Soapbox x WARP

September 1, 2023

Themes in this issue

Embodiment
Counter-Cartography
Transcorporeality
Becoming Animal
Walking Practices

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Walking centres the body in a research practice. The body that gets cold, sweaty, thirsty, or blistered. The body that encompasses feelings, emotions, prejudices, as well as intellect. The body that gets impatient, bored, or overwhelmed. The body that, if we are lucky enough to have functioning locomotive and sensory faculties, is an instrument, as-yet-unparalleled in its potential for the sensing, sifting, and assimilation of data. Walking as a research practice is about consciously deciding how to put that instrument into motion within an environment, and which types of data to sense, sift, and assimilate. It is about the visceral exchanges between a sensing body in motion and the bodies of knowledge sequestered in the phenomena that make up a site of research. Whether they engage with pixels and memes, rocks, insects, birds, instruments, mud, other researchers, memories, clouds, microbes, shop signs, roasting coffee particles, emergency vehicle sirens, pages, or rats—walking allows a researcher to surface new layers of understanding about a physical, digital, or social environment, and sometimes about themselves. This special issue of Soapbox is the result of a collaboration with the "Walking as Research Practice" research group. It was compiled to share with a broader audience what was presented and discussed during the international conference of WARP in Amsterdam, with the hope of prompting new research collaborations and other research inquiries.

Editor’s note
Lynn Gommes, Jana Sofie Liebe

Introduction
Alice Twemlow, Tânia A. Cardoso

This Walk is a Pause: 1
Nienke Scholts

What: An actual and/or metaphorical sound walk
For whom: A gift for those who never stop
When: When in need of a pause
Where: Wherever your feet take you
Duration: 50 min (or a longer while)

In search of the unpredicted: Walking in spaces of open enquiry
Sally Stenton

The writing of this paper is an opening for the unpredicted. It seeks a non-linear path but frequently fall back into line. It meanders, looping back, to re-tie and rearrange the threads. Walking, sewing, and writing are brought into an active dialogue, and collaborations are explored between artistic research and other forms of academic inquiry. In the absence of a pre-planned structure or destination, the writing becomes a vessel for chance happenings. It responds to interruptions, crosses formal boundaries, and diverts into physical experiments. Discovery is not held within the pages but permeates the spaces between words, reader, writer, and actions. The need to pay attention to the unpredicted is posed both as a conundrum and as a vital task for all forms of research.

Walking with speculative artefacts in public space of Amsterdam
Kamila Wolszczak

This article explores walking as a research practice in the urban public space of Amsterdam. This text brings selected observations and prototypes from artistic research together with experiences of participants from the “Walking back to Amsterdam” walkshop during the Walking as Research Practice (WARP) Conference in 2022. It is my drift between the vision and the reality of life lost and found in broken artefacts in the city, from a general look at the body of the city to discovering its details and dirt from the cracks. I aim to look through a magnifying glass held by a walker, who regulates the zoom for us. The idea is to help understand public space as overlapping layers of the many spatial dimensions–with a particular focus on the materiality (physical space) and the imaginary (symbolic space)–that act as social tools for new possibilities of a common future. This drift asks for the creative potentiality of an ex-centric public space and for the power to ‘co-create communication’ with other-than-humans.

Walking between the disciplinary and the tactical: An embodied view of Certeau’s everyday practice
Maria Persu

This paper examines Michel de Certeau’s account of everyday tactical resistance by exploring walking in the city as a sociomaterial practice. Although Certeau stresses the need to critique the centrality of the scriptural apparatus, of writing over other human operations, he still privileges the textual and linguistic domains. Adopting a posthuman perspective on the body, the sociomaterial processes of normalisation present in the everyday make me question the heroism of the disembodied ordinary individual. However, instead of discrediting quotidian forms of resistance, I reframe the everyday as a domain where reality is perpetually ordered by human-nonhuman interactions.

Deep canine topography: Some simple steps
Darren O’Brien

For the last three years I have been making walks with my canine companion as part of an AHRC UKRI funded practice-led, autoethnographic PhD at Nottingham Trent University (UK), which seeks to explore the potential of more-than-human co-authored walking practices; to radically trouble human-canine-landscape relational ontologies. In this short paper I propose and reflect upon the practice of deep canine topography, bringing together walking, as a contemporary artistic medium, and critical animal studies in art to explore human and more-than-human collaborative practices.

