Forthcoming Issue – 56 (1/2028) – plastic/plasticity/plasticness

2026-10-16

Forthcoming Issue – 56 (1/2028) – plastic/plasticity/plasticness
Guest edited by Anna Foltyniak-Pękala and Sławomir Konkol
Submission deadline: 15 March 2027

Plastic is a defining material of our age. Its properties—malleability, durability, the capacity to imitate almost any form, toxicity, and resistance to decomposition—are at the same time properties of contemporary culture. Plastic may therefore be read both as a historical substance and as a “theory machine”: a tool for thinking about the materiality and mediality of culture, about artificiality and simulacra, as well as about the Anthropocene and the lasting traces modernity leaves upon the environment. One of the important points of reference for this issue is Ranjan Ghosh’s project of the “plastic humanities,” developed, among other places, in his monograph The Plastic Turn (Cornell University Press, 2022). Ghosh proposes the concept of the material-aesthetic as a way of thinking about literature and culture through the prism of plastic, and at the same time about plastic itself as an aesthetic, philosophical, and medial category. Understood in this way, “material mediality” allows us to approach plastic not merely as an object of representation, but also as a medium, a figure, and an organizing principle of contemporary experience. (Click here to read the full Call for Papers.)

Forthcoming Issue – 57 (2/2028) – evolution/technology/culture

2026-10-16

Forthcoming Issue – 57 (2/2028) – evolution/technology/culture
Guest edited by Piotr Gorliński-Kucik, Jerzy Stachowicz, and Weronika Nawrocka
Submission deadline: 15 September 2027

How are we to think of evolution beyond biology today? And how can we avoid reducing it to the banal metaphor of progress? The development of civilization in the first decades of the twenty-first century has fostered an intensification of apocalyptic and dystopian modes of thought—yet this by no means precludes thinking in evolutionary terms. On the contrary: evolutionary thinking may offer a particularly productive way of describing ambiguous trends and sudden transformations. Evolutionism remains an indispensable component of modern social imaginaries, even when it is not always recognized or explicitly named as such. (Click here to read the full Call for Papers.)

Odszedł Profesor Wojciech Kalaga

2026-01-19

Pogrążeni w żalu, zawiadamiamy, że w wieku 76 lat zmarł

Prof. zw. em. dr hab. Wojciech Kalaga

Profesor był nie tylko pomysłodawcą, twórcą i wieloletnim Redaktorem Naczelnym naszego pisma, ale dla nas był przede wszystkim Mistrzem, Mentorem i Przyjacielem.

Wdzięczni za to, co wniósł do życia każdego i każdej z nas, za niezliczone rozmowy, spotkania, burze mózgów, a także za ogromne dziedzictwo tekstów, które po sobie pozostawił, łączymy się w bólu z Najbliższymi Naszego Profesora.

Przyjaciele z Redakcji

Next Issue – 55 (2/2027) – game/play/idleness

2025-12-01

Next Issue – 55 (2/2027) – game/play/idleness
submission deadline: 15 September 2026

Thinking about game, play, and idleness seems as light a task as it is suspicious. Contemporary Western humanities—shaped by the ethics of productivity, useful knowledge, and constant activity—have long looked with unease at whatever serves no purpose, slips through the logic of efficiency, or may be dismissed as a waste of time. Yet it is precisely in what appears unnecessary that an anthropological key to modernity may be found: the playing human, the playful human, the resting human might well embody what defines the lifestyle of the early twenty-first century. From Friedrich Schiller’s philosophy of play, through Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics of play, to contemporary diagnoses of late-capitalist culture, play and idleness appear less as the margins of social acceptability than as attempts to preserve meaning. (Click here to read the full CFP)

Next issue - 54 (1/2027) - home/homeliness/homelessness

2025-09-24

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. (Click here to read more)

Next issue - 53 (2/2026) - tissues/things/matters

2025-01-07

Next issue - 53 (2/2026) - tissues/things/matters
Submission deadline: 15 Sept. 2025

Although the Western humanities have attempted to organise the world critically and creatively by referring to stable categories of subjects and objects, they still largely fail to grasp tangible reality. The intellectual framework supposed to pinpoint it often backlashes in a utopian view, which, instead of making it possible for us to cognise the material, locates it in irreducible distance, impossibility, or aporia. Continental literary and cultural theories of the so-called “Linguistic Turn” are arguably the last descendants of this tendency, as they effectively reduce the humanities to textual determinism. After all, thinking rooted in two-fold signs has never intended to bind a concept with its material counterpart. It rather privileges an auditory or visual residue of reality: a signal supposed to evoke the concept. (Click here to read the full CFP)