Submission call: Dossier Urban Connections

Dossier "Urban Connections"

Guest editors:

Editores convidados:
Janice Caiafa (ECO-UFRJ)
Fernando Gonçalves (Uerj)
Jane Maciel (UFMA)

By attracting people and ideas, by circulating things in multiple spaces, the city can be a place of experimentation with ties of a very particular kind. Certainly, there is also a vertical development that generates inequalities, such as housing, mobility, income, race and gender, and which is stipulated to a large extent by the imperatives of capitalist economic and subjective production. At the same time, however, the city exists in a horizontal movement, to the extent that its heterogeneous spaces are crossed by flows that ceaselessly renew social relations, subjectivities and communication.

In this case, the strangers who circulate there breathe together these airs of variation and can cultivate ties that escape hierarchies to some extent and, less tight than those of family and circumscribed groups, gather in a space of fluidity and freedom.

In this dossier, we intend to discuss these suggestions, highlighting analyses and reflections on practices that could trigger these urban links. 

We understand these practices in many forms and in a broad spectrum: whether provoked by authorial or anonymous gestures, individual and/or collective, or the result of fortuitous encounters or even the magnitude of events organized by institutional or popular initiatives.

In this sense, street art, graffiti, posters and other visual marks on the streets, such as on lamp posts or walls, form palimpsests, or other marks that mobilize various senses. The same thing applies to cultural and artistic manifestations in  music, performance, cinema, photography and activism in public spaces, related to urban links and their experimentation.

We suggest that these practices, in the heterogeneous and constantly moving urban environment, are aggregating — either when they bring together strangers in the same space to participate in common activities, or when, by triggering signs produced by strangers in the city environment, leading us to an aesthetic fruition, they form an audience, as the newspaper would have done (Gabriel Tarde) in the sense of a "spiritual collectivity" at a distance.

We welcome both empirical works — focusing on one or more cities, or on any segment in the urban context, such as neighborhoods, streets, communities, the moving spaces of public transport or other possible settings — as well as analytical texts of a theoretical or essayistic nature and visual essays (film, video, photography), which discuss the city in its powers of visual aesthetics,  sound and tactile, subjective experimentation in the urban environment or other pertinent aspects.

Schedule:

Deadline for submission of texts: August 31, 2025

Publication forecast: December,  2025,