CFP Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Next World Order’

Henri Lefebvre and the ‘Next World Order’  

 Call for Papers   Deadline: 1 April 2010
Guest Editors: Dr. Gregory Seigworth, Millersville University, USA, e-mail: gregory.seigworth@millersville.edu. Dr. Michael E. Gardiner, University of Western Ontario, Canada, e-mail: megardin@uwo.ca.
Space and Culture invites papers for a special issue on Henri Lefebvre and the ‘next world order’.

In this first decade of the 21st Century our world has grown remarkably disordered. How are we to make sense of it, and to find some horizon for hope, at the very intersection of such global-militarist calamities, fatalistic neoliberal fantasies, cyber- & postgenomic vanities, all of these innumerable everyday oscillations of the spectacular and the mundane? The heterodox (and heretical) French thinker Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991) might offer a way (or ways) to conjure some sense of order (pointing toward a next world) from amidst the upheavals of a 21st Century already in disarray. Spanning some sixty years, Lefebvre's voluminous and challenging writings touch on virtually every topic that remains crucial to the contemporary concerns of critical socio-cultural inquiry, including historiography, everyday life, space, social change and ‘micropolitics’, the state, urbanization, and utopia, to name only the most salient.

Despite his status as (in the words of Fredric Jameson) ‘the last great classic philosopher’, with the partial exception of his writings on urbanism and spatiality, for a lengthy period Lefebvre’s ideas were greatly neglected in the English-speaking world, at least outside broad historical surveys of post-war French political and social thought. One could speculate that it may be because - although his work anticipated certain aspects of postmodernist and poststructuralist thought, without succumbing to many of their excesses and non sequiturs - Lefebvre remained committed to critical Marxism and the utopian project of ‘changing life’. More surprisingly, however, was the waning interest in Lefebvre within France itself as the 20th Century drew to a close. Astonishingly, by the time of his death in 1991, none of Lefebvre’s books were in print in his native land. But the last decade has witnessed a remarkable reversal of this situation.

This special issue of Space and Culture will concern itself primarily with two key aspects of Lefebvrean thought: The first would be to engage his ideas with a variety of current theoretical currents and developments; second, to extend his thought into the analysis of particular aspects of sociocultural life in our contemporary, and increasingly globalised world, including appropriations of Lefebvrean categories and concepts in areas of intellectual production on the ostensive margins of the Western metropole.  This may include public interventions, non-traditional submissions and visual or multi-media pieces for inclusion on our website www.spaceandculture.org.  Lefebvre’s work on the colonization of space and the natural world in particular challenges prevailing orthodoxies vis-a-vis globalization. What vital tools has Henri Lefebvre left us that might provide us critical insights for confronting the demons that haunt our new century?

Papers must be in English. See http://www.spaceandculture.org/about-the-journal    or   http://www.sagepub.com/journalsProdManSub.nav?prodId=Journal201511 for instructions for authors and details about the journal’s house style.  The deadline for submitting papers is 1 April 2010. Send an electronic copy as Word 6.0 attachment via email to space@ntu.ac.uk.   All submitted papers will be evaluated by the Editors, and publication decisions will be based on the double-blind peer-review process (the Editors will necessarily know the identities of all participants). The Editors are happy to receive inquiries about the issue via email.
Space and Culture is a peer-reviewed, quarterly interdisciplinary journal published by Sage. It fosters the publication of reflections on a wide range of sociospatial arenas such as the home, the built environment, architecture, urbanism, and geopolitics. It covers sociology, in particular, qualitative sociology and contemporary ethnography; communications, in particular, media studies and the Internet; cultural studies; urban studies; urban and human geography; architecture; anthropology; and consumer research.