tba: Journal of Art, Media, and Visual Culture, is pleased to announce that we are accepting submissions for our upcoming issue, FRICTION. tba is an annual peer-reviewed journal organized by graduate students of the Visual Arts Department at Western University in London, Ontario (CA). It provides an interdisciplinary forum for emerging and independent artists and scholars by bringing together studio, art history, cultural studies, theory and criticism, creative writing, and related fields. Academic articles, poetry, short fiction, and artworks are all welcome!

Presentation

The static of friction is palpable, it shocks us daily. Below us, the lithosphere steadily pushes against itself in a process of subduction, and above ground a multiplicity of narratives and truths electrifies the air through various frictions. Friction can generate resistances to power that take the form of activism, protest, or rebellion. Friction is also a product of opposing forces that come into contact to produce (dis)order, systems of repression, or entropy. As anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing states in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005), “Speaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency…Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing” (Tsing, 6). Currently, artists and scholars are engaging in frictional dialogues which have the potential to produce new socio-symbolic order(s). By acknowledging the power relations that are (de)constructing these sites of frictional dialogue, conceptions of decolonization, the politics of knowledge production, and placemaking seek to render the relational experiences of people visible. For our upcoming issue tba encourages contributors to think through convergence and divergence of bodies, concepts, and ideologies as they explore friction. 

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

• Mobility, displacement, migration and borders, transnationalism
• Occupation, oppression
• Seeking asylum, refugee experience
• Human rights, activism, advocacy 
• Diaspora(s) 
• Governance, sovereignty, citizenship 
• Hegemony, globalization, extractivism 
• Colonialism/Postcolonialism 
• Racism, racialization 
• Indigeneity
• Ethnophilosophy
• Censorship
• LGBTQ2S+ experience

Citation: Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2011. Friction : An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400830596.

Submission guidelines

We invite you to submit your work by June 1st, 2024.

Submissions must be completed through the journal’s website, which uses OJS software to ensure anonymity to potential reviewers. Emailed submissions will not be accepted. If you’re interested in supporting the review process, we are currently seeking peer reviewers–we welcome you to get in touch at tbawestern@gmail.com with your CV and research area(s).

Editors

• Imogen Clendinning, Editor
• Ronique Gillis, Associate Editor, Art History
• Racquel Rowe, Associate Editor, Studio

Editorial Board

• Emily Dickson, PhD Candidate, Western University, Theory and Criticism
• Dr. Deborah Galante, Miami University, Hamilton, Ohio
• Dr. John Hatch, Associate Professor, Western University, Department of Visual Arts
• Grayson Richards, PhD Candidate, York University & Toronto Metropolitan, Communications and Culture
• Alexander Rondeau, PhD Student, Queen’s University, Cultural Studies
• Nafiseh Shajani, PhD Candidate, Western University, Modern Languages and Literatures

For inquiries, please write tbawestern@gmail.comwebsite: www.tbajournal.ca