TRACES is an independent four-monthly refereed journal, launched within the European research programme Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts: From Intervention to Co-Production*. TRACES brings together original, cutting-edge contributions aiming to explore emerging issues in the field of heritage and museum studies. It focuses on practices that are influenced by different disciplines while boosting innovative approaches and experimental research actions. Visual essays, interviews, and full papers—collected all year round through an international call for papers—will investigate a specific topic from different perspectives. Three issues per year: ‘Snapshots’, with graphic-based contributions raising questions and investigating practices within a given topic; ‘Dialogues’, in which a question will unfold through a semistructured critical talk; and ‘Insights’, that will expand the field of inquiry by means of theoretical and empirical critical thoughts. Selected papers will be collected into sixteen-pages thematic signatures, custom designed and printed offset in a limited edition. An extended selection of writings will be available online as open access resources, offering a wide and in-depth overview on the chosen subjects. We are currently collecting contributions for the forthcoming issues of TRACES Journal (September 2017, January and May 2018) *** TRACES Journal Editorial Board: Luca Basso Peressut (Editor-in-Chief); and Francesca Lanz (Assistant Editors); Tal Adler, Julie Dawson, Marion Hamm, John Harries, Martin Krenn, Erica Lehrer, Sharon Macdonald, Suzana Milevska, Aisling O’Beirn, Alenka Pirman, Regina Römhild, Arnd Schneider, Karin Schneider, Klaus Schönberger, and Roma Sendyka. Editorial Staff: Michela Bassanelli, Cristina F. Colombo, Jacopo Leveratto, and Alessandra Galasso (English editing) www.traces.polimi.it/journal
TRACES JOURNAL | year 02 – 2017/2018
Europe and Heritages in/from the margins Call for papers
A buffer, a liminal landscape, a ribbon, a palimpsest, a spatial zone are some of the expressions used by authors to address the concept of the margin in terms of both symbolic and spatial meanings. The concept of margin is very connected to the idea brought forward by Homi Bhabha of a “hybrid third space”, that is a way of describing a productive and reflective space that engenders new possibilities. It is an “interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative” space of new forms of cultural meaning and production, blurring the limitations of existing boundaries and calling into question established categorisations of culture and identity (Bhabha 1994). The heightened profile and nature of different treatments of the European borders after the Schengen Agreement, the Refugee Crisis and EU countries’ different responses to it, the mobilisation of exclusionary European identities, are subjects that need an important reflection. Europe today can only be understood when seen from its social, cultural or geographic margins, thus encouraging European identity processes in which multiple and sometimes conflicting perspectives coexist, rather than being set against each other. The established interrelation between heritage, identity and history—the memory-identityheritage complex theorised by Sharon Macdonald (2013)—is today no longer univocal: augmented mobility and migration flows combined with the acceleration of communication technology development are enhancing a social condition characterised by multitransculturality and multi-ethnicity, and generally multi-perspectivity. TRACES invites scholars, researchers, artists, educators, with the widest range of backgrounds, specialisation, and perspectives, to submit innovative and critical reflections on the theme of “Europe, Heritages in/from the margins”, investigating how in and from the margins—in their multipronged meaning—we can support the development of a more reflexive idea of Europe (Römhild 2009). We look for contributions exploring innovative heritages practices drawing on an open, processual and flexible understanding of European identity and heritage, strengthening democracy, fostering negotiation and facilitating ways of dealing with conflict. We seek to explore how heritages in/from the margins—be them cultural, social, economic, religious, physical, visible or invisible, real or imagined, locational or relational—could contribute to European integration and cultural cohesion, nurturing a reflexive Europeanisation as a bedrock for a democratic and enlightened public imagination of European identity. A multi-disciplinary scientific committee will select contributions to be published in the printed and digital, open-access versions of the magazine, each with a ISSN code.
à Deadlines for submissions are: September 01, 2017 (visual essays) December 01, 2017 (interviews, dialogues and single/ multiple authors papers) April 01, 2018 (short and full papers) SUBMISSION GUIDELINES The contributions, all in British English, should be emailed as attached documents to infoTRACES@polimi.it, where other inquires may also be addressed. Visual essays Short texts (max 10000 types including spaces and essential references) with 8-12 images. Visual essays are understood to communicate speculative researches and practice-based visual investigations, building up a narration by using both visual and verbal language. Images, photographs, drawings, sketches and diagrams play a key role in presenting the intellectual inquiry enunciated in the paper. The main text could be integrated by short sentences directly linked to the images and working as a graphical superstructure. Dialogues Interviews (max 6000-18000 types including spaces and essential references, with 3 images, if possible). Short and Full papers Short papers (max 6000 types including spaces and essential references, with 4-6 images) and full papers (max 22500 types, with 9-11 images). Each contribution must include: • title (without name of the author/s); • body of the paper; • numbered footnotes; • bibliographical references; • image captions (sent in a separate file) supplied with the paper. Image captions must contain the same letters/numbering used for the corresponding files and credits (i.e. name of the photographer). • short bio—max 50 words—of the author/s (sent in a separate file) including full name, affiliation, and contacts. Please, use a Chicago B (author, data) reference system. All the images must be saved as separate file in .jpg format (300 dpi).