[Commlist] CfP Special Issue "Crowd(ed) Futures"

Call for Papers

“Crowd(ed) Futures”
A Special Issue of
Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power

Guest Editors: Solvejg Nitzke (Dresden) and Mark Schmitt (Dortmund)

Thinking about the future today means thinking about people in vast 
numbers. Everything seems to predict that space will be shared by more 
people – but whether ‘of us’ or ‘of them’ is a charged question 
depending on standpoint and scaling. However, whether you talk about 
‘the human species’ on a planetary scale, ‘refugees’ on a national or 
transnational one, whether you are interested in political processes or 
the evolutionary make-up and ecological impact of human beings as a 
geophysical actor, crowds will shape the future. One can follow a 
strategy to either prevent (Paul Ehrlich 1968) or encourage (Pope 
Francis 2015) population growth, but common questions emerge: How to 
talk about the people – future or present – who are going to crowd the 
planet? How to provide for, let alone govern, many people? How to 
activate, mobilise, and address crowds? How to negotiate crowd power 
politically, socially and theoretically?
Judith Butler and Jodi Dean have recently provided new theoretical 
approaches to come to terms with collective political bodies and their 
public agitation. While Butler considers the assembly as a politically 
performative act which “delivers a bodily demand for a more liva-ble set 
of economic, social, and political conditions no longer afflicted by 
induced forms of precarity” (2015: 11), Dean views the crowd as “the 
fundamental unit of politics” (2016: 4) and challenges the negative 
connotations of crowds and the masses. Both take their cue from the idea 
that the individual alone is virtually impotent when it comes to 
overcoming its precarity and working towards a more egalitarian society, 
and it is primarily through con-certed collective action that freedom 
can be gained. This strongly resonates with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call 
for “species thinking” (2009: 213) which abandons human intra-species 
distinctions such as race, class, nation, gender in favour of a 
naturalised collective. Thus, this idea makes crowd thinking and 
politics an existential condition of human culture and its fu-ture(s).
Recent years have seen an increasing demand for theorizing what Joshua 
Clover has called the “new era of uprisings” (2016). Public unrests such 
as the English riots 2011 or the Ferguson unrest 2014, among others, 
bespeak a spontaneously erupting collective desire to change the 
political, economic, social conditions at a given moment. Thus, there 
seems to be an inherent ambivalence in thinking crowds and crowd(ed) 
futures: on the one hand, vast numbers of people are potentially 
dangerous since they threaten ecological, social and polit-ical systems. 
On the other, however, crowds are potentially beneficial because only 
they can constitute the critical mass necessary for progressive change – 
that is, the point when, in Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s words, 
“uncounted [bodies] […] start to matter” (2013: 101).
How can the concept of populism be applied to describe these new kinds 
of mass protest movement and the physical presence of crowds as 
political entities? How do these new types of protest relate to earlier 
forms of protest, crowd agitation, riot and strike, and what sort of 
future do they imagine? From Malthusian-shaped biopolitics to the 
theories of spontaneous uprisings, crowds stir up fears of an overthrow 
of established societal structures. Spontane-ous assemblies are seldom 
in agreement with the status quo. Those who can afford or lay claim to 
individuality, space, time, privacy and undisturbed access to ‘nature’ 
seem to fear the emergent power of the ‘faceless masses’, yet are 
historically and presently not above trying to instrumentalise crowds 
for their own purposes. However, there seems to be an in-herent 
potential of resistance, even anarchy, in large numbers that eludes 
external as well as internal control.
Another area where crowds and the masses have become relevant in recent 
times is the mass movement of refugees, i.e. the movement of populations 
threatened by war, economic pressures or ecological crises. Like the 
crowd protests of outraged citizens who, through ap-pearing as 
collectives in public space, articulate the (perceived) precarity of 
either their na-tional identity (especially in right-wing forms of 
protest) or the precariousness of their living conditions (in both left- 
and right-wing forms of protest), displaced populations also reach 
critical mass as “uncounted bodies”. It remains to be seen whether these 
forms of public, vulnerable mass appearance indeed constitute “future 
politics” (Butler) – a form of agitation which will re-define governance 
as well as the political itself. Another open question is in how far 
these newly emergent forms of mass protest and agitation can be 
described as a “multitude” in Hardt and Negri’s terms (2000) – a concept 
challenged by Jodi Dean in favour of collectivized progressive efforts 
(2016: 24-25) – or assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 2004).
Crowds form intricate entanglements of non-human and human actors, time 
and space. Rather than pursuing the futile attempt to disentangle 
crowds, in this special issue we seek to follow crowds as a kind of 
Ariadne thread through entangled relations and discourses. Thus, we aim 
at a parallax view: bringing into focus at once specific crowds and how 
they are framed.

In this special issue of Coils of the Serpent, we want to address these 
issues from a range of perspectives. We welcome contributions which 
engage with the notion of crowd(ed) futures in the areas of cultural 
studies, political sciences, sociology, media and communication studies, 
environmental humanities and anthropology, to name but a few. We are 
looking for contributions to topics including (but not limited to)

-    Crowds and political performativity: a future body politic?
-    Riots, strikes and other forms of mass protest
-    Crowds and the new populism(s): progressive or reactionary movements?
-    Crowds and the body/corporeality
-    Crowds and governance/governability
-    Crowds, populations and bio-/necropolitics
-    Crowds and ecology/ecocriticism/ecological catastrophe
-    Crowds and the ‘refugee crisis’
-    Crowds and the future of the nation-state
-    The rhetoric of masses and crowds
-    Crowds vs. individualism
-    Narrating and representing crowds
-    The temporality and spatiality of crowds


Please send an abstract of approx. 500 words to the editors Solvejg 
Nitzke and Mark Schmitt ((solvejg.nitzke /at/ tu-dresden.de), 
(mark.schmitt /at/ tu-dortmund.de)) by 31 March 2019. Abstracts should include 
a topic outline, information on the kind of text (essay, statement, 
scholarly article) as well as the approximate length of the planned 
text. The editors will get back to you by 1 May 2019. Full articles will 
be due 30 September 2019. The special issue is sched-uled to be released 
in early 2020. Please read the journal’s submission guidelines: 
https://coilsoftheserpent.org/submissions/



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