Lives & Letters Mailing: July – August 2018
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to another Lives & Letters Mailing. This month’s mailing contains information about:
1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
– New Curiosity! On the other side: ‘the migrant letter’, its other and not/correspondence
– From the blog: The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela
– From the blog: Opening an archive
– From the blog: Livingstone Online
– From the blog: Only the sound of a Mozart opera was heard
2. CFP–Making Stars: Biography and Eighteenth-Century Celebrity (9/15/2018) Edited Collection
3. New issue of a/b 33:2–A Special issue on Embodiment
4. CFP Modern Biographies Book Series–Russian Biographies
5. Life Writing, Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2018 is now available
6. CALL FOR PAPERS – Auto/Fiction (Extended Deadline)
7. Call for Papers FQS Special Issue: “Qualitative Approaches in Social Network Analysis”
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1. Whites Writing Whiteness: Project News
There are five new items of project news we would like to share:
New Curiosity! On the other side: ‘the migrant letter’, its other and not/correspondence
The academic literature sets out that a ‘migrant letter’ is a letter by a migrant and is about their experiences after migration. But what about ‘the other side’, the letters by the people they corresponded with? An example is discussed in depth, written by Lizzie Forbes in Edinburgh to her brother David Forbes; it is dated 23 January 1871. To read more, please visit the Curiosity: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/curiosities/on-the-other-side/
From the blog: The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela
The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela has just been published as part of centenary celebrations, with details given at the end of the blog post. This edition of Mandela’s prison letters is an important milestone in encouraging a more detailed investigation of the ideas and practices articulated by him during his long years of imprisonment and the imposed public/private/organisational frame that surrounds these writings. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/the-prison-letters-of-nelson-mandela/
From the blog: Opening an archive
A Prisoner in the Garden: Opening Nelson Mandela‘s Prison Archive is described as a set of ‘living records of 27 years in prison’, bringing together items scattered in many archives and personal collections, facilitated by the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory and Commemoration Project in association with its a parent body the Nelson Mandela Foundation. The Memory Project also organised an Exhibition. It is concerned with ‘opening the archive’ in a further sense. Recognising that the relevant materials from Mandela (and also many others who were part of the freedom struggle but are not really featured in this context) are scattered and often inaccessible, the Exhibition and the book are linked to Centre work in locating all of these and making information about them available. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/opening-an-archive/
From the blog: Livingstone Online
The Livingstone Online website (http://www.livingstoneonline.org) is particularly interesting and helpful. It features the letters, manuscripts and books of missionary and traveller David Livingstone, and will be of interest to anyone interested in letters, manuscripts, digital projects, southern Africa, history, imperialism, colonialism, religion, literature. Livingstone Online and the Olive Schreiner Letters Online and Whites Writing Whiteness project are all concerned with Southern Africa and the time-periods overlap, And while no one in the immediate Schreiner family missionary circles had met David Livingstone, certainly Gottlob and Rebecca Schreiner had known both Robert and Mary Moffat, and David Livingstone later married the Moffats’ eldest daughter Mary. So there is an indirect connection. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/livingstone-online/
From the blog: Only the sound of a Mozart opera was heard
Mozart’s letters appear across a number of different editions of these and a detailed list has been compiled of those that Norbert Elias references in his extended essay on Mozart: The Sociology of Genius (volume 12 of the Collected Works). Elias was interested in how to understand the relationship between the I and the We (or rather, the They) and what happens to this in circumstances of accelerating change that start re-writing the ratios of power between the people involved. To read more, please visit the blog: http://www.whiteswritingwhiteness.ed.ac.uk/blog/mozart-2/
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2. CFP–Making Stars: Biography and Eighteenth-Century Celebrity (9/15/2018) Edited Collection
Making Stars: Biography and Eighteenth-Century Celebrity
A celebrity is not a person, exactly, but a construct established through the public discourse and representation that we now think of as celebrity culture. During the long eighteenth century, biography was key to an earlier form of celebrity culture that anticipates what we experience as modern celebrity. This volume proposes to explore the relationship between biography and celebrity in the long eighteenth century. In inviting essays, we keep that relationship open to definition: are biography and celebrity mutually constitutive? Does one drive the other? Are there contradictions as well as connections between biography as a genre and the celebrity culture that is manifest in a wide range of print, visual materials, and embodied performances? Similarly, we maintain an open definition of celebrity to include the many different variations in the period: theatrical, criminal, aristocratic, royal, and even the freakish.
