Call for Book Chapters: Things We Lost in the Fire: The Life and Death of Small-Scale Creative Projects
Things We Lost in the Fire: The Life and Death of Small-Scale Creative Projects
Edited by Miranda Campbell
A quick gloss on this “Things We Lost in the Fire” title reveals its overuse. There’s a 2007 film starring Halle Berry, a 2001 album by the band Low, and a 2015 episode of Grey’s Anatomy with this title, just to name a few.
Seems like a lot of things are in peril this century, and the pervasive banality of this “fire” phrase might suggest the ways we’ve accepted these forms of loss into everyday life. This edited collection highlights the commonplace nature of the extinguishment of small but mighty forms of cultural production: projects that have been cut, imploded, faded away, or simply run their course.
Small-scale creative projects often serve equity-serving groups and often lack recognition. In this context, this edited collection seeks to name, celebrate, or document meaningful projects that have animated social relations and creative practices. How might these projects also be life-affirming “radical pockets” (Haileselaissie et al., forthcoming) within otherwise dominant systems that harm or oppress? How can these pockets illuminate pathways for change, pedagogy, care, love, or resurgence?
The stakes of the loss of these projects and spaces are often high. On December 2, 2016, an electronic dance music party at a warehouse in Oakland, California, called Ghost Ship, ended tragically with 36 deaths when a fire broke out. DIY spaces like Ghost Ship are a common feature of small-scale cultural production, but these spaces are often in jeopardy, not only due to physically unsafe conditions, but also because they are frequently targeted by complaint, police surveillance, rising rents, and eviction. Some collectives have been able to anchor in their spaces, whether temporarily or long-term, such as ABC No Rio in the Lower East Side, Holzmarkt in Berlin, and the Wyers squat in Amsterdam. Whether or not these small-scale creative projects occupy physical spaces, they can face the barriers of structural racism, inequity, forced displacement, and neocolonialism.
While small-scale creative projects can face competing demands and pressures, both external and internal, they are also often vital spaces of learning, capacity building, skills development, relationality, and joy. This collection seeks to find ways to document these projects as rich pedagogical sites, without invoking longevity and continued existence as necessary benchmarks of “success,” and without simplistically casting these spaces as utopian havens away from dominant norms.
This peer-reviewed collection seeks contributions that spotlight spaces, collectives, and / or projects that have given rise to small-scale forms of cultural production.
Contributions might anchor a case study of such a space, collective, or project while extending concepts of pedagogy (e.g. Freire), community care (e. g. Piepzna-Samarasinha); love (e.g. hooks), or resurgence (e.g. Betasamosake Simpson), or another like-minded concept. (Suggested word count, 6000 words)
Contributions might also provide a shorter descriptive account of a space, collective, or project that serves to illustrate the qualities, dynamics, or history of this entity. Contributions might take a variety of forms, including photo essay, oral history, dialogue, etc. (Suggested word count, 1000 words)
International contributions and intersectional focuses are encouraged. This edited collection is intended for publication with Cultural Production and Everyday Life, a pamphlet series with Concordia University Press that is edited by Miranda Campbell and Benjamin Woo that examines how culture, commerce, and policy knit together at the level of the everyday. Concordia University Press publishes in print and open access books and pamphlets in arts, humanities, and social sciences.
To indicate interest in publishing with the Things We Lost in the Fire: The Life and Death of Small-Scale Creative Projects edited collection, please send an abstract of up to 300 words and a 100 bio to Miranda Campbell (miranda.campbell@torontomu.ca) by December 13, 2024. Please indicate interest in a longer, conceptually-anchored piece, or a shorter, descriptive account.
