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Friday 29 January 2016

CALL FOR PAPERS Special Issue on Mapping the Margins of Europe: Race, Migration and Belonging Editors, Agnes Czajka and Jennifer Suchland

philoSOPHIA is a journal of continental feminism and has a broad scope. This special issue may be of interest to many in the FEMMSS network.



CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue on
Mapping the Margins of Europe: Race, Migration and Belonging
Editors, Agnes Czajka and Jennifer Suchland 


​What and where are the margins of Europe? How can feminists theorize and interrogate those margins?

Histories of colonialism, war, and migration have made Europe a contested space of identification and belonging. The margins and borders of Europe have likewise been drawn by ongoing, if shifting and contested, internal processes of othering that simultaneously racialize so-called “non-Europeans” and deny recognition of minority statuses within national discourses. The label “migrant” has come to classify the newest wave of mobile masses traversing circuits of survival, histories of colonialism, and contemporary capitalism within and on the margins and borders of Europe. But “migrant” can also operate as a racializing category that permanently anchors multi-generational communities to an outsider status. Thus, the margins of Europe are being defined and redefined by complex national discourses and policies of citizenship, asylum and migration.

We can also think of the margins of Europe as a contested geopolitical and economic perimeter. With the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc, the borders and margins of geopolitical and economic Europe were remade through processes of accession and the opening of new migratory routes. Old hierarchies were overlaid on new hierarchies, leading to the emergence of a complex bricolage of affluence, renewal, erosion, and dispossession. But the economic margins of Europe are drawn not only by its eastern edges. The disputed economies within “old(er)” Europe including Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain (often framed by the problematic acronym PIIGS) have also been made marginal through austerity and global financial instability. These new or newly marginalized spaces are also places of transit, absorption, and rejection for recent waves of refugees and “migrants” brought on by political unrest in the Middle East and Africa. Thus, Europe’s old and new margins also maintain Europe’s center.
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This special issue asks feminist philosophers and theorists to grapple with these complex and contested margins of Europe. It seeks to interrogate where those margins are, how they have been constituted, and how and where they are being challenged and contested. It asks how feminist, anti-racist, queer, postcolonial, and/or decolonial approaches can render or reframe the margins of Europe. Can critical cartographies of Europe’s historical and contemporary margins be used to navigate and/or counter racism, exclusion and economic dispossession? Can we think across margins, looking simultaneously at processes of marginalization and peripheralization in new and old Europe as well as colonial arrangements past and present? Can critical, feminist interpretations of European pasts and presents enable us to envision a more hospitable future (for) Europe?

Send a 500-word abstract to philosophiajcf@gmail.com by February 15, 2016. Please direct all questions to philosophiajcf@gmail.com.


philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Continental Feminism is an international, peer-reviewed journal for scholarship that engages the rich traditions of feminist theory and continental philosophy, both broadly construed. The journal aims to broaden the discipline of philosophy and enrich the practices of feminist theory, bringing the conceptual resources of these fields together to address pressing socio-political issues. We encourage a wide range of theoretical approaches, particularly those exploring feminist philosophical questions through the lenses of queer, critical race, disability, and transnational perspectives.

Editors, Lynne Huffer and Shannon Winnubst
Book Review Editor, Emanuela Bianchi
Advisory Board: 
http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/philoSOPHIA_Advisory_Board.pdf