streetnotes

[streetnotes]

CFP: Streetnotes 31: Urban Habits

Listening to music while jogging, getting coffee from the same coffee shop in the morning, always crossing the street at one particular intersection, dining with friends every Friday, going to one barber or hairdresser only, leaving the subway station from the same exit…time and time again…these are some of many Urban Habits–individual or group, public or private–that we form in the cities where we live. We perform them regularly, with or without much thought. They have their own rhythm and choreography as they pulse through the cities where we perform them. How do we develop Urban Habits, how long do we practice them, and how do they change over time? What role does city infrastructure play in the life and longevity of Urban Habits? How do Urban Habits define not just the cities where they take place but also the people who enact, observe, or remember them? 

In addition to inviting submissions of essays, poems, 2D artwork, and (auto) ethnographies for the issue Streetnotes: Urban Habits, we are partnering with The Habitorium–a platform for documenting habits of all kinds–founded by Jo Novelli-Blasko in 2013 to launch The Survey of Urban Habits. The Habitorium will report on the survey findings in the journal.

Journal submissions and survey responses are due by October 31st, 2023. You can complete either or both. 

Check the journal submission guidelines here. Submit your work here. 

Check The Survey of Urban Habits here. Submit your response here. 

Inquires? Contact the co-editors: 

Jorge de La Barre, jorgelabarre@id.uff.br (journal submissions)

Blagovesta Momchedjkova, bmm202@nyu.edu (journal submissions)Jo Novelli-Blasko, jonovelli@gmail.com (survey)

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CFP: Streetnotes 30: Sketchbook: Drawing the City

We are looking for sketches, drawings, and other hand illustrations of street-scenes and urban encounters.

We call upon artists, ethnographers, and poets to draft the city by way of drawing, in maps, in street scenes, in urban encounters, and impressions, to find and illustrate the city in a way that complements, problematizes, critiques, or reimages the everyday life of urban traffic and behaviors.

The fluid production and distribution of the image, enabled by the omnipresence of phone cameras, has transformed the lived condition of the street. The city and its subjects respond to this new level of self-surveillance with a consciousness of representation, where-in both image-maker and image-subject, achieve their highest-level of objective validation from the subjectivity of photography.

The testament of digital photography, however, has also naturalized a transparency of vision, one in which, the photographer and her subject share a compact on the limits of representation, agreeing on a particular digital surface, and masking those places where light will not reflect.

Streetnotes 30: Sketchbook seeks to pierce this opaque quality of urban representation, to bypass the camera’s eye, and take up, instead, the pen (or other drawing tool).

Contributors may submit up to five drawings of city or street scenes saved as JPEG images: 700x800 150dpi. Please embed images in a Word document, and provide a submission title, a brief abstract, and any related notes or captions.

Deadline: December 1, 2022

Questions and inquiries can be directed to Streetnotes Editor: David Michalski, email: michalski@ucdavis.edu

All submissions must be made through our online submission system: https://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

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CFP: NEW YORK CITY IN TRANSFORMATION

CALL FOR PAPERS:  CLOSED, thank you. (2/15/2022)

NEW YORK CITY IN TRANSFORMATION 

Guest Editors: LinDa Saphan and Jennifer Pipitone (College of Mount Saint Vincent, NYC)

Brief Description for Fall 2022: 

This special issue will profile urban transformations in New York City, broadly defined, and ranging from the mundane rhythms of the city to the extraordinary. We invite contributions of academic articles and artistic submissions that align with the topics outlined below.

Overview: 

Urban landscapes are socially produced and socially producing, making these spaces dynamic and ever-changing. Urban transformations take place at various scales, speeds, and visibility and may be carried out by different stakeholders and actors. Large-scale material transformations like the erecting of new buildings, designs of new parks, and renovations of landmarks are often high in visibility. However, transformations also include changes in people’s relationship with, and perception of, public spaces, which may be less visible. In times of crisis, urban transformations can be intensified; New York City, with its share of urban trauma in the last decades, has revealed its toughness and resilience.

According to Lefebvre’s Production of Space (1991), social space is produced through a dialectic spatial triad: how space is perceived, conceived, and lived. Perceived space (spatial practice; perçu) may be situated within the realm of the material and includes the built environment and everyday perceptions of the world. Conceived space (representations of space; l’espace conçu) can be positioned in the realm of the abstract and is in part a result of hierarchical power relations that shape the representations of places, peoples, and cultures. Lived space (spaces of representation; l’espace vécu) refers to the (re)production of spaces through bodily enactment. The “aliveness” of lived space, powered by active engagement with surrounding environments, has the potential for multiple spatial stories to emerge in the (re)production of space, such as the renegotiation of what is thought about or seen.