Pilgrimage as a tool for perception and a form of counter-cartography
Roxana Perez Mendez, Mario Marzan

Since Hurricane Maria’s catastrophic blow to Puerto Rico in 2017, Puerto Rican artists Roxana Pérez-Mendez and Mario Marzán, as Campo Research Studio, utilise pilgrimage as part of an embodied walking art practice to generate richer kincentric relationships with the natural world. By viewing pilgrimage paths as a site for creative inquiry, participants on their journey become works of art in themselves—part radical cartography, part emergent strategy, and part social practice. The trace elements of the experience serve as a field guide on relating meaningfully to the environmental, political, or social changes of our moment.

A walk in the forest with trans*ness
Neila Zannier

This paper explores how a walk in the forest with trans*ness turns towards the sensorial, the perceptive, and affect as rhythmic forces through which trans*ness and walking can merge. Can this enmeshment provide a new lens to look at trans*ness, and maybe new questions? Through the inextricable co-dependency and co-becoming between the trans* body, the walking, and the forest, a walk with trans*ness becomes, not only walking across the forest, but trans*(it)ing through.

Bringing into conversation two walking practices to explore the palimpsest of space
Natalie Bamford, Simon King

This paper is the result of a coming together of two walking researchers whose paths may not have crossed if it were not for the Walking and Research Practice (WARP) conference, at least not in person. The meeting of Simon and Natalie during the conference led to multiple invigorating discussions and ultimately a collaboration that this text discusses. Demonstrating how two different voices can exist together within the same walk, this paper presents individual responses from each author to their shared walk. Each reflective of their practice and writing style, the responses differ but ultimately come together in a cohesive and progressively building narrative of correspondence, a reading of the built environment, and a development of both our practices.

A DIY walk on paper
Mariken Overdijk

The invitation to wander and physically engage with a private (urban) space is an essential feature of the experimental method that will be unfolded here. Just as I invited a passer-by to share their daily walk inside their private space with me, here I give you the opportunity to do the same with someone else.

This Walk is a Pause: 2
Nienke Scholts

Managing Editor: Lynn Gommes

Editorial Team: Melissa van den Schoor, Manar Ellethy, Katerina Kallivroussi, Julia Alting, Dominika Mikolajczyk, Ciara Patten, Andreea Moise, Oriana Rose, Hannah Salih

WARP Conference organised by Tânia A. Cardoso, Alice Twemlow, Francesca Ranalli

Graphic Design by Jana Sofie Liebe

Printing and Binding by de Stencilzolder, Amsterdam and by AGIA, Amsterdam. Edition of 150.

With many thanks to David Bennewith and Floor Koomen

Call for Papers: 5.0: SWAMPED! Muddied Environments and the Ecology of Being Bogged Down

January 17, 2023

Call for Papers: 5.0: SWAMPED! Muddied Environments and the Ecology of Being Bogged Down

For the upcoming issue of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis, we invite young researchers and established scholars alike to submit academic essays or creative works that critically engage with the theme of swamped. We are inviting extended proposals (500-1000 words) that follow consistent and complete formatting and referencing style to be submitted to submissions@soapboxjournal.net by February 21st, 2023.


While it may first be thought of as a space of stagnation, the swamp is also a transition zone. A space in which water and land merge, swamps have long represented an area in which the earth resists being controlled, and have functioned as areas of resistance in many Indigenous epistemes and folklores. Swamps, then, are areas that resist human control, and epitomise agency of the natural world, doing so too on a conceptual level (Wilson 1). At the same time, it has been co-opted semantically, as the term “swamped” has become associated with systems, both of society and signification, that are overwhelmed - whether in terms of a job market being swamped, or in the politically loaded draining of “the swamp” as a network of corruption. Where the former strand of signification uses the swamp to highlight agency, the latter points out a lack of it. As a result, swamps have become spaces of contestation and transition both as physical environments, and as linguistic ones. How do these strands of meaning diverge, and where do they come together?


Swamps as they exist in cultural imagination(s).

Swamps speak to the imagination. They feature prominently in folklore and provide fertile soil for myriad mythical creatures: from the nine-headed hydra in ancient Greek mythology, to the South-African grootslang, to the numerous global configurations of the will-o’-wisp. These narratives largely hinge on the swamp’s liminal positioning that makes it hard to traverse, inhabit, or otherwise tame. To this day, when swamps are featured in pop-culture, they are often mythologized to house the monstrous or, at the very least, the off-beat (e.g. Shrek, or the Man-Thing in Marvel comics, or the entire cast of characters in Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!). 

In addition to housing imagined creatures, the swamp is also a famously rich archeological site where we can find many well-preserved traces of past human life. Most notable are the so-called bog bodies, eerily intact corpses that date back as far as the holocene. These findings add to the swamp’s mythical appeal, but are also hypothesised to, in some cases, originate from it. A particularly large amount of bog bodies dating back to the iron age were found in Northern Europe, and the bulk of these corpses bear traces of ritualistic human sacrifice. This has led historians to believe that, at the time, the swamp was seen as a transition space, not just between land and water, but also as a gateway between different worlds (Randsborg). 

