[Reader-list] Call for Submissions – Sarai Reader 09: The Book

[The Sarai Programme]

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – SARAI READER 09: THE BOOK
http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/09-projections/call

Sarai (www.sarai.net), an interdisciplinary research and practice
programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies invites
contributions to Sarai Reader 09: Projections.

Sarai Reader 09: Projections aims at bringing together original,
thoughtful, critical, reflective, well-researched and provocative texts
and essays by theorists, practitioners and activists at the intersection
of practice, discourse, art, criticality and research, especially within a
global urban context.

Previous Readers have included: 'The Public Domain' : Sarai Reader 01,
2001, 'The Cities of Everyday Life' : Sarai Reader 02, 2002, 'Shaping
Technologies' : Sarai Reader 03, 2003, 'Crisis/Media' : Sarai Reader 04,
2004, 'Bare Acts' : Sarai Reader 05, 2005, Turbulence: Sarai Reader 06',
'Frontiers': Sarai Reader 07 and 'Fear': Sarai Reader 08.

The Sarai Reader book series has been, over the years, widely recognized
as a site of critical and creative thinking. All the Sarai Readers are
available for free download at http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/

We see Sarai Reader 09 as setting the stage for a productive encounter
with the demand for an account of the limits, margins and edges of our
times.

CONCEPTS AND QUESTIONS FOR THE BOOK, SARAI READER 09: PROJECTIONS

To project is to throw forward – light, dreams, visions, plans,
propositions and prospects. A projection always involves an incandescent
transference, some movement of affect or information, some crossing of a
void or darkness to effect landings on a distant luminous surface. Without
projections, we would have no cinemas, no city plans, no forecasts, no
wagers, no fantasies. Projections convect questions, magnify dreams,
illuminate desires.

The book will invite writing and image-text essays that take the term
'Projections' as a spring board to launch new ideas and inaugurate a fresh
sensibility both within discourse and practice. A brief hand-list of
themes and questions that Sarai Reader 09 (the book) wants to address are
as follows:

1. What does it mean to go back to the drawing board? Which drawing board
are we going back to? What makes us want to revisit fundamental questions
of how life, space, time, work, power, the ecosystem and society are
organized?

2.The screen (screens of all kinds) as devices for thought to land on.
This would include not just the cinema and TV screens and computer
monitors, but also screens on mobile phones, tablets and iPads.

3.Why is it no longer possible or attractive to think of piecemeal reforms
or solutions to the general economic and social crises of contemporary
capitalism? The failure of Capitalism to produce viable visions for
tomorrow – combined with the scenarios unfolding within situations like
the 'Occupy' Movements all over the world – anchor the urgency with which
these questions can be asked today.

4. What tasks can artistic activity set itself in the twenty first
century? This would include speculations on the future trajectory of
practice in the arts, art education, curation, and the possibilities of
the drawing of new relationships between art, design, technology, science,
philosophy and everyday life. How can exhibitions, museums, public art
institutions become sites of active unfolding of questions, rather than a
catalog of answers and assertions?

5. Architecture, plans, drawings, propositions, utopias, dystopias: How do
people project from the mind to paper to space to the world? Field notes
from studios and building sites. The politics and ethics of restoration.

6. Cinema, its viewing context, its history and future (to mark the 100
years of Cinema in India).

7. The City and its hinterland in Cinema. A special focus on the recent
profusion of films set in Delhi and Gurgaon. Projections into the
interior, Bollywood's discovery of a 'wild east' – films set in ganglands
and badlands – as the site to project an anti-image of Mumbai's urbanity.

8. What are the great unknowns of our times, the zones of darkness? Not in
terms of negativity, but in terms of the fact that we are simply in the
dark about a series of questions that confront us. For instance, new areas
of investigation that tie neuroscience to cognition, to culture and
behavior.

9. How has the extended and generalized availability of powerful
communication tools such as web 2.0 and social media changed the cultural
and political landscape?

10. Visual metaphors for social and political processes. What do we mean
when we talk about transparency and opacity, light and darkness, in social
and political speech?

WHAT KIND OF FORMS ARE WE LOOKING FOR

The form that contributions can take can be varied. We want to invite
practitioners and others, wherever in the world they may be located,
whether they are located in the domains of theory, research, contemporary
art, media, information and software design, politics or commentary, to
join us in Sarai Reader 09.

You are invited to contribute through essays, arguments, interviews,
photographs, image-text combinations, comics, art-works, diary entries,
research reports and commentaries that can evoke responses to the call in
all its myriad dimensions. We do not carry fiction and poetry as there are
many spaces that are already available to writers who work in fiction and
poetry. But our understanding of non-fiction forms is open and
accommodative to imaginative responses.

We are looking for practical and visionary proposals for a complete
re-drawing of the map of social life and fresh forms of intervention which
could include, apart from the essay – the dialogue, the manifesto, the
inventory, the correspondence, the to-do list, recipes (not only for food,
but also for different forms of social and cultural processes),
instruction manuals, disobedience kits and proposals of every description
and tonality. We invite fresh and fearless writing and images.

WHERE AND WHEN TO SEND YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS

Last date for the final submission is 2nd November, 2012.

Send, as soon as possible, and no later than 1st August, 2012, a brief
outline/abstract, of not more than one page, of what you want to write
about. (This helps in designing the content of the reader). We expect to
have the reader published by 1st February 2013.

Please send in your outlines and abstracts, and images/graphic material to–

(for articles and images/or graphic material)
Sarai Reader 09 Editorial Collective
reader [at] sarai [dot] net

THE EXHIBITION

Sarai Reader 09 (the book) will be made within the context of Sarai Reader
09: The Exhibition, a forthcoming contemporary art exhibition at the Devi
Art Foundation, Gurgaon (18 August 2012 – 15 April 2013.

See http://www.sarai.net/practices/media-forms/sarai-reader-09-exb/call
for a call for contributions to the exhibition.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS

Word Limit: 1500 - 4000 words

1.Submissions may be scholarly, journalistic, or literary – or a mix of
these, in the form of essays, papers, interviews, online discussions or
diary entries. All submissions, unless specifically solicited, must be in
English, or must be accompanied by a good translation into English. All
contributions will be published in English.

2.Submissions must be sent by email as text, or as rtf, or as word
documents. Articles may be accompanied by black and white photographs or
drawings submitted in the tiff format.

3.We urge all writers, to follow the Chicago Manual of Style, (CMS) in
terms of footnotes, annotations and references. For more details about the
CMS and an updated list of Frequently Asked Questions, see
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/cmosfaq/cmosfaq.html

For a 'Quick Reference Guide to the Chicago Manual of Style' -
especially relevant for citation style, see -
http://libguides.wwu.edu/content.php?pid=123723&sid=1063051

4.All contributions should be accompanied by a three/four line text
introducing the author.

5.All submissions will be read by the editorial collective of Sarai Reader
09 before a final selection is made. The editorial collective reserves the
right not to publish any material sent to it for publication in the Sarai
Reader on stylistic or editorial grounds. All contributors will be
informed of the final decisions of the editorial collective vis a vis
their contribution.

6.Copyright for all accepted contributions will remain with the authors,
but Sarai reserves indefinitely the right to place any of the material
accepted for publication in the public domain, in print or electronic
forms, and on the internet.

7.Accepted submissions will not be paid for, but authors are guaranteed a
wide international readership. The Reader will be published in print,
distributed in India and internationally, and will also be uploaded as a
PDF on the Sarai website. All contributors whose work has been accepted
for publication will receive two copies of the Reader.