Call for submissions: “After Tragedy” - Special Issue of Performance Philosophy

Call for submissions: “After Tragedy” Special Issue of Performance Philosophy

Edited by Minou Arjomand and David Kornhaber

Extended deadline for submissions: 1 April 2025

This special issue relates to the 2024 Performance Philosophy biennial conference, hosted by the University of Texas at Austin. Contributors to the conference are invited to submit material for consideration—but we also welcome proposals from all artists, philosophers, scholars, artist-researchers and performance philosophers who would like to address the theme.

Performance philosophy is an interdisciplinary field of thought, creative practice and scholarship concerned with the relationship between performance and philosophy. Emerging since around 2012, performance philosophy can be broadly defined as a performative paradigm of knowledge-making attentive to how thinking performs and performance thinks. It questions disciplinary distinctions and challenges the persistent hierarchies between ways of knowing as reinforced by the standard formats of academic teaching and research including by understanding the identity of philosophy itself as performative and the performativity of research. We encourage applications that engage with this field and experiment with what it might mean for the journal format.

Issue Theme: “After Tragedy”

As we continue to confront authoritarian violence around the world, climate disasters, the rising white nationalist movements, and the COVID-19 pandemic, we ask: what forms of performance thinking and thinking performance might come after tragedy?

We encourage multiple approaches to this theme, ranging from the topic of mourning, to collective action, to historiography, to aesthetic form. Questions may include, but are not limited to:

• What are we to make of the tragic as represented in music and as worked through, in, and by sound art?
• How does contemporary theater and performance art reflect on, incorporate, and/or move past tragic form?
• How can performance demand or enact reparations and repatriation? In the wake of social, environmental, and existential tragedy, how can performance philosophers contribute to the artistic and scholarly thinking around creative and collective mourning practices? 
• How useful is the category of tragedy for narrating history? Does Karl Marx’s famous dictum, that after tragedy comes farce, still hold? What comes after farce?

Formats

Performance philosophy is particularly concerned with questions of form and encourages experimental as well as traditional formats. For Performance Philosophy, we welcome long-form academic articles, and also contributions in a wide range of other formats that take advantage of our platform and ethos, which includes the embrace of  collaborative pieces between two or more authors. For Performance Philosophy “Key Groups” who prepared work for the Austin conference, we are very happy to discuss with you a format that represents the collaboration (including variations in standard length of writing, inclusion of media, and non-standard layouts).

The primary formats for this issue will be: 

Article submissions of 6,000-10,000 words including notes.

[Margins] submissions usually are shorter than a full-length article, and might contain multiple media, formats or elements, including (but not limited to) ficto-criticism, manifestos, and visual essays. [Margins] submissions should normally sit between half a page and ten pages upon conversion to PDF, but can remain flexible. 

Performance Philosophy is able to embed video and other media (where appropriate permissions have been obtained) in our online edition. See examples such as a mixed media article, a collectively authored annotated score, or a video essay.

Performance Philosophy only considers submissions that have not been previously published, and are not under consideration for publication with another journal. 

Citation should follow the Chicago Author-Date formatting: https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide/citation-guide-2.html

For complete author guidelines, see www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines 

 

How to submit

Contributors should upload the following materials to the online journal platform at https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/about/submissions by 1 April 2025:

• Complete drafts for peer review (text files, images, media, code in standard formats). Material should be anonymised where possible (though this may not always be possible)
• Optional: Names of two proposed peer reviewers
• 200-word max biography/ies

This issue is scheduled for publication in January 2026.

 

Peer Review

Editors reserve the right to return submissions that are not suitable for the journal at the submission stage.

If your submission is accepted for consideration, then your material will be sent out for peer-review. We aim for this to be a supportive process and are careful to select reviewers with expertise in the form of the submission.  We do not charge fees for accessing articles, nor for publishing or processing submissions.

 

Open Access

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. We do not charge fees for accessing articles, nor for publishing or processing submissions.

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal, provided it is for non-commercial uses; and that lets others excerpt, translate, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Performance Philosophy has earned the Seal of Approval for Open Access Journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals, awarded to journals that achieve a high level of openness, adhere to best practice, and maintain high publishing standards. See https://doaj.org/toc/2057-7176

Performance Philosophy articles are indexed by SCOPUS, WorldCat, DOAJ, and others.

For full details regarding Performance Philosophy’s open access, peer-review, and other policies, see https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/about/policies.