[Commlist] CFP: Transverse Disciplines

*Transverse Disciplines: *

*Working across and beyond Academic Communities*

Edited by: Simone Pfleger (University of Alberta) and Carrie Smith 
(University of Alberta)

**

In January 2019, /The Chronicle of Higher Education /reported on the 
radical decline in language programs across colleges and universities in 
the United States since 2013; such trends have been charted across the 
anglophone world. Beginning from the thought experiment that maybe our 
discipline should “dismantle itself altogether” despite warnings to the 
contrary (Norbert 13), the proposed volume uses “German Studies” as a 
litmus test for what might be possible when the value and conduct of 
research is located already from the outset beyond disciplinary 
specificities and histories. Thus “German Studies”—unmoored from the 
confines of disciplines and departments proper and considered instead 
through feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial academic practices 
and commitments—becomes a knot tying together scholars interested in the 
unsettling of disciplinary-based academic structures, including also 
work with industries, community-based work, research-creation, and 
scholar-activism.

Languages serve by no means as a singular example: petitions against the 
closure of this or that program in the humanities or social sciences 
circulate with alarming regularity on email and social media, and the 
crisis rhetoric has become its own self-perpetuating academic industry. 
Attendant to program closures is the ongoing fight to maintain 
disciplinary integrity, even as universities seem increasingly less 
willing to support disciplines in thriving; the “adjunctification” of 
the labor pool is just one stark example. At the same time, there is 
little internal support for the development of creative structures that 
might formulate alternate responses. The holes left behind by these 
closures prompt some of the radical rethinking that this volume intends 
to capture. The volume seeks to include contributions that grapple with 
imagining a different future that begins with an investment in and 
accountability to social justice, allowing a restructuring of units in 
ways that maintain core intellectual values without reifying ossified 
canonization impulses, methodologies, or theories nor merely replacing 
these with new ones.

This volume seeks to offer approaches that do not dilute the political 
capacity of the kind of work that happens inside and outside of the 
academy. In order to unsettle the restrictive nature of working 
exclusively within disciplinary structures, scholars and teachers must 
rethink the ethical and social impact of academic work as activists in 
our spheres of influence. If the university writ large is invested in 
bringing together different approaches and forms of knowledge and making 
social justice a sustainable politics of being, transverse disciplines 
built of queer-feminist approaches act as a lightning rod for 
transformative thinking. In this manner, the reshaping of a discipline 
and disciplinarity itself becomes an activist project. Interrogating 
positionality, relationality, and ethical principles of academic work, 
this volume will feature a series of theoretical essays that explore 
future possibilities punctuated by short, diagnostic stories or 
testimonies on present experiences of being in the academy.

We are seeking theoretical essays (6,000–6,500 words in length) that are 
future-oriented and address such topics as (though not limited to):

-rethinking of key concepts such as disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, 
and transdisciplinarity

-reshaping of disciplines and disciplinarity as political projects

-valuing disciplinary legacies while also accessing feminist, queer, 
antiracist, decolonial agendas

-cooption mechanisms that target concepts such as intersectionality and 
decolonization

-dialogues with feminist, gender, queer, critical race, or ethnic 
studies as discipline redefining two-way streets

-alternatives to current institutional structures, assessment categories 
for funding, and performance evaluation to push back against normative 
progress narratives (success, career goals, and employment)

-the emergence of epistemological and ontological questions/concepts 
when (inter)national communities and/or local contexts are taken into 
account

-new modes of working for language and area studies in a neoliberal, 
capitalist, settler-colonial context, particularly when digital worlds 
open up avenues while at the same time policing and reaffirming 
geopolitical and national boundaries more tightly than ever before

-academic and activist work in conversation with industry, government, 
and NGOs

-different ways of creating impact and reaching audiences through such 
avenues as research creation and maker cultures

-forging of alliances and coalitional partners locally and (inter)nationally

-professional bodies and their potential facilitation of 
multi-institutional transformation

We are also seeking personal stories and diagnostic testimonies (around 
2,000 words in length) that assess the current state of the academy from 
different positionalities.

Please send an abstract (200 words) and a brief bio (no more than 150 
words) for either format to Simone Pfleger ((pfleger /at/ ualberta.ca) 
<mailto:(pfleger /at/ ualberta.ca)>) and Carrie Smith ((carrie.smith /at/ ualberta.ca) 
<mailto:(carrie.smith /at/ ualberta.ca)>) by August 15, 2019. Full 
contributions will be due January 15, 2020.

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