We welcome work that clarifies and gives nuance to the prehistory of the celebrity bio as a genre and that thinks about ways in which particular material and ideological conditions shaped the formal and experiential effects of celebrity during the period roughly between 1660 and 1830. Essays might focus, for example, on comparing biography’s relationship to celebrity representation in other genres and media; a specific challenge or problem posed by a person or text or a particular form of representation; or contested representational forms. We also are interested in work that grows out of or reflects on the process of writing a modern biography of an eighteenth-century celebrity. How do biographies create celebrity? How do various rhetorics of biographical discourse contest or refuse celebrity? How might attention to the formal rhetorics of biographical studies provide us new ways to think about celebrity culture in the long eighteenth century and conversely how might the terms of celebrity studies allow us new insights into biography? What case studies allow us to see the constitutive work of celebrity and biography in action?
Questions regarding potential submissions should be sent to both editors:
Kristina Straub <ks3t@andrew.cmu.edu> and Nora Nachumi <nachumi@yu.edu>.
Abstracts of 300 – 400 words are due September 15, 2018. Please include a brief bio. (150 words max.) as well.
Contact Info:
Kristina Straub
Professor of English
Director of Literary and Cultural Studies Program
Carnigie Mellon University
ks3t@andrew.cmu.edu
Nora Nachumi
Associate Professor
Department of English
Yeshiva University
Contact Email: nachumi@yu.edu
URL: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14PTM7kzUlEELcYj8tKCb-qSRJ5coHUz8BWE27pIZBGE/edit?usp=sharing
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/
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3. New issue of a/b 33:2–A Special issue on Embodiment
The editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies are thrilled to announce the publication of our spring 2018 issue (33.2), a special issue on Embodiment guest edited by Sarah Brophy, McMaster University.
The digital version of the issue is now available at www.tandfonline.com/raut and paper copies will be mailed to subscribers next month. If you’d like to subscribe to receive print copies by mail and access to our full digital archives for $35. USD per year, please contact societies@tandf.co.uk.
Enjoy!
Introduction
“Mediated Embodiments/Embodied Meditations”
Abstract: This introduction to the Embodiment special issue of a/bbegins by considering how Johanna Hedva’s “Sick Woman Theory” crystallizes current conceptualizations of embodied selfhood and deploys online self-representational practices. The introduction goes on to situate the contributors’ discussions of installation art, 3D-printing, painting, graphic narrative, prose memoir, performance, poetry, personal narrative, and collective embodiment as social praxis within these critical conversations, highlighting connections to a “politics of care” (Hedva) and “brilliant imperfection” (Clare).
Sarah Brophy, McMaster University [brophys@mcmaster.ca]
The Process
“DystopiAbramović: Marina Abramović: In Residence: Sydney 2015”
Abstract: “DystopiAbramović” responds to a performance initiated by Marina Abramović using bodies of the public in silent performance. We trace the haunting of that performance by forms of collective embodiment that characterize Australia’s political reality—carceral immigration policies, an inquiry into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Australia as a refuge for Jews fleeing Europe, and late-capitalism.
Quinn Eades, La Trobe University [q.eades@latrobe.edu.au] and Anna Poletti, Utrecht University/Monash University[a.l.poletti@uu.nl]
“‘The Embodiment of Pure Thought’? Digital Fabrication, Disability, and New Possibilities for Auto/biography”
Abstract: This essay draws on findings from a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project: “In the Making” to argue that the digital turn in art therapy – particularly 3D printing – makes possible new forms of disability agency, engaging post-humanist theory to suggest re-conceptualizations of embodied person-hood.
