CfP deadline approaching: International Journal of Islamic Architecture
Special Issue: Field as Archive / Archive as Field
Paper proposals should offer insights relevant to 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?
Submission deadline: 30 July 2018
The full CfP can be found here >>