In this special issue, we are interested in how urban transformations are perceived, conceived, and/or lived within the New York City context, broadly defined, that range from the everyday rhythms to the extraordinary. Potential topics submissions may address, but are not limited to are as follows:

● Resilience in times of crisis

● Contested spaces

● Public space

● Public arts

● Urban activism

● Urban nature

● Gentrification

● Sacred spaces

● Racial reckoning

● Tourism and recreation

● Labor

● Home

● Transportation

● Fashion

● ...and more!

References:

Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Wiley- Blackwell: Oxford, UK (Original work published 1974).

Timeline: Deadline for 500-word abstract of submission: February 1st 2022

● For artistic submissions, please submit three (3) images of different bodies of work or from the same series with a short description how it fits into the call. All kinds of art works are accepted, except: video, installations, and performances.

Deadline for full paper/artistic submission, if invited: Late Spring 2022

Anticipated publication: Fall 2022

All submissions should be made through: http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Please direct all inquiries to the co-editors of this volume:

LinDa Saphan, PhD linda.saphan@mountsaintvincent.edu

Jennifer Pipitone, PhD jennifer.pipitone@mountsaintvincent.edu

Streetnotes is a peer-reviewed journal for the interdisciplinary study of the city, its lifeways and social relations, with a special concern for the cultural and aesthetic forms that arise through its traffic.

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Sounds of the City

Now In Press as :

Sounds and Silence in the Pandemic City

: http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Original CFP for Streetnotes 28: Sounds of the City

From traffic honking to church bells; jackhammers to party music; begging to preaching; protest chants to hovering helicopters…sounds of various kinds accompany our daily urban existence, and in time we learn how to navigate them—generating, regulating, celebrating, or ignoring them. But the COVID-19 pandemic transformed our sonic experiences in cities: some are amplified, some subdued. How do we make sense of urban sounds, noise, and music anew? Sirens, alarms, garbage trucks, gunshots, outdoor concerts, street festivals, bar music, block parties, ice-cream trucks, loud conversations, group protests, the revving up of motorcycles, the shattering of glass, the barking of dogs, busking, cursing, cat-calling, street-peddling, public transportation announcements—sounds used to evoke familiar places, practices, or people; they also calmed us down or drove us mad. Do we contemplate sounds and sound memories differently in the face of the global health crisis? What sounds do we fear, miss, anticipate? How do we process silence? Quarantined at home, isolated from each other, urban dwellers around the world open their windows every night, to salute frontline workers by clapping in unison, or to protest their government’s inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic by banging on pots and pans. Have we found new ways, in these times of social distancing, to be together through sound? Or is sound simply not enough, as we see urban dwellers, protective masks on, gather together in public places worldwide despite virus and curfew, to fight racism and police brutality? In the past, we relied on our smartphones and listening devices to tune into our own, private soundscapes and avoid the city’s. Now we rely on our devices to record public instances of governmental injustice and abuse. How have our concepts of private space, public life, and sharing the city through sound changed? Drawing from the works of Raymond Murray Schafer, Jacques Attali, and Michael Bull, among others, the next issue of Streetnotes seeks submissions that address the sonic shaping of our contemporary urban experiences, prior, during, because and in spite of COVID-19. We are interested in academic or personal essays, ethnographies, experimental writing, poetry, and photo essays.

Submit all articles through Streetnotes submission system, by Oct 15th, 2020:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Please, direct any inquiries to the co-editors of the volume:Prof. Jorge de La Barre, jorgelabarre@id.uff.br and Prof. Blagovesta Momchedjkova, bmm202@nyu.edu

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Walking the Digital City

CFP Streetnotes 27: Walking in the Digital City

Guest editors: Claudia Brazzale and Blake Morris This special issue will examine the interface between technology and our experience of urban space and, in particular, of walking in the city. We invite contributions of academic articles, interviews, visual essays, artistic provocations, walking scores or artists’ pages that address the topics outlined below.  