Ursula Hurley, The University of Salford [u.k.hurley@salford.ac.uk]
Reflection
“On Labor, Embodiment, and Debt in the Academy”
Abstract: The point of this reflection is to essay – in the old-fashion sense of “try” – out an argument that grapples with the deteriorating effects that the neoliberal university, in its current state of extreme precarity, has on the bodies of (young) faculty members of color. Mobilizing autobiography, poetry, and (non)fiction to think through questions of embodiment, I will focus on academic labor and its often injurious dimensions.
Phanuel Antwi, University of British Columbia [phanuel.antwi@ubc.ca]
Essays
“Painting the Body: Feminist Musings on Visual Autographies”
Abstract: In this paper I look at autographical depictions of the body in the work of Mato Ioannidou, a Greek woman artist, who participated in a wider narrative-based project on visual and textual entanglements between life and art. The paper unfolds in three parts: first, I give an overview of Ioannidou’s artwork, making connections with significant events in her life, then I discuss feminist theorizations of embodiment and visual auto/biography and finally I draw on insights from Spinozist feminist philosophers to discuss the artist’s portrayal of women’s bodies in three cycles of her work. What I argue is that the body becomes a centre piece in the attempt to perceive connections between life and art through expressionism rather than representation.
Maria Tamboukou, University of East London [mariatamboukou@gmail.com]
“Is There a Body in this Text? Embodiment in Graphic Somatography”
Abstract: If the great advantage of the graphic memoir of illness and disability is that it features the body in the text, for greatest effectiveness—and affectiveness–the body ought to be recognizable as a particular human’s — manifestly a thing of flesh, blood, and bone, a truly corporeal body.
Thomas Couser, Hofstra University (Emeritus) [g.t.couser@hofstra.edu]
“A Meditation on Color and the Body in Derek Jarman’s Chromaand Maggie Nelson’s Bluets”
Abstract: Derek Jarman’s Chroma and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets are interdisciplinary autobiographical texts that explore the limits of articulacy and create new queer and feminist genealogies of meaning. This paper argues that these experimental projects communicate embodied experiences including the effects of loss and AIDS-related illnesses by interrogating our understandings of perception and color.
Alexandra Parsons, Yale University/ University College, London [alexandrajaneparsons@gmail.com]
“Tranimacies and Affective Trans Embodiment in Nina Arsenault’s Silicone Diaries and Cassils’s Becoming an Image”
In Nina Arsenault’s Silicone Diaries and Cassils’s Becoming an Image, the artists perform trans embodiment through engaging with animate objects, silicone and clay. Arsenault and Cassils work towards defining trans embodiment as affective entanglements with (in)animate objects and foreground trans agency, creation, and movement.
Ana Horvat, University of Alberta [ahorvat@ualberta.ca]
“Milk Poems and Blood Poems: Revolutionary Embodiment and the New Nicaraguan Woman”
The focus of this essay is the construction Sandinista womanhood through its autobiographical depiction in a full range of embodied self-expression. It highlights the poetry of six guerilla poets of the revolution – Daisy Zamora, Gioconda Belli, Yolanda Blanco, Michele Najlis, Vidaluz Meneses, and Rosario Murillo – all of whom vocalize the emergence of the “New Nicaraguan Woman” as experienced in the physical body.
Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, The College of New Jersey [ortiz@tcnj.edu]
Forum
“Collective Embodiment and Social Praxis”
Abstract: This Forum adopts a process-oriented approach to documenting material and online projects that nurture embodied knowledges for social justice. The contributors contemplate their involvement in collating refugee narratives online, participating in an academic workshop retreat, curating AIDS oral history archives, and pursuing decolonial directions for critical disability arts. They consider the power of embodied testimonies to enact social change by disrupting normative neoliberal boundaries of temporality, citizenship, and identity.
Introduction: “On the Times and Places of Embodied Testimony: Remaking the World”
Sarah Brophy
“Refugee Compassion and the Politics of Embodied Storytelling: A Critical Conversation”
Abstract: In this forum essay, we reflect on the relationship between embodiment, refugees, and global compassion fatigue. We discuss our motivations for contributing to the blog, “Compassionate Canada: Stories in Solidarity with Refugees,” a collection of autobiographical essays written by former Southeast Asian Canadian Refugees in response to the current global refugee crisis.
