Next issue - 54 (1/2027) - home/homeliness/homelessness
Submission deadline: February 28th, 2026
In the Western humanities, home as a project is both unfinished and overdone. Indeed, human physical and intellectual connection with the world relies on transgressing boundaries and setting them anew, and defining one’s right to inhabit a given place and to use what it has to offer. In the third decade of the 21st century, such an idea seems to be hardly tenable, while home happens to be a concept which resists stable or exhaustive definitions.
Culturally speaking, home is a deterministic figure of exclusion. It rarely embodies its own mythological universality or completeness; it is someone’s place barring us from that someone or something else. Contemporary revisions of postcolonial, Marxist, feminist, gender, critical race, or ecocritical ideas prove that the discourses of homeliness way too often prescribe it as a privileged space – a space prefigured by white, Western, patriarchal, middle-class, or human understanding of its borders – and realise symptomatic Freudian fantasy of a return to woman’s (mother’s?) body.
The discourses of home and homeliness render a figure of vulnerability in the times of climatic instability, migrant crises, and violent military conflicts spreading all over the world. Home – a shared world – becomes mediated through its own end. Such eschatology rarely involves absolute annihilation; it enacts an array of ends of local worlds or ends of comprehensive ways to define homeliness in human and nonhuman understandings. In a way, the world that is falling apart, literally or metaphorically, carries an ethical injunction which forces us to redefine the ways in which we inhabit it in the times of global and local hosti(pita)lity. And yet, as limits and boundaries collapse whereas the experience of mortality and finitude regains its universal scope, we might develop new more-than-human cartographies of worlds in which entirely different and yet co-dependent beings dwell.
Recently, home has transcended cultural expectations vested in it; it is the place of hospitalisation, seclusion, and work. Political decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic, oriented at the protection of individual and public health, confronted us with psychological, corporeal, and emotional dangers of isolation, including shared isolation with those from whom we had tried to separate ourselves in the first place. Moreover, contemporary military conflicts transform home into the space of exile and displacement, a home that has never been one, or a home that is expected to never exist again. Space and borders are in question, while frontiers and limits seem to be tighter than ever.
In the light of these intuitions, new metaphors and figurations of home are needed, including new conceptualisations of its dwellers, borders, and shapes, all of which might give justice to contemporary symbolic, semiotic, and material transformations of this peculiar space. It turns out that the cultural and symbolic burden home carries invalidates its fixed cartographies. Moreover, the narratives of the end of oikos, paradoxically, prescribe and solidify its existence. Should we perhaps look at home differently, setting aside human hubris? Should we reject abstract and metaphysical images and think of home as a place of degradation instead? In an attempt to approach critically the problems of home, homeliness, and homelessness, we invite submissions inspired by the following ideas:
Articles, including all required metadata, should be submitted through the OJS system by 28 February 2026, in accordance with all the guidelines available in the “About” and “Authors’ guidelines” sections
English
Język Polski