So, the swamp is charged with a rich cultural history and subject to wide-ranging meaning-making practices. We invite you to delve further into this and open it up. What stories do we tell about swamps? Which narratives are remembered? And, what does that ultimately say about us? 

The swamp as it appears in political rhetoric.

Since its first use in 1881 by Helen Hunt Jackson in her polemical text, A Century of Dishonor, the concept of the swamp as an area to be overcome has resurfaced repeatedly as a powerful metaphor in the arena of political discussion and rhetoric (most often in the context of US federal politics). Arguing against the so-called ‘Indian Appropriations Act’ of 1871, which rendered Indigenous peoples as wards of the state and, therefore, eligible for forcible relocation, Jackson argued that such panacean responses were immoral and did not address the needs and concerns, of Native peoples, nor did it strive towards the reparations that Indigenous nations deserved. Rather than debate the specifics of individual policy decisions, Jackson argued that ceasing to cheat, rob, break promises, and extending ‘the protection of the law to the Indian's rights of property’ (342) would be the most appropriate first course of action. To illustrate this, Jackson presented the following scenario:

When pioneers in a new country find a tract of poisonous and swampy wilderness to be reclaimed, they do not withhold their hands from fire and axe till they see clearly which way roads should run, where good water will spring, and what crops will best grow on the redeemed land. They first clear the swamp. So with this poisonous and baffling part of the domain of our national affairs — let us first "clear the swamp”. (341).

This metaphorical call to clear, or to drain, the swamp was then exercised by socialist and left-leaning politicians and political commentators such as Winfield R. Gaylord and Victor L. Berger who petitioned for draining the swamp of capitalism (Gaylord 8, Berger 107). In 1966, civil rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin employed the phrase in A Freedom Budget for All Americans, a policy proposal that, among other things, sought to eradicate poverty (14-15). Ronald Reagan’s use of the phrase in 1982 when authorising the Grace Commision (which investigated inefficiency within the Federal Government), dragged the phrase across the political aisle. Where it had once illustrated a progressive politics, it henceforth became tethered to conceptions of government waste, cronyism and distrust in Capitol Hill, a claim bolstered by the fact of Washington, D.C.,’s construction on supposed marshlands between the Potomac and the Anacostia rivers. From Reagan’s usage  onwards, calls to drain the swamp were almost exclusively directed towards Washington, D.C., as a locus of political venality. The phrase’s most recent, and perhaps most memorable, usage was by former President Donald Trump, who repeatedly uttered the phrase at rallies, during interviews, and in countless tweets. 

The invocation and the power of this phrase can be seen across various areas of cultural and political discourse and analysis; its intent and meaning wavering from progressive to reactionary throughout its history. So begs the question, what does it mean to drain a swamp? Metaphorically speaking, what is the impact of identifying spaces as swamps to be drained? Who does the draining, or the promise of draining, serve? In reality, what are the implications of identifying and draining a swamp? Who does the draining itself? Think of the thousands of people displaced by Benito Mussolini’s draining of the Pontine Marshes, and the many more thousands of workers who were subject to backbreaking manual labour and exposure to malaria and disease (Snowden 155-6). What bubbles to the surface when we delve into the history, use, and the real-world implications of this charged phrase?


The affective experience of being swamped.

But to be swamped is also to feel swamped; to be overwhelmed with work, a sensory overload, stress and clutter. Infrastructures can be swamped; systems too; and spaces can swamp you with stimuli. How does one endure a state of swampedness, feel one’s way through it, resist it or find rest in it? Can objects or texts be swamped? To disconnect, go offline, turn to self-help books, and take time off work – all these are responses to feeling swamped. But then: who can afford to respond like this, and who is unable to withdraw? Or can information overload – to stay with the swamp – be creatively productive or critical? This is the muddy matrix that feeling swamped opens in theory; a space of excessive encounter between ecologies and affects, where swamps become metaphors, and metaphors swamp. 

Thought on the feeling of being swamped and its social-political relationalities are everywhere: from Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep to Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society to Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. So too the desire to escape overwhelm has recently been re-conceptualized in edited volumes like Politics of Withdrawal. But “swamp” as a metaphor has not yet passed the floodgates. We invite you to think with this swamp, feel through its conceptual implication. 