Vinh Nguyen, University of Waterloo [vinh.nguyen@uwaterloo.ca], Thy Phu, Western University [tphu@uwo.ca], and Y-Dang Troeung, City University of Hong Kong [ytroeung@cityu.edu.hk]
“Marikana, Emoyeni, and the Chronopolitics of Happiness”
Abstract: This essay considers the complex entanglement of embodiment, happiness, and time within recent South African social and biopolitical imaginaries. Specifically, the chronopolitical implications of shifting from politically atomizing modes of self-care in the face of structural injustice, towards forms of collective resistant action, are explored from an embodied-personal vantage point.
Helene Strauss, University of the Free State [strausshj@ufs.ac.za]
“‘This Is My Body’: Historical Trauma, Activist Performance, and Embodied Rage”
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the enactment of resistant embodiment in Michael Smith’s play Person Livid With AIDS: A Day in the Life of a Gay Man Living with AIDS (PLWA). We argue that the recovered recording of the play gives us a model for vibrant, ongoing queer rage.
Ryan Conrad, Carleton University [conradryanconrad@gmail.com] and Alexis Shotwell, Carleton University [alexis.shotwell@carleton.ca]
“Dialectics of Race and Disability: On the Unintelligibility of Revolutionary Desire”
Abstract: Contemporary disability arts practices have a tendency to conflate ‘visible’ embodied traits and identity, and offer little space to locate disability identity within the global colonial/capitalist white supremacist world order. In such an aesthetics context, political desire beyond liberal inclusion becomes unintelligible, and the contours of disability identity are tightly bound to a stigma/redemption binary
Rachel da Silva Gorman, York University [gorman@yorku.ca]
“Disability Art and Re-Worlding Possibilities”
Abstract: My experience as a disabled person tells me that the world is not hospitable to marginalized people. This article explores the ways that disability art and Indigenous art are instrumental to social justice movements for how they imagine and perpetuate new understandings of life with difference and new worldly arrangements.
Eliza Chandler, Ryerson University [eliza.chandler@ryerson.ca]
How Would You Teach It?
“Beyond the Post/Colonial Canon: A Pedagogical Approach to Embodiment in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother”
Abstract: This essay explores the connections between embodiment and gendered postcolonial subject-formation as frame within which to teach Jamaica Kincaid’s 1996 novel The Autobiography of My Mother. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of rewriting Shakespeare’s The Tempest as means of subverting masculinist colonial and anti-colonial narratives.
Kaiama Glover, Barnard College, Columbia University [kglover@barnard.edu]
Review Essay
“Avatars Under Attack: The War on Women’s Testimony”
Abstract: Reading Leigh Gilmore’s Tainted Witness (2017) alongside Identity Technologies (2014) and Networked Affect (2015), this review essay uncovers the permeability between online and offline bodies, racialized and gendered violence, and Gilmore’s “testimonial networks.” Engaging digital embodiment and female testimony, these texts map out a critical frontier in feminist life-writing scholarship.
Adan Jerreat-Poole, McMaster University [jerreata@mcmaster.ca]
What’s Next?
“Embodiment in [Critical] Auto/biography Studies”
Abstract: In auto/biographical studies, it is often only auto/biographies about subjects with marginalized bodies and identities that are considered to be “embodied.” This can potentially function as an intellectual consumption of the margin by the center. In looking to non-traditional types of self-telling and self-narration—beginning with and centering race, gender, disability, fatness, and queerness in autobiography—we suggest that that it is important for [critical] auto/biography studies to open up space for narratives that resist the hegemonic and institutional demands of intelligibility, for not telling, and perhaps resist what is traditionally understood to be embodiment itself.
