Call for submissions
Embodied Knowledge and Making Texts: A handbook
No text gets made without a body. Usually, multiple bodies are involved. This illustrated edited collection will ask about what it means to think of texts as hands-on, laborious, and tactile.
What is the relationship between the skills a craftsperson has learned and the skills they know? What does it feel like to be good at something, or to get it ‘right’? Or to be all fingers and thumbs, or find that body and tools are not working together?
Our book will bring together academics and practitioners to ask how bodies have been part of the making of texts, in different times and places. What skills and crafts have been, or are, essential to text production? What kind of knowledge do artisans, writers and other labourers (including non-human workers) hold in their bodies and hands? How have bodies changed and adapted the tools of text-making? How has text work changed bodies? How does making change our sense of what bodies are and what they do, or vice versa? How are the relationships between body and text inflected by race, disability, sex, gender and class?
The editors aim to build a cross-period and geographically wide-ranging collection that approaches these and other questions from a range of perspectives, and appeals to a wide readership. We welcome proposals for chapters of c. 7000-8000 words; shorter reflections on a particular craft or issue (c. 1000-1500 words); interviews with contemporary makers (c 1000-1500 words); editions of short texts or extracts that fit the theme (c. 1000-1500 words); and one or two-page creative responses.
Proposals can relate to any period and region. In selecting contributions, the editors will seek to represent a range of technologies, workers, bodies, time periods, and geographies, and will prioritise contributions that explore exciting and thought-provoking topics in an engaging and accessible way.
Proposal topics may include, but are not limited to:
Embodied knowledge of text-making, its production, survival, reception, and dispersal
Radical, unconventional, censored, or ‘useless’ kinds of embodied knowledge
Questions of access and differently-abled bodies
How book history has prioritised or excluded certain kinds of bodies
The embodiment of archival experiences
Technologies of non-codexical texts
The survival, mutability, or precarity of embodied knowledge through time and space
Please send proposals of around 300 words to helen.smith@york.ac.uk and georgina.wilson@york.ac.uk by Monday 13th January 2025.
We are keen to encourage underrepresented scholars and practitioners to enter abstracts for the collection. Scholars who identify as having a protected characteristic, first generation university educated, precariously employed or unaffiliated are invited to ask for feedback on their abstract. Please send us your first draft no later than Friday 14th December if you would like feedback on your proposal.
