CFP: International Journal of Fashion Studies
The International Journal of Fashion Studies
Special Issue: ‘The State of Fashion Studies’
Call for Abstracts
You can submit your abstract for either section I or for section II.
The International Journal of Fashion Studies will be devoting a special issue, entitled ‘The State of Fashion Studies’, to an assessment of the academic study of fashion in academia through two distinct sections. Its first section, entitled ‘The Place of Fashion Studies in Academia’, will specifically consider the institutionalization of fashion studies by presenting how different higher education programmes at various levels have been developed all over the world.
SECTION I
“The Place of Fashion Studies in Academia”
Guest Edited by:
Alessandro Bucci (Ph.D Candidate, Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh)
Chiara Faggella (Ph.D Candidate, Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University)
This section aims to establish the state of the field in relation to education and teaching, stemming from the session ‘The Place of Fashion Studies in Academia’ at the Association of Art Historians conference held in Edinburgh in April 2016. Given the setting of the event, the point of departure is a collective reflection on how fashion studies, despite being historically rooted in art history, now finds itself in disparate scholarly settings. This shows that collocating fashion studies in educational institutions is still quite often up for discussion. Still innovating, even if it has been an academic field of study and research for more than 30 years, academics often feel the need to deconstruct disciplinary boundaries within the area. While understanding fashion as a meaningful system within which the production of the cultural and aesthetic representations of the body is made possible, research in fashion studies all over the world is undertaken from different perspectives in diverse university departments, including art history, media studies, design, literature, and cultural studies. Thus, university programmes in fashion studies enrich their unique profiles alongside academic traditions connected to their own institutions, yet the global amount of graduates in this field undoubtedly shares a mutual ground. Indeed, as we believe that the interdisciplinarity of fashion studies is an advantage to all individuals and institutions involved, the first section aims to be an occasion to showcase the vast array of international opportunities in higher education available for students to embark on a dedicated training program in fashion studies. This is particularly relevant because it gives us the opportunity to explore a number of different academic programmes that show how the institutionalization of the field has happened all over the world, as well as to compare and contrast different experiences in contexts which are often dissimilar to the Anglo-Saxon tradition. We invite proposals that discuss issues of internationalization and institutionalization of fashion studies as an academic field, opening up for posterity to evaluate its prospective transition towards becoming a discipline.
In keeping with the broader mission of the International Journal of Fashion Studies, we welcome contributions submitted in the preferred language of the author. We are particularly interested in papers that consider the development of fashion studies programmes outside of the Anglo-American context.
Questions and Issues to be addressed:
- The development of fashion studies programmes at various levels, from undergraduate to doctoral;
- Difficulties arising from engaging with a field in which the canonical literature is almost exclusively published in English;
- Challenges in creating programmes in what is considered a young academic field;
- Peculiarities of national programmes in fashion studies compared to established English-speaking ones;
- Building a canon of authors and texts with the challenges of balancing the national contributors and the international paradigms;
- Attracting an audience of international students by creating programmes that virtually share
common grounds for future generations of researchers;
- The lack of fashion studies programmes in various national contexts, obstacles to the establishment of new programmes in fashion studies;
- The language of fashion studies academic communities, the predominance of English-speaking
contributions within fashion academia: advantages and limitations.
SECTION II
“Researching Fashion: Theory and Method”
Guest Edited by:
Lauren Downing Peters (Ph.D Candidate, Centre for Fashion Studies, Stockholm University)
Marco Pecorari (Ph.D, Director of MA Fashion Studies, Parsons The New School Paris)
This section focuses on the relationship between theory and method in fashion research. Inspired by the 1998 ‘Methodology’ issue ofFashion Theory, this issue is a space in which to reflect upon changes that have occurred in the field since then, as well as to anticipate the new directions in which it is going. Published nearly two decades ago, ‘Methodology’ stood as a first systematization and historicization of the field, and brought together articles that testified to the multidisciplinary state of the field at that time. While the diverse approaches to the study of fashion presented in that issue have in many ways defined fashion studies, debates within the field are now increasingly turning toward matters of interdisciplinarity, as well as of the hybridization of those theoretical and methodological paradigms.
In responding to these debates, this section will place a particular critical emphasis on the specificity of new approaches to the study of fashion as a diffuse and far-reaching phenomenon. It will therefore engage with the following questions: What are the different theories and methods we use to study fashion? How do we blend theory and method to create hybridized approaches to the study of fashion? How do theories inform the adoption and adaptation of specific methods in the study of fashion? And finally, and perhaps most importantly, how do debates in theory and method inform the understanding of fashion studies as a multi-, inter-, non or even in-disciplinary field?
We invite proposals for papers that either a) address past and contemporary uses of theory and method in fashion studies from a meta-perspective, or b) propose applied-studies that discuss a topic or research subject in fashion paying particular attention to theoretical and methodological issues in the research process. Proposals should focus on new methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of fashion, their interrelations and how theories and methods which belong to different fields can be hybridized to better facilitate the study of fashion.
In keeping with the broader mission of the International Journal of Fashion Studies, we welcome contributions submitted in the preferred language of the author. The issue also invites papers that reflect upon the ways internationalization has expanded the study of fashion phenomena, instigating new methodological and theoretical approaches in the field. Particular importance will be given to the implications of the internationalization of the field over the past decade, and what this has meant for the innovations in theory, method and interdisciplinarity to overcome the anglophilic and Western matrix that debates around fashion studies have tended to take.
Questions and Issues to be addressed:
- How issues of interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, indisciplinarity and infra-disciplinarity affect the process of researching fashion phenomena;
- How contemporary changes in the fashion industry have dictated new theoretical and methodological approaches to the phenomena;
- Conceptual pitfalls that hinder the analysis of fashion as a diffuse phenomenon;
- The creation, disruption and problematization of theoretical and methodological canons in fashion studies;
- Theoretical and methodological relationships between fashion studies and other fields;
- New fields of study that lend new theoretical and methodological perspectives in fashion studies;
- How fashion practices/phenomena can engender novel or innovative uses and understandings of theory;
- The practice of theorizing fashion;
- How theories from other fields can inform the construction of new methods in fashion studies;
- Particular implications and mechanics of blending theory and method in fashion studies (e.g.
discourse theory/discourse analysis);
- The geographies and the localization of theory and methods in fashion studies;
- How theoretical and methodological approaches can help to establish fashion studies as a discipline;
- Or conversely, should a ‘disciplining’ of fashion studies be the field’s end goal, or through theory and method can we think of inter-, multi- or even in-disciplinarity as assets to the study of fashion?
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For Section II, please send abstracts to Lauren Downing Peters (lauren.downing.peters@ims.su.se) and Marco Pecorari (pecorarm@newschool.edu).
Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30th September 2016
The authors of the selected abstracts will be notified by the 15th October 2016 and the final articles will have to be submitted by the30th January 2017. Final submissions should be no longer than 8,000 words and should follow the Intellect house style.
Abstracts should be no longer than 250 words.
For Section I, please send abstracts to Alessandro Bucci (a.g.bucci@sms.ed.ac.uk) and Chiara Faggella(chiara.faggella@ims.su.se).
