Indus: A Journal of Art, Culture & Design #1

Call for Papers

INAUGURAL ISSUE: CALL FOR PAPERS

The Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture is pleased to announce the launch of its new academic journal, Indus, and to invite submissions for our inaugural issue.

Indus is seeking essays, research papers, reviews, criticism, and interviews from scholars and practitioners that address historical and contemporary visual, artifactual, and artisanal culture produced in Pakistan or in the diaspora (architecture, art, craft, design, film, performance, video). ‘Historical’, for our purposes, reflects creative work produced pre-partition, but within the boundaries that describe the nation today. Significant exceptions include essays that examine wider regional, continental, or global influences on historical or contemporary work.

We encourage submissions that address visual art and culture from an interdisciplinary perspective, that reveal epistemological gaps and omissions in our collective understanding of the new, and that articulate new approaches to thinking about our aesthetic heritage.

“CITIES”

Each issue of Indus will include a broadly defined thematic section that asks scholars and practitioners to address a specific subject from multiple points-of-view. The theme for our first issue is ‘Cities’: how we look at, create, imagine, destroy, and represent them. Early in his essay “Semiology and the Urban”, Roland Barthes writes,

The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak to our city, the city where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it. Still the problem is to bring an expression like ‘the language of the city’ out of the purely metaphorical stage….

Yet throughout his essay, he likens cities to other things—a poem, a writing, a map, an image, a historical symbol.

We invite essays that read the city through its visual and material forms, that investigate our built environments as simultaneously fixed and ephemeral, that give critical and imaginative shape to these local habitations.

Please e-mail 500-word abstracts by Tuesday, April 30th, 2013 to [email protected]. Completed essays should be e-mailed by Monday, July 1st, 2013

Guidelines:

Critical essays/Research papers 5000-10000 words
Interviews 3000-5000 words
Reviews 1500-3000 words
One Work 2000-2500 words

We welcome reviews of exhibitions, performances, films, television programmes, books, architecture, and archaeological discoveries. Reviews should include relevant publication, production, and/or curatorial information (dates, venues, artists), and must be submitted no later than one month following publication or the conclusion of the event.

“One Work” invites a sustained reflection on a single visual work—film, building, painting, sculpture, photograph, monument, video, or design. While the journal usually commissions these essays, we do accept unsolicited submissions, and will make every effort to consider these for publication.

Editing/Formatting:

All manuscripts must be double-spaced (including documentation), and should not exceed the word counts specified above (including notes). All citations should be submitted as endnotes, and must be included with the original submission (please do not use the automatic footnote or endnote facility in your word processing program), and must follow the Modern Language Association Style Manual, 3rd Edition (2008).

To facilitate blind peer reviewing, please make certain your name does not appear in the body of your article. If you need to cite your own previous scholarship, please refer to yourself in the third person.

Once edited and peer-reviewed, essays will be returned for revision before final acceptance for publication. The editors reserve the right to edit your submission, with your approval, before final publication, and/or to withdraw publication during this process.

Indus uses British English spelling and punctuation. For editorial ease, please refer to Oxford Dictionaries useful online guide < http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/british-and-american-spelling>.

All submissions should be sent electronically to [email protected].

Copyright

All material published in this journal is protected by copyright. All rights of reproduction or storage in any form (electronic, magnetic, or optical) of essays, reviews, illustrations, or photographs published in this journal are reserved. Permission to photocopy items for research, pedagogical, or scholarly use must be requested in writing.

All queries should be addressed to Indus Journal, Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, ST-33, Block 2, Scheme 5, Clifton, Karachi-75600, Pakistan.

For additional information regarding submissions or our editorial policies, please contact us at [email protected].

Dr. Framji Minwalla
Editor/ Managing Editor

Gemma Sharpe
Associate Editor