Publication: Haunted Cities: Spaces, Spectres, and Urban Hauntologies.
Deadline for proposal submission: 1 July 2025.
Issue edited by Irena Jurković and Marko Lukić (University of Zadar)
Publication presentation
Cities are palimpsests of the living and the dead, spaces where, as Derrida’s concept of hauntology reminds us, the past continues to loom over the present, unsettling linear time. At the same time, these urban spaces illustrate what Henri Lefebvre calls the production of space as an always-unfinished process of conflict and memory.
These spectral tensions find some of their most creative and thoroughly -explored expressions in the realm of fiction. In works such as Henry James’s The Jolly Corner (1908) and China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009) imagined haunted urban spaces reveal what David Harvey describes as spaces of uneven development, where suppressed histories seep back as phantoms. By contrast, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) transforms a suburban home into an unnavigable space—an infinite labyrinth that echoes Jameson’s postmodern urban disorientation. These literary haunted spaces establish a narrative and conceptual framework that cinema both inherits and expands.
Film, as a visual medium, transforms abstract urban anxieties into embodied and sensory experiences, intensifying the spatial logic of literary hauntings. From the stigmatized Cabrini-Green in Candyman (1992/2021) to the cursed Tokyo apartment blocks of Ring (1998) or Dark Water (2002), cinematic cities stage Foucault’s heterotopias, hosting parallel realities that rupture everyday geographies. Digital and alternative media intensify these hauntings with narrative forms that blur the boundaries between fiction, film, and real-world space. Silent Hill, a horror video-game franchise, reimagines rust-stained streets as psychic cartographies of guilt; urban-exploration channels like The Proper People and Exploring with Josh broadcast real-time descents into abandoned malls and hospitals, creating participatory hauntologies; Instagram “ruin porn” and TikTok ghost-hunting micro-videos circulate affective geotags that turn everyday viewers into curators of the uncanny. Drawing on Anthony Vidler’s architectural uncanny, Mark Fisher’s weird and the eerie, and Judith Butler’s notion of grievability, this collection asks how such literary, cinematic and digital spectres animate contemporary cities, mediate collective trauma, and reconfigure the politics of place— inviting scholars to map these restless urban phantoms.
We seek proposals from interested scholars from across the disciplines that critically engage with haunted and/or haunting urban spaces from the modernist period to the present-day metropolises, including imagined urban spaces of the future. Submissions may explore cities across diverse global and transnational contexts, engaging with a variety of media—from literature and film to video games and other digital platforms.
Timeline
- Deadline for abstracts: July 1st 2025
- Notification of acceptance: July 15th 2025
- Deadline for essay submission: October 15th 2025
Contact details
We invite all interested scholars to send their proposal (400-500 words) and short bio (max. 200 words, including author’s academic affiliation) to hauntedcityspaces@gmail.com . Full-length essays should be 6000-8000 words (including references, notes, and citations) and follow the Harvard style guide. University of Wales Press has expressed interest in the volume as part of their Horror Studies series.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
Haunted Cities CFP- UWP (1)(Posted 14 June 2025)
Publication: Studia Anglica Resoviensia: Volume 22 (2025).
Deadline for proposal submission: 30 August 2025.
A peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the Institute of English Studies at the University of Rzeszów (Poland).
The editors welcome original research articles in all areas of English linguistics, literature, and cultural studies.
CFP
For further details, please check the original call including submission guidelines and important dates:
https://journals.ur.edu.pl/SAR/callforpapers2025
(Posted 20 May 2025)
Publication: Lexis – Journal in English Lexicology.
Deadline for proposal submission: 31 August 2025.
Edited by: Camille Biros (Université Grenoble Alpes, France – ILCEA4), Denis Jamet-Coupé (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France – CEL and University of Arizona, USA) and Adeline Terry (Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3, France – CEL).
Publication presentation
The 2nd issue of the “Words about…” series hosted by Lexis – Journal in English Lexicology focuses on “Words about Climate Change”.