Overview:

In ‘Walking in the Capitalist City’, Anja Hälg Bieri (2017) identifies a trend to ‘walkable urbanism’, promoted by urban planners and designers to create less car-centric cities. While the desire to create walkable spaces is laudable, Bieri’s research identifies the danger of its recuperation, ‘a sales pitch for real-estate premiums’ and the ‘whole spectrum of gear, clothes and even cars’ that go with a ‘walkable lifestyle’ (34). One of the essential pieces of ‘gear’ that accompanies contemporary urban walking practices is the smart-phone, and the multitude of applications developed for it, which mediate and inform our experiences of the city. In this special issue of Streetnotes, we would like to examine how the ubiquity of digital tools, exemplified by the phones we carry with us, can contribute to new considerations of walking that challenges its recuperation and co-optation by the investment class.

In 2005, in her book For Space, Doreen Massey wonders if technologically facilitated communication potentially reduces “one of the truly productive characteristics of material spatiality”: the “happenstance juxtaposition of previously unrelated trajectories, that business of walking round a corner and bumping into alterity” (94). For Massey, what is at stake is our engagement with the diversity of the streets and more importantly, the requirements of ‘social negotiation’ that accidental and unexpected social encounters foster. Revisiting Massey’s observation fifteen years later, we invite papers that consider how her concerns have manifested, and how digital tools might create ‘happenstance moments’ in urban spaces rather than serve as tools of disengagement and alienation.

 The potential for digital tools and mobile applications to be used to increase connectivity through globally connected local practices, is exemplified by recent rise in artistic practices that combine walking and digital technology. A new generation of artists working in and across disciplines - dance/choreography, performance, visual art, music, and what Phil Smith (2015) refers to as "Walking's New Movement" - are using digital tools, such as blogs, listservs, mobile applications, and augmented reality, to encourage different ways of walking through the city. Works such as Jennie Savage’s Fracture Mob (2012), which asked participants to engage in a simultaneous worldwide drift; Jen Southern and Chris Speed’s Comob (2009), a collaborative mapping application; or Deveron Projects’ Slow Marathon, which has connected the rural space of Huntly, Scotland to Gaza in Palestine and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, embrace digital tools to create aesthetic walking exchanges.  We are interested in walking as both subject and method, and encourage submissions that take a practice-based approach. Importantly, we look for contributions that offer models for practice, in addition to any critique of, the intersection of digital technology and urban walking practices. Papers may cover a wide array of approaches and creative inquiries to this topic.  Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following themes and prompts:

·      How are inhabitants of urban spaces utilising technology to encourage new ways of walking through and interacting with the landscape ·        How are digital tools being used by people whose access needs are not met by the urban design of their area? ·        How might digital interfaces connect walking practices in urban spaces to suburban, town, village or rural walks? ·        How might digital media and technologies change our embodied sense of walking in the city? ·        To what extent does the digital realm enable and shape more embodied, localised, everyday walking practices? And how do these practices extend and challenge understandings of embodiment and embodied experiences? ·        How have locative media and mobile applications changed walking experiences for urban dwellers (eg. the use of digital tech to facilitate tourist walking experiences;  walking and digital storytelling; augmented reality and mobile phone applications), and what potential models might we introduce in the future?

Deadline: February 24, 2020

Questions and inquiries can be directed to the issue Editors:  Claudia Brazzale, email: c.brazzale@uel.ac.uk and Blake Morris, email: blake@walkexchange.org

All submissions must be made through our online submission system: https://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

  References:

Bieri, Anja Hälg (2017), ‘Walking in the capitalist city’, inThe Routledge International Handbook of Walking. London: Routledge, pp. 27-36.

Massey, Doreen (2005) For Space. London: Sage Publications.

Smith, Phil (2015) Walking’s New Movement. Axminster: Triarchy.

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CFP: Sketchbook

CFP: Streetnotes 28

Sketchbook: Drawing the City

We are looking for sketches, drawings, and other hand illustrations of street-scenes and urban encounters.

The fluid production and distribution of the image, enabled by the omnipresence of phone cameras, has transformed the lived condition of the street. The city and its subjects respond to this new level of self-surveillance with a consciousness of representation, where-in both image-maker and image-subject, achieve their highest-level of objective validation from the subjectivity of photography.

The testament of digital photography, however, has also naturalized a transparency of vision, one in which, the photographer and her subject share a compact on the limits of representation, agreeing on a particular digital surface, and masking those places where light will not reflect.