We encourage submissions relating to the themes above, as well as, but not limited to, the following: 

  • Critical engagements with/investigations into environments that could be described as marshlands, wetlands, fens, bogs, moors, etc. 
  • Practices of re-wilding and re-swamping.
  • Cultural ethnographies of muddied environments.
  • Environmental humanities and ecocritical approaches to swamps.
  • Investigations into swamps as liminal, transitional, or mutable sites.
  • Swamps as sites of decay (e.g. die-off and algal bloom) and repair (e.g. as fertile sites of regeneration).
  • Socio-cultural explorations of what it means to feel swamped, its implications, and who this affect can belong to.
  • Socio-economic approaches investigating issues such as: 
  • Who is relegated to the swamp?
  • Who has access to the swamp?
  • What are the social impacts of swamped environments on individuals and groups?
  • Investigations of the function of swamps in political rhetoric.
  • Pieces that investigate swamps as veiled, uncharted, or otherred locales or those that approach swamps as spaces to be traversed.


We invite extended proposals (500-1000 words) to be submitted to submissions@soapboxjournal.net by February 21st 2023. Following conditional acceptance, an initial draft version (3000 words) will be due two weeks after receiving the acceptance email. The editing process will take place throughout Spring/Summer 2023. If you have any questions regarding your submission, do not hesitate to contact us at info@soapboxjournal.net. Editing and peer review guidelines will be sent to authors individually upon acceptance of their submission. For full submission guidelines, see our website.


Guidelines for creative submissions are more flexible and can be finished works, but please keep in mind spatial limitations: there is usually room for one longer or two shorter pieces in the print version. A sense of the formatting possibilities can be garnered from previous issues (open-access pdf versions are available on our website).


We also accept submissions for our website all year round. We encourage a variety of styles and formats, including short-form essays (around 2000 words), reviews, experimental writing and multimedia. These can engage with the theme of the upcoming issue but are not limited to it. Please get in touch to pitch new ideas or existing projects that you would like to have published by reading our submission guidelines and filling in the form.



Works cited.

Berger, Victor L. Berger’s Broadsides, Social-Democratic Publishing Company, 1912.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press 2011.

Crary, Jonathan. 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep. Verso, 2014. 

Gaylord, Winfield R. “Gaylord Makes a Statement.” Daily Northwestern [Oshkosh: WI], 10 Oct. 1903, p. 8.

Han, Byung-Chul. The Burnout Society. Stanford University Press, 2015.

Hesselberth, Pepita., and Joost de Bloois, editors. Politics of Withdrawal: Media, Arts, Theory. Rowman and Littlefield, 2020.

Jackson, Helen Hunt. A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United State’s Government’s Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes. New York, Harper & Brothers, 1881.

Randolph, A. Philip, and Bayard Rustin. A Freedom Budget for All Americans: A Summary. A Philip Randolph Institute, 1967.

Randsborg, Klavs. Roman Reflections: Iron Age to Viking Age in Northern Europe. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Snowden, Frank M. The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962. Yale University Press, 2006.

Wilson, Anthony. Swamp: Nature and Culture. Reaktion Books Ltd, 2018.




Call for Creative Work - 5.0: SWAMPED!

October 2, 2023

For the upcoming issue of Soapbox, a graduate peer-reviewed journal for cultural analysis, we invite young artists to submit creative works that critically engage with the theme of swamped. We are inviting proposals or finished works to be submitted to submissions@soapboxjournal.net by October 10th, 2023.

Swamps speak to the imagination. While it may first be thought of as a space of stagnation, the swamp is also a transition zone: an area in which water and land merge, a space where the earth resists being controlled. In addition to its geographical referent, the swamp also covers less tangible—though equally murky—semantic ground. It has become associated with systems, both of society and signification, that are overwhelmed—whether in terms of a job market being swamped, or in the politically loaded draining of “the swamp” as a network of corruption. Where the former strand of signification uses the swamp to highlight agency, the latter points out a lack of it. How do these strands of meaning diverge, and where do they come together?

Guidelines for creative submissions are flexible: poems, short-stories (up to 5000 words), visual art pieces, collages, drawings, comics, anything as long as it's printable! Feel free to take a look at our previous issues for inspiration.

Open Board Positions 2023

We are currently looking to expand our team. Soapbox is a student-run journal focused on promoting voices that creatively engage with concepts and cultural objects in the broadest sense, through publishing academic, artistic, and interdisciplinary works. Soapbox is a collaborative effort in gaining experience and experimenting with running a small publishing platform. All members take part in actively shaping what Soapbox is by weighing in on editorial decisions and take part in any aspects of publishing (both online and in print). 

In general, the time commitment expected is between four and six hrs/week, including a weekly two-hour meeting. The journal is run on a voluntary basis. For all roles, applicants should be based in the Amsterdam area and available for weekly meetings for at least the remaining academic year (until June 2024).

If you're interested, please email info@soapboxjournal.net with the particular role(s) you are interested in and a few words of motivation.

Deadline: Sunday, October 15th


IT 

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