Sayantani DasGupta Columbia University [sk3578@columbia.edu] and Sasha Kruger, Columbia University [sd2030@columbia.edu]
Book Reviews
Rev. of Speaking of the Self: Gender, Performance and Autobiography in South Asia edited by ANSHU MALHOTRA AND SIOBHAN LAMBERT-HURLEY. Reviewed by Jesse Field.
Rev. of An Anthology to Feast Upon: Eating Worlds: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing edited by SANDRA M. GILBERT AND ROGER J. PORTER. Reviewed by Barbara Frey Waxman.
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Ricia Anne Chansky, PhD
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Research Affiliate, York University CERLAC
Fulbright Specialist in US Studies – Literature
Series Editor, Routledge Auto/Biography Studies
Editor, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Chair, IABA Americas
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba
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4. CFP Modern Biographies Book Series–Russian Biographies
CALL FOR PROPOSALS: Modern Biographies Book Series
Academic Studies Press is pleased to announce an open call for manuscript submissions for its new book series, Modern Biographies, edited by Angela Brintlinger (Ohio State University).
One of the best ways into a culture is through the lives of those who created that culture, and Russian culture is no exception. This new series, Modern Biographies, will be an entry point for English-speaking readers to begin to understand the people and processes which have formed Russia as we know it. Russia has always been rich in fascinating figures and in its own biographical tradition. This series aims to bring those lives to an American audience and to English-speakers across the world.
The carefully selected authors of Modern Biographies are all practicing “Russianists”: eminent writers and scholars who have dedicated their careers to investigating and presenting Russia in numerous monographs and scholarly articles, in classrooms, and in public lectures. For readers, this guarantees that these books are illuminating and engaging as well as authoritative and thought-provoking. Compact and clearly written, the volumes are appropriate for specialists and the general public alike and feature a minimal scholarly apparatus, with a list of works cited and suggestions for further reading following the main text.
For further information on how to submit a proposal, please visit: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/for-authors/, or contact the acquisitions editor, Ekaterina Yanduganova, at kate.yan@academicstudiespress.com.
ABOUT ACADEMIC STUDIES PRESS:
Academic Studies Press is an independent scholarly publisher devoted to advancing knowledge and understanding in the humanities and social sciences, with an emphasis on Jewish Studies and Slavic Studies. Through our outstanding, opinion-leading authors and series editors, we continuously strive to enhance understanding through our monographs and critical companions, improve the accessibility of classic works through our translations, and inspire dialogue through our scholarly commentaries. We champion innovative ideas and new, creative interpretations.
https://www.academicstudiespress.com/
Contact Info:
Ekaterina Yanduganova
Acquisitions Editor
Contact Email: kate.yan@academicstudiespress.com
URL: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/modern-biographies
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba
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5. Life Writing, Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2018 is now available
Life Writing, Volume 15, Issue 3, September 2018 is now available online on Taylor & Francis Online.
Philosophy and Life Writing
This new issue contains the following articles:
Introduction
D. L. LeMahieu & Christopher Cowley
Pages: 301-303 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475000
Articles
Self-management and Narrativity in Teresa of Avila’s Work
Noelia Bueno-Gómez
Pages: 305-320 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475001
‘S’éclairer en dedans’: Rousseau and the Autobiographical Construction of Truth
Marco Menin
Pages: 321-334 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475005
The Incubus of Necessity in Mill’s Autobiography
R. J. Manheimer
Pages: 335-351 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475006
Wilhelm Dilthey’s Views on Autobiography
Helga Lenart-Cheng
Pages: 353-368 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475007
Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um 1900: Longing, Enchantment and the Material Subject
Christopher Hamilton
Pages: 369-383 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475012
‘Forgive Me Reader, for I Have Sinned’: Disponibilité and Confession in the Works of Albert Camus
Grace Whistler
Pages: 385-397 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475017
Life Writing and Philosophy: Bryan Magee and the Subjectivities of the Examined Life
D. L. LeMahieu
Pages: 399-411 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1267547
Heterobiography: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Autobiographical Writing
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
Pages: 413-430 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475055
Narrative and the Phenomenology of Personal Identity in Merleau-Ponty
Peter Antich
Pages: 431-445 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1485538
Narrating Trauma: Judith Butler on Narrative Coherence and the Politics of Self-Narration
Kurt Borg
Pages: 447-465 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1475056
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IABA-L: A LIST FOR LIFE WRITING
International Auto/Biography Association
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home
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6. CALL FOR PAPERS – Auto/Fiction (Extended Deadline)
CALL FOR PAPERS – Auto/Fiction
Special Issue on Serge Doubrovsky
Guest Editor: Pierre-Alexandre Sicart
Submission of full essays due January 31, 2019
(Extended Deadline)
Autobiography? Fiction? Autofiction. This portmanteau word, coined by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his own literary production, was borrowed by Jacques Lecarme to classify the works of other authors, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet (who accepted it nonchalantly) or François Nourissier (who rejected it violently). Since then, it has spread from the academic world to the mass media, and from literature to other arts (cinematography, painting, even music), though its exact definition is still a topic of fiery debate.