Streetnotes 27: Sketchbook seeks to pierce this opaque quality of urban representation, to bypass the camera’s mechanical eye, and take up, instead, the pen.  We call upon artists, ethnographers, and poets to draft the city by way of drawing, in maps, in street scenes, in urban encounters, and impressions, to find and illustrate the city in a way that complements, problematizes, critiques and reimages the everyday life of urban traffic and behaviors.  The coordination and time necessary to draw what one sees, builds upon a communication between one’s physicality and vision. We are looking for inventive work that expresses this dialogue between image and form.   

Contributors may submit up to five drawings of cities or streets scenes saved as JPEG images: 700x800 150dpi.

Deadline: May 1, 2019

Questions and inquiries can be directed to Streetnotes Editor:  David Michalski, email: michalski@ucdavis.edu

All submissions must be made through our online submission system: https://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

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From Above: The Practice of Verticality

Call For Work: Streetnotes 26

Streetnotes is seeking submissions for 26th issue titled “From Above: The Practice of Verticality.” Cities may be old or new, modern or post-modern, global or not quite yet so. Cities are in fact increasingly vertical, and verticality may be regarded as a universal asset: the higher (the building, hill or mountain), the better (the view, for all purposes). From Jeremy Bentham’s (or Michel Foucault’s) Panopticon to Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s Earth from Above, the practice of vertical viewing has expanded from surveillance and control to forms of enjoyment and an aestheticization of the built and natural environments: while a particular excitement has always been contained in the ability to see from above, a vertical tourist gaze has arisen globally. The practice of verticality may be informed by its “architectures of power” (Sharon Zukin), built or natural rooftops, panoramic viewpoints for visiting or living, cable car or helicopter sightseeing, etc.

In an attempt to critically engage with a possibly arising culture of verticality, we are interested in collecting a variety of contributions that explore the experience and imagination attached to gaining a bird’s (or God’s) eye view. Particularly, we aim at understanding how and in which ways the production and/or consumption of verticality helps document the contemporary urban experience.

Submissions include but are not limited to academic or personal essays, ethnographies, experimental writing, poetry, and photo essays.

 Submit all articles through Streetnotes submission system, by May 2nd, 2018:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Please, direct any inquiries to the co-editors of the volume:

Prof. Jorge de La Barre,        jorgelabarre@id.uff.br

Prof. Blagovesta Momchedjkova,    bmm202@nyu.edu 

Publication is expected in the Summer of 2018

Streetnotes is a peer-reviewed biannual journal for the interdisciplinary study of the city, its lifeways and social relations, with a special concern for the cultural and aesthetic forms that arise through its traffic. We publish qualitative sociology, critical essays, documentary photography, poetry and visual arts informed by the ethnographic exploration of contemporary and historic urban forms. http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

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Streetnotes 25: Between Spectacle and Resistance

Streetnotes 25, a major work, brought together by Blagovesta Momchedjikova and Jorge de La Barre, is here. It assembles thirty two original contributions by sociologists, anthropologists, activists, poets and photographers to probe the contemporary condition of public space, asking what is possible in era of closure and privatization, while at the same time, animating the possibilities and potentiality of city life by delicately recording its life-force as it pulses against its constrictors.

Enjoy,

David Michalski, Editor. Streetnotes

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a preview to Streetnotes 25: Public Space: Between Spectacle and Resistance, Section 1: A Few Lessons from Brazil

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

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Streetnotes 24 “Poietic Polis” edited by Derek Fenner now available.

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

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CFP: Public Space: Between Spectacle and Resistance

Streetnotes 25 (Spring 2016) Public Space: Between Spectacle and Resistance

Streetnotes is seeking submissions for its Spring 2016 issue: “Public Space: Between Spectacle and Resistance.” We are interested in examining the formal or informal movements that take place in the city—from mega-events to street-vending. These kinds of performances create unique, albeit, temporary space/time units, involving and transforming both the city and its dwellers in various ways. We are curious to understand how these spectacular or routine events come to be; what are their visual and auditory dimensions; and where do we find their broader socio-political implications. Furthermore, how do such instances of spectacle or resistance interact with contemporary urban life and social memory?

Submissions may include, but are not limited to academic or personal essays, ethnographies, experimental writing, theory grounded in concrete observation, poetry, and photo essays.

Please submit all all work through the Streetnotes submission system, by January 1st, 2016: http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Work for this issue ought not exceed 12 pages.

