thereof?
3. How might an architecturally focused approach to archives as fields (and
vice versa) help complicate linear approaches to history and
historiography? How might it help complicate the sweeping identification of
certain historical and/or geographical contexts with conflict, unrest,
crisis, and oppression as diametrically opposed to post-conflict, peace,
prosperity and freedom, and offer a nuanced appraisal of the agency of
researchers and interlocutors operating in such contexts?
4. What are the ways in which the positionality and reliability of
architectural researchers, gatekeepers, interlocutors, or participants
shift during archival work and fieldwork? How might these shifts be
exploited, rather than glossed over, during the research towards attuning
to non-institutional methods of knowledge production? How might they be
integrated into, rather than written out of, the histories, theories,
criticisms and/or practices resulting from the research?
5. How might a convergence between the concepts of field and archive help
architectural researchers negotiate the dynamics between intellectual
autonomy and responsibility towards others involved in or impacted by the
research?
6. What might be the role of language and that of other communicative modes
in engendering or negotiating contingencies and errancies affecting
fieldwork and archival work? What new forms, structures, and styles—be they
textual or material—might result from a close and nuanced attention to this
role?
Articles offering historical and theoretical analysis (DiT papers) should
be between 6000 and 8000 words, and those on design and practice (DiP
papers) between 3000 and 4000 words. Practitioners are welcome to
contribute insofar as they address the critical framework of the journal.
Urbanists, art historians, anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and
historians, whose work resonates with architecture are also welcome. Please
send a title and a 400-word abstract to the guest editor, Eray Çaylı,
London School of Economics and Political Science ([log in to unmask]), by 30
July 2018. Authors of accepted proposals will be contacted soon thereafter
and will be requested to submit full papers by 28 February 2019. All papers
will be subject to blind peer review. For author instructions, please
consult: www.intellectbooks.com/ijia
Contact Email:
[log in to unmask]
*URL: *https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=204/
Regards,
Eray
--
Eray Çaylı
www.eraycayli.com
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