For this special issue, however, we will gladly consider any paper on Doubrovsky—who, before he won awards as an author, was better known for his scholarly work on, notably, Corneille, Proust, Sartre, and psychocriticism. The proposals submitted for this special issue are not required to even mention autofiction. A Corneille scholar, for instance, could choose to look back at Corneille et la dialectique du héros: Is this work still relevant today? Is it still read, and if so, how, and by whom? In retrospect, how much of it reflects Corneille, how much Doubrovsky, and how much a certain chapter in the history of literary criticism?
Even scholars more interested in Doubrovsky’s autofictions should not feel compelled to make autofiction the topic of their article. Other aspects of Doubrovsky’s literary work can and should be explored, such as how he represents (his relationship with) women, masculinity, aging, or death.
Finally, we would be interested in reading articles on the last book published under Doubrovsky’s name. Between 1970 and 1977, Doubrovsky typed around 9,000 pages of a “novel” that Grasset rejected until successive cuts left us with the 460 pages of Fils. Thirty-seven years later, thanks to Isabelle Grell, the original typescript was published as Le Monstre, but to this day, few scholars have dared wrangle with it.
How does Le Monstre differ from Fils? What did Fils lose and gain from the cuts? Is there a pattern as to which passages were removed? Do those passages shed new light on Fils? on Doubrovsky’s whole creative production? Do they foreshadow the autofictions that followed Fils? Conversely, do they sketch stories or initiate themes the author never touched again? Is this huge book the one that “says it all” about its author?
Proposals/abstracts of around 200 words should be sent to autofiction@hotmail.com before 31 August 2018. Once a proposal is selected, by 30 September 2018, authors will have until 31 January 2019 to submit an article of up to 10,000 words, notes included. (No lower limit.) All contributions must be in English, must adhere to the MLA style sheet (8th edition), and must be saved as .doc or .docx.
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7. Call for Papers FQS Special Issue: “Qualitative Approaches in Social Network Analysis”
Guest Editors
Stefan Bernhard (Institute for Employment Research Nuremberg), Andreas Herz (University of Hildesheim), Luisa Peters (University of Hildesheim), Inga Truschkat (University of Hildesheim) (Guest Editors)
1. Focus of the Special Issue
Social network analysis (SNA) is one of the most promising and flourishing strands of research in social sciences. A variety of methodological traditions and theories have enabled this research to evolve, including conversation analysis, ethnography, small story research, field theory, social world theory and interactionism. Researchers apply a diversity of qualitative methods in empirical studies, which rely on different kinds of qualitative data collection including interviews, observations, and visualizations. While SNA is a research program that has advanced by applying and revisiting (quantitative) methods, in recent years the reflection, explicit elaboration and discussion of qualitative approaches has gained traction in social research literature.
In this FQS Special Issue on “Qualitative Approaches in Social Network Analysis”, we engage with the rapidly growing field of expertise on qualitative methods in SNA. In particular, we are interested in stimulating and progressing the discussion in this field between “classical” SNA-approaches on the one hand and qualitative approaches (methodology, heuristic, method, etc.) on the other. Furthermore, we would like to systematize current approaches in the field of qualitative methods in SNA and offer different solutions for methodical and methodological challenges.
