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.

Despite this legacy of loss, or history of repressing materiality in the humanities, at least since the first decade of the 21st century, an increased academic interest in materiality and objectivity has been noticed. To name a few theoretical approaches, feminist epistemologies redefine the meaning of embodied practices and relations, new materialisms and object-oriented ontologies identify challenges and promises of reflection that undermines the role of the Subject, while critical science and technology studies emphasise how tentative the abovementioned separation is.

More importantly, we are constantly exposed to intensely material phenomena, which contest anthropocentric phantasies of control. These phenomena belong to everyday reality, and yet evade direct experience. In a way, the everyday turns out to be uncanny. (After all, is it not uncanny that the organic life emerged from the inorganic elements of the primordial soup?) And so, private objects exhibit their agencies as they convey open and repressed phantasies, consumerist desires, and nostalgic recollections. Human and nonhuman corporealities undergo physical and biochemical changes, not to mention cellular transformations and quantum entanglements. Processes that necessitate living, be it breathing or digesting, redefine the way organisms function, and often open them to detrimental agents threatening their health and survival. Collective human endeavours effectively transform natural environment, as they destabilise geosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere, and lead to a series of natural disasters in the world, which itself is a by-product of cosmic cataclysms in the ancient past of the universe. Paradoxically, even thinking on this subject, which this CFP hopes to inspire, takes place in cerebral cortex and plastically affects the structure of the brain.

This tentative selection of ideas shows that, in the third decade of the 21st century, it is much required to rethink material imagination. Although many of these processes resist description, they deserve representations as they also manifest themselves culturally. In an attempt to approach critically the problems of tissues, things, and matters, we invite submissions encouraged by the following ideas:

• cultural and literary representations of tissues, things, and matters,
• material and inorganic agencies,
• material, (in)organic, objective imagination,
• (anti)correlationism: subjects and objects,
• molar and molecular relations,
• discourses of immanence and flat ontologies,
• new materialisms, neovitalisms, object-oriented ontologies,
• local and cosmic naturecultures,
• human and nonhuman (trans)corporealities,
• stories of matter and storied matter,
• humanisms, posthumanisms, transhumanisms.

Articles, including all required metadata, should be submitted through the OJS system by 15 September 2025, in accordance with all the guidelines available in the “About” and “Authors’ guidelines” sections.

Submissions MUST include:
1) First Name and Family Name of the Author/Auther
2) Institutional Affiliation of the Author/Auther
3) Author/Auther's ORCID number
4) Author/Auther's website address
5) Author/Auther's email address
6) If the Author/Auther wishes to receive a complementary hard copy of the journal, the physical address to which the copy should be delivered
7) The title of the article
8) A 250-350 words' abstract of the article
9) A 250-350 words' biographical note on the Author/Auther
10) Keywords
11) Disciplines represented (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_academic_disciplines)
12) The text of the article formatted in strict accordance with the principles of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) (length between 25000 and 40000 characters with spaces).
13) The bibliography of works cited formatted in strict accordance with the principles of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)
15) All images must be submitted in print quality (min. 300 dpi)
16) All copyrighted visual material must be accompanied by permissions or licences issued to the Author.

IMPORTANT: Please, bear in mind that incomplete submissions will be automatically rejected.