Fwd: Call for proposals: openwork journal - issue 3: 'Estrangement in Practice' - deadline extended to Wed 15th Oct

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Iain Findlay-Walsh

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Oct 6, 2025, 3:54:03 AM (2 days ago) Oct 6
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Dear all,

Please find below our call for proposals for openwork issue 3, with deadline extended to Wednesday 15th October.

Theme: Estrangement in Practice
Submission Deadline: October 15, 2025, 11:59 PM Anywhere on Earth (AoE)
Looking for: Artistic and scholarly engagement with and around experimental music
Peer-review: Developmental, double-blind, collaborative
Art is artificial. Processes of making music and art can be understood as ways of defamiliarizing the everyday and seemingly self-evident—making strange the familiar, the traditional, the normative, and the repressive—through aesthetic practices and the works they generate, enabling encounters with the world otherwise. 
We invite contributions that engage with music and art as estrangement. We are interested in practices that render the familiar unfamiliar, expose the seams of tools and institutions, and test how bodies, machines, and publics meet under conditions of austerity, platform governance, and automation. We welcome submissions that show how technique, techne, and institutional constraint co-produce form and meaning, and that ask who gets to declare which practices are “strange,” and why.
Estrangement may be experienced as limitation or possibility, insofar as it unsettles relations between the means and ends of art. Viktor Shklovsky’s 1917 proposal that art makes the familiar unfamiliar, encapsulated in his neologism ostranenie (commonly translated as “making strange” or “defamiliarization”), is one such provocation. More recently, the play with English translations of ostranenie has played into artistic discourses and practices. “Defamiliarization,” “estrangement,” “e(n)strangement,” “weird,” “eerie,” “strange,” and “wrongness” form part of a growing vocabulary used by scholars and artists to come to terms with the world and time we inhabit.
Inviting submissions that invoke ambiguous uses of strangeness, we seek to collectively investigate how estrangement manifests in practice, whether in aesthetic work, creative process, technical setups, performance communities, or reception. We take “practice” to encompass the broad field of human action, inseparable from thought, and open to musicking formations.
As part of this issue, we are introducing “tracks” to frame this call for proposals in the context of various fields of research. We welcome submissions that overlap across multiple tracks and encourage prospective authors to contact journal editors with any questions about scope and fit.
Track 1 – (e)Strange(d) Technologies
Technologies—and the platforms and procedures that sustain them—are not only means of production; they continually reshape what is produced and how. At times, they even work against the aims of production and the interests of producers. How have artists explored the relationship between technology and practice by using familiar technologies in unfamiliar ways? How have new technologies disrupted existing categories of aesthetic practice, past and present? In what ways have emerging technologies facilitated new forms of agency beyond traditional notions of artistry, authorship, and reception?
Track 2 – (e)Strange(d) Socialities
Across history, social and institutional contexts have been marked by turbulence, mistrust, and transformation—conditions under which experimental music and sound art often emerge as forms of resistance and expression. How have artists engaged with conditions of social estrangement—whether through displacement or marginalisation? Conversely, how have they generated experimental forms of sociality, forging new modes of collaboration and community in an increasingly estranged world?
Track 3 – (e)Strange(d) Methods
Even in an era that celebrates inter-, multi-, and post-disciplinarity, academic and artistic structures remain largely organized along disciplinary and methodological lines—yet estranged objects often resist familiar categories. What new forms of analysis are necessary to engage with such objects and practices? What defamiliarized processes are needed to respond to “estranged” ways of musicking, performing, or documenting?
Track 4 – (e)Strange(d) Forms
As our artistic forms evolve, the relationship between form and function is continually tested. How have formal conventions across genres shifted over time, and what role does genre itself play in shaping form? What kinds of estrangements from convention have enabled such transformations? How has the very notion of what constitutes “art” shifted in relation to other human practices as well as to non-human agencies, algorithmic processes, and multi-species practices?
Submission Formats
We aim to represent diverse works across disciplines, welcoming contributions from both academic and non-academic spheres, particularly those not typically suited for conventional journals. As an online journal, we encourage the use of digital media—video, audio, image, and animation—as well as imaginative applications of digital formats and presentational possibilities, such as audio essays, interactive essays, and digital exhibitions.
We are seeking proposals in (but not limited to) the following formats:
  • Academic essays: 5,000–7,000 words
  • Creative pieces/reflections: 500–2,500 words
  • Commentaries, manifestos, and polemics (cultural, political, theoretical, or otherwise): up to 3,000 words
  • Artworks and multimedia submissions: stand-alone pieces, installations, digital exhibitions, and hybrid/composite forms
  • Music submissions: stand-alone pieces, albums, DJ sets, music videos
    • File Format: mp3 (audio), mp4 (for music videos)
    • Maximum file size: 50 MB (larger files can be shared via an external link)
  • Short films, photo collections, visual essays, or collages
    • File format: mp4 (for video)
    • Submission via an external link (e.g., Google Drive, Dropbox) if exceeding 50 MB
  • Poetry: up to 2,500 words or equivalent length in lines
  • Other experimental formats: We encourage unconventional or hybrid/composite forms that challenge genre or medium expectations. Surprise us!
Proposal Submission Checklist
Before submitting, please make sure your proposal adheres to the following guidelines:
1. Length
  • Does not exceed 250 words
  • Includes an optional selected bibliography (if relevant)
2. Anonymization
  • Contains no author name(s) in the text
  • References to your own work are written in the third person
  • File metadata (e.g., “Author” fields in Word, PDF, or similar) have been cleared
  • Any online materials (websites, YouTube/Vimeo links, SoundCloud, etc.) or links to relevant works are anonymized or use neutral identifiers
3. Submission Details
  • Name and contact details are provided separately via the online submission system
  • Only one submission per individual or group is permitted
Proposal Submission
Please submit your proposal and resume/CV to https://forms.gle/6N2kL1e4124C8Zfw7. Accepted proposals will receive notification by October 22, 2025 October 29, 2025.
Peer Review Process
openwork uses a double-blind peer review process: neither authors nor reviewers know each other’s identities.

Read our previous issue: https://openwork.library.columbia.edu

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Dr. Iain Findlay-Walsh (he/him)
Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Music
Postgraduate Convenor for Music
Issue Editor - openwork

Room 201 - Music, 14 University Gardens
School of Culture and Creative Arts, University of Glasgow

Recent publications:

The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401

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