[ecrea] Call for articles: Journeys (Academic Quarter)

*Call for articles:*

Academic Quarter -- journal for research from the humanities 
<http://akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/UK/index.php>


 Journeys

Documenting human patterns of mobility is a key element in the 
travelers' social anatomy. The distinctive dialectic process between the 
traveler and the foreign has led to processes of identity formation from 
Homer to the present day. The result of these dialectic processes has 
over time resulted in both substantial images of identification, 
imaginary, and xenophobic images.

With this special issue on Journeys Academic Quarter invite abstracts 
across the humanistic disciplines to focus on the journey as focal point 
and the human element in its centre. With this broad frame of incentive 
we call for articles on related categories and subcategories like 
literary forms/genres comprising everything from scientific or religious 
traveling to famous movie site tourism or colonial motivated mobility or 
subjects that involve cultural aspects, images of 
identity/identification and imaginary encounters that are mediated 
through journeys.

On this background there could be gained new insights by focusing on the 
journeys mutual relationship between real and imaginary as co-producers 
in the constitution of the self and the other. This is where you might 
find a localizable or presumed essence of a phenomenon that does not 
necessarily adapt to a familiar category of mobility. It causes 
attention to the exchange of cultural relationships, but also to those 
not characterized through regular conventions. In this sense, identity 
or identification could be seen as something that is intimately 
connected to mobility, whether it is journeys of reality or imaginary.

The imaginary momentum in travel narratives is typically established on 
the contradictions nearby/distance to which phenomena has unrestricted 
anachronistic possibilities. In this type of narrative you often find a 
refined use of syncretistic elements in regards to a thematic 
representation of politics, love, nationalism, etc. Under these 
conditions, the historic location and the "factual" space/time 
relationship has a deprioritized significance. The absence of a de facto 
time/space relationship does not necessarily mean that time is not 
present. The momentary occurrences can both correspond with the 
processes of life and be defined in time, although the protagonists act 
in imaginary time and space. Despite the imaginary conditions this genre 
often produces a highly developed "sixth sense" of the human aspect, to 
which a thematic relation is established.

According to the Douglas Harper OnlineEtymologyDictionary traveling 
(travail) is generically associated with "suffering, painful effort, 
trouble, to toil, labor, to torture, instrument of torture", which in 
the 18th-20th century's British pulp fiction genre would have a positive 
adventurous and heroic meaning. But travel as concept might find 
different interesting perspectives by including the less positive aspect 
of traveling focusing on the involuntary/forced traveler and the 
imprints they leave on history. The Prophet Mohammed and his escape from 
Mecca to Medina in the year 622 has for example derived great 
significance to the Muslim concept of Hijra (emigration) that today, 
maybe more than ever, influence topics spanning from Muslim pilgrimage 
to Muslim integration in non-Muslim countries.

The editors invite articles from scholars across the humanities and 
social sciences working within the confines stated above.

*Suggestion for articles*
Suggestion for articles, including an abstract of 150 words to be mailed 
to *Rune Andersen <mailto:(ra /at/ hist.sdu.dk)>* and *Knud Knudsen 
<mailto:(kk /at/ ihis.aau.dk)>* no later than October 1st 2011. Accepted 
articles -- using the Harvard System Style Sheet -- to be mailed to the 
editors no later than January 1st 2012. Articles will then be reviewed 
anonymously. The articles should be around 15,000-25.000 keystrokes. The 
issue will be published in the Spring of 2012. Academic Quarter has been 
approved according to the Danish bibliometrical system for 2011 and 
forward.