Climate change has become a major concern and a central, topical issue in our modern world and is not restricted to environmental studies such as biology, earth system science, air quality, solar physics, glaciology, land use, ecosystem, water, to name but a few. Linguistics also has its say, as clearly demonstrated by the emergence of ecolinguistics (Lechevrel [2008; 2012]; Stibbs [2021]). Considering climate change through its lexis and terminology should provide insights into how knowledge is established, communicated and distorted in this highly mediatized scientific field. Because of its interdisciplinary nature and the fact that international institutions had a central role in establishing it as a separate field of scientific inquiry, climate change can be seen as a non-prototypical specialized domain (neither disciplinary nor professional). This interdisciplinarity nature and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s pivotal role in establishing widely accepted results in the field and the ways of speaking about them has exerted a profound influence not only on the terminology employed but also on the broader depiction of the problem across diverse contexts (Bureau [2023]). The naming of the scientific domain itself has been a topic of debate. For some, in particular those that question the results of the IPCC, climate change refers to any climatic variation, whether it is caused by human activity or not. Other terms like “global warming” or “greenhouse effect” could be used to highlight the essential role of emissions produced by extractivist technologies in triggering the phenomenon. For others, “climate change” is a term that fails to highlight the devastating consequences and terms such as “climate crisis” or “climate disruption” should rather be favored.
An inquiry into the most appropriate words to name the phenomena can be extrapolated to all disciplines, thereby prompting a reevaluation of the limitations of language in its current form to represent how deeply it is likely to affect human social, political, economic and cultural organizations. It is reflected through a high degree of terminological and lexical innovation to consider new relationships between humans and their environment (the debated term of “anthropocene” is an example) or new emotions (ecoanxiety, solastalgia). In this context it is not surprising to find that metaphors are highly used, both to try and explain the phenomenon, its consequences and potential solutions (tipping point, carbon sink, adaptation pathway) and to defend ideas through their argumentative potential in a debated field (Augé [2023]). Euphemisms or hyperbolic expressions can also be considered for their argumentative or persuasive potential (climate variability or climate crisis instead of climate change).
If terminological and lexical variability can be observed in a monolingual context through diatopic, diachronic, diaphasic and/or diastratic differences (Coseriu [1974]), a layer of complexity is added in a multilingual context. As it is the language most used in international scientific publications, English is the preferred language when it comes to creating scientific terminology; therefore most scientific climate change terms are created in English first. Because of phenomena like borrowing and lack of equivalence the circulation of these terms and the knowledge they carry into other languages may be challenging and lead to delayed access to climate change science for a wider audience of non-English speakers. Specific cultural understandings of climate phenomena also influence what the most appropriate ways of naming and proposing solutions in different parts of the world are (Brüggemann & Rödder [2020]).
Both diachronic and synchronic analyses are welcome. All methodological approaches will be considered as long as they deal with the lexicological dimension of words, terms, multi-word units and expressions about climate change.
Timeline
- May 2025: Call for papers
- August 31, 2025: Deadline for submitting abstracts to Lexis via the journal’s submission platform
- September 2025: Evaluation Committee’s decisions notified to authors
- February 1, 2026: Deadline for submitting papers via the journal’s submission platform (Guidelines for submitting articles: https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/1000)
- March and April 2026: Proofreading of papers by the Evaluation committee
- June and July 2026: Authors’ corrections
- September 1, 2026: Deadline for sending in final versions of papers
Website address
https://journals.openedition.org/lexis/ (journal)
https://ojs.openedition.org/index.php/lexis (submission of abstract and/or article)
Contact details
Prof. Denis Jamet-Coupé: lexis@univ-lyon3.fr
(Posted 25 May 2025)
Publication and issue: Polish Journal of English Studies. 11.2/2025 Critical Posthumanism and Relationality.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 1 September 2025.
Issue edited by: Prof. Katarzyna Ostalska (University of Łódź).
Issue description
Relationality constitutes the core foundation of critical posthumanism. Rosi Braidotti captures it as follows: “Posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building” (2013: 49). Relationality views people as inseparably entangled (on equal footing) with more-than-human beings, organic and nonorganic entities. Such a conception undermines speciesism, the allegedly superior and unique place of human beings on Earth. Furthermore, for Braidotti, relationality (together with positivity and affirmation) is a condition sine qua non of posthuman ethics (2013: 191). With the above in mind, possible research topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Relationality and Plant Studies
- Relationality and Animal Studies
- Interspecies relations
- Sympoiesis and symbiosis
- Relationality Beyond Euro- and Western-centric narratives
- Relationality and Postcolonial and Indigenous studies
- Relationality and Biocapitalism, Cognitive Capitalism, Late Capitalism
- Relationality and More-than human entities
- Relationality and Environmental humanities
- Relationality and Blue Humanities
- Relationality and Posthuman Ethics
- Relationality and New Materialisms;
- Relationality and Feminisms;
- Relationality and LGBTQ+ communities;
- Relationality and Disability studies;
- Relationality in Literature, Art, Cinema
- Relationality and Visual Cultures
- Relationality and The Social Media
- Relationality and Game Studies
- Relationality and Philosophy
- Relationality and Science
- Relationality and Digital Technology
- The critique of relationality
We invite articles relevant to the themes of the issue (not limited by the list above) and consistent with the journal’s style sheet which is available here: Information for Contributors – PJES Articles together with a short bio-bibliographical note should be submitted in English by the 1st of September. We intend to publish the issue by the end of 2025.
