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Performance Research Journal – New Call for Proposals – Vol. 29, No. 2: ‘On Social Imaginaries’ (March 2024)
Edited by Danae Theodoridou with Falk Hübner (Fontys University of Applied Sciences) 

Proposal Deadline: 12 June 2023

This issue on Social Imaginaries focuses on the complex relationship between performance, social imagination and community building, investigating some of the ways in which the performing arts contribute to the reactivation of public space and public time by constructing alternative – to capitalism – social imaginaries. 

In 2007, Fredric Jameson argued that it seems easier for us to imagine the end of Earth being hit by a comet than imagining an alternative to capitalism. More recently, performance scholars Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović (2016) have written that the least discussed crisis today, after the more ‘popular’ ones (financial or environmental crisis, etc.), is probably the crisis of social imagination. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (2013) have posited that since the 1970s a series of key changes in the world (such as the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the triumph of market-led capitalism and the individualization of society) have made imaginative, social and political speculation more difficult and less likely. Following the broader frustration that accompanied the decay of the great dreams of the twentieth century, we now seem unable to imagine and produce visions for our present and future – to create new dreams for the twenty-first century. 

The performing arts could be considered as a strong context for (re)imagining the social, given their public character and the fact that their working material is primarily imagination. However, as Bojana Kunst (2012) or Cvejić and Vujanović (2016) have argued, artistic production seems to suffer from a similar limitation of social imagination, partaking in the capitalist machinery of an art market organized mainly on the basis of financial ‘value’ – offering at best cynical criticism, but not new imaginaries. 

At the same time though, during the last ten to twelve years, important social movements have emerged all over the world, movements in which art workers often have played a crucial role. The Occupy, #MeToo, the Extinction Rebellion movements, the Yellow Vests and the current massive demonstrations in France, the Standing Man in Taksim Square in Istanbul, the ‘Rapist Is You’ performative protest that started from Chile but took powerful forms also in the United States and Europe, the Support Art Workers initiative and the recent demonstrations and occupations of the art world in Greece, can be seen as some of the significant milestones of the last decade for the emergence of socio-political alternatives. Could this mean that while critical thoughts such as those mentioned above were being articulated, both the world and the performing arts were finding new ways to overcome the crisis of social imagination and construct an alternative public space and sphere? Should we, then, be more optimistic, despite the fact that the alarming rise of extreme-right, fascist, neo-Nazi parties in Europe and the world often renders the way in which we imagine our future dark, unjust, polarized and violent?
This issue on Social Imaginaries wishes to approach performance as an act of ‘public_ing’ (Theodoridou 2022), that is, an act that consciously constructs public space and time by dealing with political complexities such as those mentioned above, challenging established norms, opening space for the emergence of alternative social configurations always in progress, always negotiable among the different agents involved in them. We propose the notion of ‘artistic connectivity’ as a lens towards such alternative figurations, distinct from ‘interactivity’ or ‘participation’. We understand artistic connective processes as frames that do not fetishize social interaction or, even worse, appropriate it and sell it as a profitable product. On the contrary, artistic connectivity constitutes a distinct quality of connection and connecting, driven by processes based on spending time together, mutual learning and respect, positive change, sustainability and endless curiosity. We ask why such modes of connectivity matter, especially in post-pandemic times, what (artistic) connections entail, as well as what kind of qualities, complexities or urgencies such connective mode might create (Hübner 2022). 
We welcome submissions in the form of essays, manifestos and artists’ pages, by artists, other art workers and scholars, but also scholars from sociology, philosophy, political and law sciences, and other disciplines interested in the relation of arts to social imagination and connectivity. 
Contributions can relate – without being limited – to topics and/or questions such as:

•	potential and limitations of performance as a tool for engaging with, or overcoming the current crisis of social imagination
•	‘public_ing’ and its potential as a term and practice: artistically driven processes of constructing public space and time
•	‘artistic connectivity’ as a term and practice: its difference from previously used terms (such as ‘interactivity’ or ‘participation’), its social and artistic potential 
•	the role and function of artistic connectivity in post-pandemic times of social isolation
•	dramaturgical and/or working principles, artistic tools involved in artworks that manage to construct new social imaginaries
•	artistic and/or curatorial case studies of artistic connectivity and/or acts of public_ing from across the globe
•	the return to the body and its materiality, the role of senses and affect for the reactivation of social imagination and community building
•	performative social imaginaries in physical and/or digital public sphere
 

References
 
Cvejić, Bojana and Vujanović, Ana (2016) ‘The crisis of the social imaginary and beyond’, in M. Nerland (ed.) The Imaginary Reader, Bergen: Volt, pp. 34–7.

Dunne, Anthony and Raby, Fiona (2013) Speculative Everything, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hübner, Falk (2022) In Good Company. Think we must, Tilburg: Fontys Fine and Performing Arts.

Jameson, Fredric (2007) Archaeologies of the Future, London: Verso.

Kunst, Bojana (2012) ‘The Project Horizon: On the temporality of making’, Maska XXVII(149–50): 66–73.

Theodoridou, Danae (2022) PUBLICING: Practising Democracy through Performance, Athens: Nissos. 

Format
Please send an abstract (250–300 words) with a short bio (100–120 words).

Issue contacts
All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent direct to Performance Research at: [log in to unmask]
Issue-related enquiries should be directed to the issue editors via:
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