Please, direct any inquiries to the co-editors of the volume:

Prof. Jorge de La Barre, jorgelabarre@id.uff.br and Prof. Blagovesta Momchedjkova, bmm202@nyu.edu

More information about Streetnotes: http://escholarship.org/uc/search?entity=ucdavislibrary_streetnotes;view=aimandscope

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CFP: Poietic Polis (new deadline May 15)

--

CFP: Poietic Polis (Streetnotes 24)

Poietic Polis

a special “poetry” issue of Streetnotes

Edited by Derek Fenner (derekfenner@gmail.com)

New Deadline: May 15, 2015

--

Empire means to prepare against. The empire is fear.

Embracing our fear, a deep mourning emerged, the Skyscraper Blues.

–Cecelia Vicuña

The task of the poet is not different from the work of history, which also discovers rather than invents: history, like poets, uncovers, in ever new situations, human possibilities previously hidden.

–Zygmunt Bauman

Streetnotes is a turn on the word ‘fieldnotes’, as such our journal seeks methodological innovation and critical engagement through works which lay bare the poetics of discovery, display and analysis of street observations.

Poeitic: word-forming element meaning “making, producing,” from Latinized form of Greek poietikos “capable of making, creative, productive,” from poiein “to make, create”

Polis: a combining form, meaning “city,” appearing in loanwords from Greek ( metropolis), and used in the formation of placenames (Annapolis).

This special “poetry” issue seeks “to extract from poeitic production those unthought forces capable of thinking a people yet to come” (jagodzinzki) and the cities they are yet to inhabit, to look at the streets not as you see them, but rather an inquiry into languages interplay with- in/out empire.

For this issue we seek poetics that investigate:

cartographies of place;

places of power;

forgetting / memory;

territories in resistance;

witness / prophecy;

the police state and white supremacy;

gentrification;

decolonization;

history / now;

revolutions to be taken up;

systems to be shut down;

aesthetic / anaesthetic

confronting power in defined/marked territories; and,

climate change.

The contemporary form of exodus and the new barbarian life demand that tools become poietic prostheses, liberating us from the condition of modern humanity.

–Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri

About Streetnotes:

Streetnotes is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing qualitative sociology, critical essays, documentary photography, poetry and visual arts informed by the ethnographic exploration of contemporary and historic urban forms.

Our name, Streetnotes is a turn on the word ‘fieldnotes’, as such our journal seeks methodological innovation and critical engagement through works which lay bare the poetics of discovery, display and analysis of street observations. Towards this end we publish work of seasoned and aspiring scholars, social scientists, artists, photographers and poets engaged in creative ways of making sense of, and questioning the familiar and strange of urban life in the effort to build empirically based social theory.

To nurture the humanistic exploration of the city as a social form, Streetnotes seeks to develop through its publications a popular ethnographic tradition, one that encourages the mass reflection and critical grasp of the concrete matrix of urban social life.

More information about submission policies are located at the journal site:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Questions can be directed to the issue editor Derek Fenner (derekfenner@gmail.com)

[streetnotes]

CFP: Poietic Polis (Streetnotes 24)

  Poietic Polis

a special “poetry” issue of Streetnotes

Edited by Derek Fenner (derekfenner@gmail.com)

Deadline: April 1, 2015

Empire means to prepare against. The empire is fear.

Embracing our fear, a deep mourning emerged, the Skyscraper Blues.

--Cecelia Vicuña

The task of the poet is not different from the work of history, which also discovers rather than invents: history, like poets, uncovers, in ever new situations, human possibilities previously hidden.

--Zygmunt Bauman

Streetnotes is a turn on the word ‘fieldnotes’, as such our journal seeks methodological innovation and critical engagement through works which lay bare the poetics of discovery, display and analysis of street observations.

Poeitic: word-forming element meaning "making, producing," from Latinized form of Greek poietikos "capable of making, creative, productive," from poiein "to make, create"

Polis: a combining form, meaning “city,” appearing in loanwords from Greek ( metropolis), and used in the formation of placenames (Annapolis).

This special “poetry” issue seeks “to extract from poeitic production those unthought forces capable of thinking a people yet to come” (jagodzinzki) and the cities they are yet to inhabit, to look at the streets not as you see them, but rather an inquiry into languages interplay with- in/out empire.

For this issue we seek poetics that investigate:

cartographies of place;

places of power;

forgetting / memory;

territories in resistance;

witness / prophecy;

the police state and white supremacy;

gentrification;

decolonization;

history / now;

revolutions to be taken up;

systems to be shut down;

aesthetic / anaesthetic

confronting power in defined/marked territories; and,

climate change.

