[CALL FOR PROPOSALS – English Version

roots§routes is a magazine with an editorial vision announced by its editorial board, which guarantees the quality and coherence of its contents. We consider it crucial to maintain an ongoing receptivity towards any submission of quality, provided it corresponds with the final vision shared among the editors. We therefore not only solicit work from artists and scholars, but also encourage submissions from contributors working in contexts that we do not know directly.

roots§routes announces a Call For Proposals, asking artists and scholars to submit proposals, beginning with the magazine’s theme for the upcoming quarter. Submissions should be sent in the form of an abstract, with a maximum of 350 words, to the form. Abstracts written in English, Italian, French, Portugues or Spanish are acceptable. In case of interest on the part of the editorial board, an email requesting the full paper will be sent to the author of the abstract. The paper is to be written in the language of the author’s choosing.

The editorial board, upon receiving the full paper, reserves the right to request partial edits, or to reject the piece, in the case that it does not align with the earlier proposal. For those interested in submitting materials, the themes for the upcoming issue of the magazine will be announced on this section of the website.

Fundamental to these festive situations is often a shared interest in not-knowing precisely, in following more emergent approaches, where finding out together underpins the experience. These become structural in so far as they are held by those involved, rather than imposed from elsewhere, and which, importantly, support feelings of shared responsibility and co-ownership.

Katía Truijen and Brandon LaBelle (eds.), Epistemic Imaginaries: Learning as Festivity

On a good night, everything at a good rave comes together with just the right tension of invention and intention. […] Take in this situation. Add to it. Vary it. Update it, freshen it. Add an accent, a move, in time. The moment will pass on to the next no matter what you do. The rhythm machines exceed us. They’re relentless. They’ve displaced what was once called history. There’s space between the beats, though, still to be. Those beats are calling. I need to be back on the floor.

McKenzie Wark, Raving

Some knowledge only circulates in a packed room, in a warehouse at the end of a dirt road, in someone’s flat at four in the morning. It moves through volume and sweat, through bodies pressed close, through whatever has been swallowed, through the way a stranger shifts to let you in without meeting your eye. This knowledge has its own tests of validity: who gets in, who stays, who can move, who knows the track, who can tell when the moment has arrived. It also has its own channels of transmission, which are embodied, wordless and impossible to archive, held somewhere between the skin and the clothes. The party is not time left over, a pause that makes the working week bearable. It produces knowledge, community and “a world of many worlds.”

Western modernity dismissed rites, carnivals, wakes and dances as folklore, superstition or disorder, from peasant festivities and the dances of colonized peoples to Black dance halls and queer social life. Taking the party seriously as a place where theory is made is therefore a political gesture, because it grants epistemic standing to what method has kept out. But the party comes in many forms, and none of them is innocent. Sara Ahmed has taught us to distrust happiness when it becomes a duty, a reward for staying in line, or a way of casting anyone who names injustice as a “killjoy.” Normative happiness keeps bodies in line, and joy knocks them out of line: joy among bodies that aren’t meant to be together, in places they aren’t meant to be, at hours when they should be asleep. Yet the same intensity that keeps a community alive is also the first thing the market cashes in on. All the while, someone is setting up, working the door, pouring drinks, staying up until the last guest leaves, selling you the right look. 

For José Esteban Muñoz, queerness is a horizon that comes into view when the everyday present begins to crack. A stage, a night or a gesture can each be both a rehearsal for the future and a way in. Some of these thresholds are physical: the door, the bouncer, the guest list, the address you can’t write down. Others have to do with time and space: the night that won’t end, the afterparty, the week lost to it, the house thrown open to strangers, the woods, the venue that exists for one night only. And then there is the threshold between what can be said and what can only be done, in a body altered by fluids, drugs and medication. None of these ways in comes free. The party runs on unwritten codes and learned postures, and on secrecy, a social technology that shields those who cannot risk exposure but also breeds exclusivity. It also runs up against the state, from the UK’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to Italy’s 2022 “anti-rave” law. Under dictatorships, occupations and states of exception, the party has become a way to survive and to resist. 

We are looking for contributions that neither resolve this ambivalence into celebration nor turn it into its mirror image, the disenchanted verdict that dismisses the party as false consciousness. The question is not whether the party sets people free, but on what terms. Who is it open to, and what does it cost to get in, whether or not the price is stated? Who keeps it running, given that every night out is also someone’s shift or the product of someone’s planning? Who foots the bill, in money, in health, in legal risk, in the evictions and ordinances that come the morning after? We also want answers that don’t come only from Detroit, Berlin or New York. Histories of nightlife cluster around a handful of cities. This is less because that is where people danced than because that is where the archives, magazines, translations, record labels and club tourism are. The canon of the party is also a map of economic power. We are therefore keen to receive contributions from its other geographies, both farther afield and closer to home. We see them as places where theory has always been made, and still is, rather than as case studies at the edges of that canon. We are equally interested in what moves between them: how a sound travels, who renames it, who profits from it, and what gets lost, or invented, in translation.

