Calls for papers

 

International Journal of Tourism Anthropology

 

Special Issue on: "Constructing Interstitial Heritage: Architectures, Visions and Experiences"

Guest Editors:
Gabriel N. Gee, Franklin College, Switzerland
Michelle L. Stefano, Maryland State Arts Council, USA

This special issue invites submissions that explore the past and present modes through which alternate cultural heritage can be preserved and encouraged. In particular, it focuses on the realm of the interstice: a “space, opening, crevice etc, between things near together or between the component parts of a body”.

Interstitial heritage can be located between entities as well as within them. By nature, it creates an aperture that forms an alternate field and conduit to existent structures. It needs not necessarily negate a prevailing socio-political and economic frame (though it may well do so), but it ultimately provides individuals and groups with a ground on which to construct their environment and express themselves within it rather than be subservient to it. In the city, for example, spontaneous occupations of grounds and temporary archisculptures have offered models of interstitial production.

In the ever-increasing flow of images during the 20th century, visual strategies aiming to build alternate banks of visual data have grown inside and outside of the constraints of the society of spectacle. In the everyday life of an increasingly global world, numerous attempts have been made to propose behaviours and experiences that challenge the predicates of top-down social fabrics.

This issue is concerned with the history and the present of interstitial architectures, visions and experiences. And crucially, it is concerned with the issue of their safeguarding. Given the alternate nature of interstitial production and living, their sustainability is central to the articulation of empowered individual and communal consciousness.

The issue invites proposals that explore historical and contemporary forms of interstitial heritage, such as spontaneous architectures and three dimensional constructions, visual archives and alternate visual production systems, as well as the transmission of a varied and fertile bodily creativity.

The readership of this issue includes academics and researchers in anthropology, sociology, architecture, urban history and art history, and historians and professionals of tourism as well as local planners and decision making agents.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the inaugural conference for the Association for Critical Heritage Studies (held in June 2012), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit papers for this call.

Subject Coverage
Suitable topics include but are not limited to:

• Theorising interstitial heritage: contemporary developments
• Theorising interstitial heritage: historical mapping and safeguarding
• Urban forms and functionalities of architectural interstices
• Preserving and empowering para-identities
• Experiencing the norm and subverting or displacing it
• Constructing interstitial aesthetic machines
• The economics and politics of a multilayered whole: developing strategies, empowering actors

Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. (N.B. Conference papers may only be submitted if the paper was not originally copyrighted and if it has been completely re-written).

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission of manuscripts: 15 November, 2012

Notification of acceptance/rejection to authors: 15 January, 2013

Final acceptance of manuscript: 31 March, 2013