We invite contributions from all kinds of research traditions, theories and disciplines, which may address but are not restricted to one or more of the following topics:
1.1 Data collection
To date, the discussion on qualitative methods in SNA primarily concerns questions regarding the collection of qualitative network data and particularly how network maps are incorporated with qualitative interviews. The use of other qualitative data collection methods, such as observation, group discussion, document analysis, etc. has attracted by contrast, much less attention. Moreover, there is little systematic discussion on how the epistemological implications of qualitative methods can be combined with SNA research interests or on how qualitative methods are conceptually compatible with SNA research questions. We invite contributions from researchers in which questions of qualitative network data collection are addressed from a methodological perspective.
1.2 Data analysis
The question of data analysis is far less prominent in methodical and methodological debates than that of data collection. While current research practice appears to utilise general procedures such as content analysis or grounded theory, little is known about how qualitative network data analysis procedures. At the same time, analytic solutions and methodical innovations often develop “along the way” and within empirical research studies. In this Special Issue we would like to give room to the practice of working with qualitative network data. We particularly invite contributions which offer insight into the compatibility of qualitative methods and SNA-style research and how epistemological and methodological issues are resolved. Additionally, we invite contributions in which applications of established methods to qualitative SNA, or that detail methodical innovations are presented.
1.3 Qualitative methodology in social network analysis
Qualitative research ideally integrates epistemology, theory, methodology and analysis in a consistent manner (i.e. methodological holism). Against this backdrop, qualitative network analysis faces the question of its theoretical foundation. Theoretical premises permeate the research process from the research question to research design to techniques and methods of analysis. Thus, using or combining of network analytical perspectives with methods of collecting and analysing qualitative network data not only raises issues of research practice but also has theoretical implications. To date, the theoretical foundation of qualitative network research has been discussed in terms of relational approaches, qualitative approaches, or combining/integrating theoretical references. In the light of that, we call for contributions in which the implications of methodological holism for qualitative SNA are explored and resolved.
1.4 Reflexivity and research practice
Finally, SNA based on a qualitative perspective provokes reflexivity in different ways. One issue is to address the discussion on standards of qualitative research. What lessons can be drawn from the debate on quality criteria for qualitative social network analysis? Again, we think that this is important but largely undiscovered terrain of qualitative methods in SNA. Furthermore, qualitative network research addressing questions of reflexivity, also needs to reconcile issues of ethical standards, the role and function of participatory research elements, teaching, data security and the possibilities of the secondary use of data.
2. Timeline
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- September 30, 2018: Deadline for abstracts
- October 15, 2018: Decisions with invitation for handing in a manuscript
- May 31, 2019: Deadline for article submission (first draft)
- June 2019: Review Workshop (peer review among authors)
- September 1, 2019: Deadline article submission (second draft)
- September, October 2019: minor revisions (if necessary)
- Until November 1, 2019: Delivery of all articles (final draft) to the guest editors
- March 2020: Publication of the Special Issue
3. Submission of Abstracts
Articles may be written in German or English language. Abstracts and contributions should follow the FQS guidelines for authors (http://www.qualitativeresearch.net/index.php/fqs/about/submissions#authorGuidelines). Each submitted abstract should be between 400 and 500 words in length. The abstract needs to present a rationale for the proposed article that is grounded in background literature before outlining the main discussion points. In addition, authors need to submit a short biography of no more than 200 words, corresponding author contact details including their e-mail address.
Inquiries and proposals should be sent to the guest editors via e-mail until September 30, 2018:
Stefan Bernhard (Institute for Employment Research Nuremberg): Stefan.Bernhard@iab.de
Andreas Herz (University of Hildesheim): andreas.herz@uni-hildesheim.de
Luisa Peters (University of Hildesheim): luisa.peters@uni-hildesheim.de
Inga Truschkat (University of Hildesheim): truschka@uni-hildesheim.de
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Last updated: 3 August 2018
