SPECIAL ISSUE EDITORS: Bryan Yazell and Emily J. Hogg 

 

ESSAY SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 1 2021

 

Theorists of precarity stress the temporal dimensions of economic insecurity, whether in Guy Standing’s formulation of “tertiary time” or Lauren Berlant’s “ongoing now.” This forum extends recent scholarship on precarious time through a sustained investigation of a particular site where it is experienced with special intensity: the social housing estate in post-austerity Europe.

 

Artists and scholars have long stressed the extent to which public access to housing shapes both individual and collective imaginations of the past, present, and future, and the particular affordances of the European public housing development represent a crucial location from which to theorize precarious time. First, social housing developments collect diverse populations (including remaining members of the Fordist-era working class and first-generation immigrants) who keenly feel their own sense of precarious time—albeit in contrasting and contradictory ways. Moreover, as a relic from the welfare state’s past that persists into an uncertain future, social housing is frequently stigmatized and pictured in dominant media discourse as a dead-end. Due to the dismantling of public housing programs across Europe, which has accelerated since the 2007 Great Recession, its future is deeply uncertain and vulnerable, frequently overshadowed by the threat of imminent destruction.

 

The cluster will therefore establish a new critical dialogue that draws from precarity studies, accounts of European austerity, and contemporary artistic forms to show how social housing—as the subject of visual representation, narrativization, and social policy planning, as a setting for works of art and as a site which generates artistic production—indexes the relationship between precarity and temporality.

 

We are particularly interested to receive submissions which explore formally innovative contemporary literary, visual, cinematic and mixed-media texts; live art, site-specific theatre, and other ephemeral performance art; and media technologies (e.g., social media campaigns, pirate radio, underground music genres) in relation to the following themes:

 

  • The multiple temporalities associated with the precarious ongoing existence of specific social housing developments in Europe (e.g., renewal, home-making across generations, hope, decay, disaster and memorialization).
  • Contrasting temporal experiences of precarious housing estates in relation to processes of racialization.
  • The temporalities embedded in public housing architecture and aesthetics (e.g., the ‘ugly’ concrete from the post-war construction boom), especially in view of the recent revival of Brutalism.
  • Protests against racist and exclusionary housing policies and/or the demolition of social housing.
  • Rewritings of the history of public housing from marginalized or minoritarian perspectives.

 

Please send queries or abstracts via email to the ASAP/Journal editor, Elizabeth Ho, at editors_asap@ press.jhu.edu. Articles should be submitted to the journal’s online submission site at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/asapjournal

 

ASAP/Journal Forum contributions are 600-1200 words or equivalent. You’re invited to present your ideas through non-expository means; i.e., contributions may take the form of essays, case studies, multimedia, or personal narratives. Co-created pieces are welcome.

 

Forum submissions (including notes but excluding translations, which should accompany foreign-language quotations) in Microsoft Word should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. If the contribution includes any materials (e.g., quotations that exceed fair use, illustrations, charts, other graphics) that have been taken from another source, the author must obtain written permission to reproduce them in print and electronic formats and assume all reprinting costs.

 

Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; when submitting manuscripts, authors should remove identifying information by clicking on “File”/“Properties” in Microsoft Word and removing identifying tags for the piece. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them.

 

For additional submission guidelines, please see: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asap_journal/guidelines.html

 

For informal inquiries prior to submission you may also write to the issue editors at the email addresses below.

Emily J. Hogg (ejh@sdu.dk) is Associate Professor of Contemporary Anglophone Literature at the University of Southern Denmark. Her research has appeared in Criticism, Textual Practice and English Studies and she is the co-editor of Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture (Bloomsbury, 2021).

 

Bryan Yazell (yazell@sdu.dk) is an Assistant Professor in the Department for the Study of Culture at the University of Southern Denmark and a research fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study. His research on social welfare politics and literature appears in Precarity in Contemporary Literature and Culture, Configurations, and Modern Fiction Studies.