Timeline
- Submissions: September 1st 2025;
- Planned publication by the end of 2025.
Website address
https://pjes.edu.pl/issues/11-2-2025
Contact details: pjes@pjes.edu.pl or use the contact form at https://pjes.edu.pl/contact/
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 3 April 2025)
Publication: English Phraseology in Contrast.
Deadline for abstract submission: 1 September 2025.
Presentation
A contrastive approach to English phraseology is essential to identify and describe the specificities of its lexicogrammar, imagery, and figurative and formulaic language. This call for papers invites scholars interested in exploring contrastive phraseology and phraseotranslation. We welcome papers focusing on English collocations, idioms and other fixed phrases, conversational formulae, and proverbs as well as phraseological patterns with open slots and other phraseological constructions in contrast or in comparison with other languages.
This call for papers represents the culmination of the three-year research project The peculiarities of the phraseology of English from a contrastive perspective, whose main objective has been to identify idioms that are specific to English or, at least, that make English stand out from the rest of the European and other world languages. Other aims included the search for similarities and differences between phraseological equivalents across languages on the morphosyntactic, semantic, metaphorical, and pragmatic levels and the ways in which languages express different concepts or conceptual domains by means of idiomatic expressions.
The contrastive analysis of English phraseology pursues the retrieval of the images that are shared by English and many other languages, such as sword of Damocles or give the green light (Piirainen 2012, 2016) as well as those that are specific to English or shared by all or most Germanic languages. However, it is of fundamental importance that the analysis be carried out within the frame of a specific theoretical model (Colson 2008).
Corpus-based cross-linguistic analysis of multi-word units (Andersen 2019, 2022; Colson 2012; Corpas Pastor 2021; Cotta Ramusino & Mollica 2020; Dobrovol’skij & Piirainen 2021; Hallsteinsdóttir & Farø 2010) has become pervasive thanks to the general access and use of both parallel and comparable corpora, which allows a detailed description of various linguistic phenomena as well as empirical data on differences concerning frequency of use.
Phraseological equivalence is a key field of research in Contrastive Phraseology and especially partial equivalents that are “idioms of L1 and L2 which have identical or near-identical meanings, but do not fully correspond in syntactic and lexical structure, or imagery basis.” (Dobrovol’skij 2000: 372). Widespread idiomatic patterns (Piirainen 2020) together with constructional phrasemes (Dobrovol’skij 2011) represent a major source of inspiration for phraseological contrastive analysis. Other lines of research include the pragmatic differences between equivalent multi-word conversational routines in two or more languages focusing on their contextual and functional properties or the links between contrastive phraseology and translation. Studies can also enquire into the degree of comparability of English idioms and proverbs and their equivalents in other languages concerning their frequency of use, semantics, and context of use from a diachronic and a synchronic perspective as well as the functional equivalence in other languages of English idioms and proverbs as they are used in authentic texts compared to their lexicographic descriptions.
We invite contributions on applied and theoretical topics mainly in the framework of cognitive linguistics. Idiomatic expressions are the reflection of the history, culture and cognition concerning the imagery, the figurativeness and the metaphorical and metonymical processes of each language. The types and the cognitive links between source and target domains within one language and in comparison with others represent a major challenge of analysis in contrastive phraseology. Other possible approaches include construction grammar, corpus linguistics, translation studies, lexicography, semantics, pragmatics, cultural studies, and language teaching and learning.
Submissions
Submissions will include an abstract of 3,000 to 4,000 characters (without spaces) as well as four or five keywords and references. All abstracts will be anonymously peer-reviewed by an international scientific board. Abstracts must be written in English.
Please send your abstracts to the three editors,
- Ramon Marti Solano (ramarsol61@gmail.com),
- Alicja Witalisz (alicja.witalisz@uken.krakow.pl) and
- Gisle Andersen (gisle.andersen@nhh.no).
Abstracts may be rejected, accepted subject to revision, or accepted as such, the resulting selection will appear in two publications, a collective volume (John Benjamins, Cognitive Linguistic Studies in Cultural Contexts) and a special issue of the open access journal Espaces linguistiques.
Timeline
- 1 September 2025 – Deadline for submitting abstracts
- 30 November 2025 – Notification to authors
- 1 May 2026 – Deadline for submitting first draft of manuscripts
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 7 June 2025)