Frame from Big Fucking Party vol IV © Linda Papaleo

Themes

We invite contributions addressing, among others, the following areas:

• The party as epistemology: the party as an apparatus for producing, validating, and transmitting knowledge; festive pedagogies and alternative learning situations.
• Politics of joy: dissident joy, normative happiness and the figure of the killjoy; the erotic as a form of power and knowledge; the ambivalence between emancipation and value extraction.
• Night economies: dépense and its capture; gentrification, urban branding, festivalization; night work and its invisibility.
• Futurity: the party as an anticipatory gesture, a rehearsal for worlds not yet given; minor utopias, queer temporalities.
• Thresholds: liminality, rites of passage, mechanisms of entry and exit; the door as a political technology; the aftermath, the return home, the comedown.
• Alternative spatialities: home, warehouse, club, woods, courtyard, ruin, squat; temporary heterotopias and geographies of the night.
• Alternative temporalities: the night, the afterparty, seasonality, recurrence, other calendars; festive time against productive time.
• Setting: sound systems, lighting, darkness, architecture, furnishings, staging; care for the setup as curatorial practice and technical know-how.
• Secrecy and clandestinity: secret parties, the underground, word of mouth, undocumentability; secrecy as protection and as exclusion.
• Bodies, substances, chemistry: alcohol, drugs and medication as ways of acting on the body; trance, altered states, endurance, exhaustion; drug checking and harm reduction.
• Care and kinship: awareness work, mutual aid, houses and chosen families; grassroots infrastructures of survival.
• Nonverbality: dance, rhythm, repetition, touch; embodied knowledge and the problem of translating it into writing.
• Encountering the unknown: the party as an economy of the stranger; desire, risk, hospitality, proximity between strangers; what goes wrong.
• Intersectional desire: race, class, gender, disability and legal status in the making of festive space; who gets in, and at what price.
• Identity and abandon: self-fashioning through style, pose, drag and chosen names, and the suspension of self through anonymity and depersonalization.
• Codes and regulation: unwritten rules, postures, informal pedagogies, door policies; the tyranny of structurelessness; exclusivity vs. inclusivity.
• Party and power: state repression of gatherings, ordinances, licensing, opening hours; the party as escape and resistance under dictatorships, occupations and colonial regimes; the party as a form of protest.
• Expanded geographies: scenes and theories beyond Europe and North America; circulations, diasporas, translations and appropriations; internal margins such as the provinces, the village festival and the neighborhood.
• Archives of the party: how to document what asks not to be documented; oral memory, ephemera, flyers, recordings, forgetting.
• And everything we have been unable to imagine from this side of the door.

In keeping with its theme, the call welcomes, and explicitly encourages, contributions that go beyond the written critical essay, towards forms of expression that sit between research and artistic creation. These may include sound, visual and audiovisual works, performance practices and their documentation, or hybrid and transmedia forms that can convey what writing leaves out of the party. 

Frames from Teknocity: Hasta los perros educaos (forthcoming) di María S. Olmo © María S. Olmo

References

Aguado V., del Buey R., LaBelle B. (eds.), Party Studies, vols. 1 and 2, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2021 and 2024.
Ahmed S., Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, Routledge, London, 2000.
Ahmed S., The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2004.
Ahmed S., The Promise of Happiness, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010.
Bailey M. M., Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2013.
Buckland F., Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, 2002.
Echols A., Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, W. W. Norton, New York, 2010.
Foucault M., “Of Other Spaces,” trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27 (lecture delivered 1967).
Freeman E., Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010.
Freeman J., “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 17 (1972–73), pp. 151–164,
Halberstam J., In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, New York University Press, New York, 2005.
Kerekes D. (ed.), Headpress 25: William Burroughs & The Flicker Machine, Headpress, Manchester, 2003.
Lawrence T., Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979, Duke University Press, Durham, 2003.
Lorde A., “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978), in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, Trumansburg, NY, 1984, pp. 53–59.
Truijen K., LaBelle B. (eds.), Epistemic Imaginaries: Learning as Festivity, Errant Bodies Press / Les presses du réel, Berlin and Dijon, 2025.
Wark M., Raving, Duke University Press, Durham, 2023.

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abstract submission deadline by 30 October 2026

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publication 15 January 2027
article by 20 December 2026