Call for Submissions

Extra/ordinary: Eleven Months In

This year we have been consistently called to recognise the unprecedented or ground-breaking quality of events-and not just as concerns the global pandemic. The last 11 months have seen the idea of police abolition enter the U.S. mainstream, the toppling of slave-owner statues in the U.K. and the election of the first woman and first person of colour to the vice presidency in the U.S. We have also seen the U.S. capitol attacked by armed right-wing insurrectionists and the U.K. named the country with the highest COVID death-rate in the world.

At the same time, debate regarding each of these issues has consistently turned on their relationship to a larger history in which they might be seen less as groundbreaking than as more of the same. When we position the storming of the U.S. capitol building as an expression of the same forces that created the country in the first place--or trace the COVID mortality rate of British people of colour to the legacy of empire--we make claims about the present by insisting on its relation to the past.

In various and subtle ways, this relationship between an extraordinary event and the ordinary, longstanding forces that impinge on it is also central to Jay Bernard's book Surge, which is our selected text for this term's reading. As Surge makes clear, how we trace or ignore these overarching forces in turn shapes how we remember (or forget) the event in question.

As part of the spring term series of events for Thinking in Crisis Times, we invite submissions that engage in some way with the connection between the extraordinary and the ordinary over the last 11 months. These can be in any format or medium you chose: criticism, memoir, poetry, fiction, visual art, audio or visual recordings, etc.

This might involve any number of the large-scale events above, but also events in your own life, history or family. We are interested in how the extraordinary becomes ordinary, and vice versa--or how this fails to happen, and why. What might be important to remember about what we are living through, and what might we be in danger of forgetting? What pressure do both the extraordinary and the ordinary put on our capacity to record and understand this moment?

Details

Submissions can be on any topic related to the last 11 months and the relationship between the ordinary and extraordinary. Text-based submissions should be under 500 words. Submissions can be in any form or medium you chose: criticism, memoir, poetry, fiction, visual art, audio or visual recordings, etc.

Submissions are due 26 February 2020, or roughly 11 months since we went into our first lockdown, and can be sent to thinkingincrisistimes@gmail.com. If you would like to submit a file that is too large to email, let us know and we can make other arrangements.

For questions, please contact thinkingincrisistimes@gmail.com.