CFP. Vol. 2 No. 1: Criticism at Its Critical Moment: Cinema and Media Facing the Challenges Posed by the Digital Revolution
Deadline: January 30
This issue seeks to awaken the etymological affinity, derived from the Greek, between Kritikos and Krísis. The critic is someone who, by virtue of their own po(i)etics, analyzes the work while safeguarding a just distance—one that makes possible both the process of decoding and that of assessment. The critic immerses themselves in the time of the work while simultaneously delineating safety distances in their relationship with the object of study, namely by integrating it into a tradition or set of movements that precede it. The critic is, by definition, both product and producer of this distance, something that is the sine qua non condition of their activity, since all criticism is also a form of mediation. Faced with various pressures—technical, social, political, and economic—we ask ourselves about the paths of criticism across the different domains of communication and the arts: to what extent can a certain critical exercise represent an escape from the dissolution of the spectator into the condition (or role) of consumer (without memory), from the reduction of the work of art to content or product (without identity)? In what way will the thinking or rethinking of criticism as a journalistic and literary genre—at a time when it is not only defined as crisis but is effectively in crisis—depend, or not, on the affirmation of a lost "art of loving" (Jean Douchet) in a society that is perhaps excessively Cartesian, cerebral, or algorithmic (even as it becomes ever more amnesiac and uncritical), in which love itself is reduced to highly instrumental codes and keywords? Have we reached the "decisive moment" in which it has become imperative and just to reconvene and renew a certain way of doing criticism as a means of recovering a lost distance with time and things? The die is cast for a return to the territory of criticism.
We invite submissions in the areas of media art, film studies, philosophy of cinema, philosophy of technology, semiotics, critical theory, media theory, and visual studies. There are no processing or publication costs for authors.
Call for papers: until January 30, 2027
Notification of decisions to authors: April
Second round of review and editing: May
Publication: July 2027
Issue editors: Júlio Alves and Luís Mendonça.
Please consult registration and submission information at: https://revistas.ulusofona.pt/index.php/caleidoscopio/about/submissions.
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