The contemporary form of exodus and the new barbarian life demand that tools become poietic prostheses, liberating us from the condition of modern humanity.

--Michael Hardt / Antonio Negri

About Streetnotes:

Streetnotes is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing qualitative sociology, critical essays, documentary photography, poetry and visual arts informed by the ethnographic exploration of contemporary and historic urban forms.

Our name, Streetnotes is a turn on the word ‘fieldnotes’, as such our journal seeks methodological innovation and critical engagement through works which lay bare the poetics of discovery, display and analysis of street observations. Towards this end we publish work of seasoned and aspiring scholars, social scientists, artists, photographers and poets engaged in creative ways of making sense of, and questioning the familiar and strange of urban life in the effort to build empirically based social theory.

To nurture the humanistic exploration of the city as a social form, Streetnotes seeks to develop through its publications a popular ethnographic tradition, one that encourages the mass reflection and critical grasp of the concrete matrix of urban social life.

More information about submission policies are located at the journal site:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

Questions can be directed to the issue editor Derek Fenner (derekfenner@gmail.com)

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Call for Work:

City Kids

a special issue of Streetnotes

New Extended Deadline: April 1, 2014

And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing.

Zechariah 8:5

The prophet may have envisioned the New Jerusalem as swarming with kids, but the streets today tend to be...

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Streetnotes 22: Photo Essay

Streetnotes 22: PHOTO ESSAY

Streetnotes 22 Cover editor, Streetnotes

Table of Contents and Front Matter editor, Streetnotes

Articles

Bank Street: A Photographic Essay Vanderwees, Chris

Honolulu, Oceanic Urbanism Evangelista, Jonathan "Took"; Labrador, Roderick N.

Manhattan’s "Dirty Urban Landscapes" Busà, Alessandro

Field Notes: Beijing Markets Seale, Kirsten

Creating Spaces of Transborder Play: Indigenous Mexican Migrants in California and the Game of Pelota Mixteca Berger, Martin E.; Peña, Leopoldo

Offerandestraat: Experimenting with Flash Encounters with Strangers on Dress Alp, Elif; Hald, Lene; Sorenson, Peter

Spaces: undergo. the parallels Kartlelishvili, Theona;  Palavandishvili, Nini

Zagreb: Boxenwerk Cohen, Deatra; Siegel, Adam

Prosperity Gospel: an excerpt Weeks, Charter; Flynn, Keith

PhiladelphiAmble Schall, Daniel

From Central to the World: A Day in the Life in Transit de La Barre, Jorge

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CFP: City Kids

Call for Work:

City Kids

a special issue of Streetnotes

New Extended Deadline: April 1, 2014

  And the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing.

Zechariah 8:5

 The prophet may have envisioned the New Jerusalem as swarming with kids, but the streets today tend to be rather quiet. To be sure, city neighborhoods once resounded to the shouts and  cries of double Dutch, ringolevio, and stickball, but if your kid today is found playing in the street, you might hauled off for child neglect. In the suburban streets you may encounter dog walkers or joggers while the kids may be found in backyard, at a play date or soccer practice. Even more likely, rich or poor, urban or suburban, the modern child is inside-- looking at a screen.

Supervised and protected as never before, children no longer roam freely. Shuttled between home and school, they have disappeared from public view. At the same time, the length of childhood (and attendant juvenile behavior) extends further and further into what was formerly considered adulthood.

In this special “City Kids” issue of Streetnotes, we invite you to explain what urban (and suburban) childhood once was and what it is today. How can we account for the astonishing changes that so profoundly altered the child’s relationship to public and private space? We welcome contributions in history, anthropology, education, psychology, economics, public policy, art history, photography, medicine, architecture and other relevant disciplines.  Along with scholarly papers, we seek photo essays, stories, memoirs and poems.

  City Kids

will appear in Streetnotes 23

New Extended Deadline: April 1, 2014

Please submit questions to the editor of this special issue, James Wunsch, at jlwunsch@gmail.com or to Streetnotes editor, David Michalski at michalski@ucdavis.edu

  All articles must be submitted through Streetnotes submission management software: http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

A fragment from Peter Brueghel’s encyclopedic, Children’s Games (1560), Kunsthistoriche Museum, Vienna

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Call for Work: Photo Essay

CFP: Photo Essay, special issue Streetnotes 22

Deadline: October 15, 2013

  Streetnotes: poetry, ethnography, and the documentary experience.

