[ecrea] CfP: Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis 1.2 “Off the Grid”

Call for Papers: Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis 1.2 “Off the Grid”

Grids govern our landscapes and cityscapes, our paintings and grocery 
lists, our maps and our borders, both walled and imaginary. They get us 
our energy and water, they fuel our online social lives, and structure 
the ways we perceive and move through space. On the one hand, the grid 
is a representational mode, one of rendering the world under a Euclidean 
regime of points, lines, and areas. On the other, it is the material 
infrastructure of utilities, transit routes and architecture. In an 
increasingly networked control society, data, numbers, and figures are 
in a constant feedback loop with material reality. Across this 
material-physical and the cultural-technical – between instantiations of 
the grid as artistic practice and as the “stuff you can kick” (Lisa 
Parks 2015) – we find a mess of politics and ideology, corporate and 
common interest.

For this issue, we encourage thinking ‘Off the Grid’ – calling for 
papers that envision and/or enact within, outside, through or against 
systems of perception, matter, energy and space. Papers might explore 
perspectives against logics that distribute power across concepts and 
cables, design and tarmac, techniques and technologies. This might mean 
engaging with what Shannon Mattern calls the “ether and ore” of 
contemporary urban and rural societies (2017), or it could involve 
tracing (dis)order in less concrete structures of visuality, spatiality 
and discourse. Is there a connection between a landscape gridded with 
pipelines and by modern scientific cartography? Or perhaps a shared 
logic between a grid of fiber-optics and the data societies it 
facilitates? To what extent is the grid by its very operation an 
instrument of national or corporate power – or can it be appropriated 
for the commons?
Ultimately, going ‘Off the Grid’ might be considered a romantic, futile 
gesture; a slantwise shift across preordained perspectives; an 
impossible step outside ideology; or an urgent tactic of resistance. If 
Western modernity and the grid go hand in hand – as suggested by 
Rosalind Krauss’ account of modern art’s gravitation towards “flattened, 
geometricized, ordered” forms (1985) – then what would it mean to 
challenge, repurpose or reject it? Does the concept still help us to 
understand the world, or limit expression within it?

For the second issue of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for 
cultural analysis, we invite young researchers to submit abstracts that 
critically engage with notions of the ‘Grid’. We encourage submissions 
that are directed towards, but not limited to, the following themes:
- Modes of resistance or alternatives to the grid as mode of organization
- The grid as (or as alternative to) network, assemblage, empire and/or 
entanglement
- Grids at the intersection of cultural geography and cultural analysis
- Infrastructure: infrastructural crises and failures, the edge of 
infrastructure
- (De)centralised power: the energy commons, democracy and climate crisis
- Cityscapes, urban ecologies and planning
- The rural as ‘off the grid’, against the grid, or as a grid
- Living off the grid: alternative lifestyles and escapism; survivalism 
and wilderness
- Grids in modern and contemporary art, architecture and design
- Visual (dis)order and film: quadrants, grids and golden ratios in 
mise-en-scène
- Grids in and as gaming; ‘NPCs’, ‘normies’ and meme culture
- Data, networks and digital traces

Please submit your abstract (max 300 words) to 
(submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.com) by December 1. The full papers (3000-5000 
words) are due February 15. Feel free to contact us if you have any 
questions.
Soapbox also welcomes texts on any topic, all year-round – send full 
drafts of 4,000-6,000 words to (submissions /at/ soapboxjournal.com).

Also consider contributing to our website (soapboxjournal.com), where a 
variety of styles and formats is encouraged, including short-form 
essays, reviews, experimental writing and multimedia. Please get in 
touch to pitch new ideas or existing projects for us to feature there.

Link to call for papers: 
https://soapboxjournal.com/2018/10/31/call-for-papers-1-2-off-the-grid/

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