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

  Photo Essay

  In this special issue of Streetnotes we wish to examine the concept of the Photo Essay, to engage, question, experiment, and reinvent it, as a means to capture the character of the contemporary moment.

  Born alongside the camera, the Photo Essay took shape as a challenge to hitch together image and thought.  Maneuvering between two modes of writing, with light and with words, the creators of the Photo Essay set in motion modern genres, such as photojournalism and documentary, and initiated new disciplines like visual anthropology and sociology. Offering the promise of new insight and new truths, the exposé of the Photo Essay helped create new media platforms and new audiences too. The best work also provoked a new critical awareness of social conditions and new questions about their representation.

  Along the way, however, the Photo Essay became less transparent and more freighted with the problems of late modernity. Questions arose about the form's authenticity and objectivity. Critics and artists saw in it a hardening of style, and the emergence of a privileged gaze and compositional authority that was less conducive to disrupting and demystifying power than to maintaining its structures. Perhaps against its original intentions, the Photo Essay became a device that distanced viewers from events. 

  The fall of the Photo Essay, its turn from truth to deception, however, took place alongside the popularization of both photography and ethnography. New technology and media enabled both an explosion and acceleration of images and texts across an omnipresent mediascape, one which is today increasingly dominated by so-called 'user-generated content.' In this issue of Streetnotes, we ask if at-hand tools to capture images, instantly upload videos, and issue short-burst communiques have further buried the Photo Essay as form. Or instead, have these advances made the very challenges the Photo Essay calls forth, all the more important to take up?

  There is no way to go back to re-create nor re-read a Photo Essay like Bateson and Mead's _Balinese Character_ or W. Eugene Smith 'Country Doctor' as if the crisis of representation never happened, or as if the means of digital production had not significantly changed. Streetnotes asks, instead, if the impossibility of the Photo Essay today has not, in fact, made the questions implicit in its form all the more critical as we attempt to make sense of the flood of images and texts which today everywhere surround us.

We endeavor to think and experiment with the Photo Essay of tomorrow. To ask what must be destroyed and what must be rescued? What is the Photo Essay’s unique craft, art or invitation? What kind of audience can it evoke today?

  In this issue of Streetnotes we are looking for:

New Photo Essays, which experiment and play with its form.

Academic articles on the place of the Photo Essay within today’s mediascape.

Critical reviews of contemporary work that aims to bring photography and texts together in a sustained and complex fashion.

And any other inventive work that struggles with the challenges associated with the interplay and poetics of images and thought, or pictures and words.   

  Questions and topics related to the Photo Essay may include (but are not limited to the following):

  The heuristic character of essays and photography

The poetics of concealment and exposition

The dialectics of image and texts

The End and/or Ends of photojournalism

The Photo Essay within the context of new media

The politics of the Photo Essay

Radical images and the onset of concrete social conditions

Capturing and appropriating space

Reimagination of social relations

Images of the global, placemaking and travel

Fast media and slow Interpretation

Image vs. Text, Eye vs. Ear

Im/possibilities of seeing differently

The Work, craft and art of photography and writing today

New advances in descriptive poetics

    Deadline: October 15, 2013

Please direct questions to Streetnotes Editor, David Michalski michalski@ucdavis.edu

  All articles must be submitted through Streetnotes submission management software:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

    About Streetnotes:

  Streetnotes is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal publishing qualitative sociology, critical essays, documentary photography, poetry and visual arts informed by the ethnographic exploration of contemporary and historic urban forms.

  Our name, Streetnotes is a turn on the word ‘fieldnotes’, as such our journal seeks methodological innovation and critical engagement through works which lay bare the poetics of discovery, display and analysis of street observations. Towards this end we publish work of seasoned and aspiring scholars, social scientists, artists, photographers and poets engaged in creative ways of making sense of, and questioning the familiar and strange of urban life in the effort to build empirically based social theory.

  To nurture the humanistic exploration of the city as a social form, Streetnotes seeks to develop through its publications a popular ethnographic tradition, one that encourages the mass reflection and critical grasp of the concrete matrix of urban social life.

  More information about submission policies are located at the journal site:

http://escholarship.org/uc/ucdavislibrary_streetnotes

  Questions can be directed to the Editor, David Michalski  michalski@ucdavis.edu.