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From the Unbearability of the I to the Exigency of Transgression

From the Unbearability of the I to the Exigency of Transgression

Transgression is necessary. This text was produced by our desire for the impossible and our lament over the unbearability of subjectivity. Transgression is impossible. Having little faith in the ability of philosophy to capture what by definition escapes capture, we have opted for a mixed form, part narrative, part theory. Transgression is necessary to the extent that it is impossible. The story starts from the bleak subjective experience of studying abroad in the era of zoom and scatters into unpredictable directions. We looked for freedom on the other side of the law, yet all we found there was nothingness with a human face. The theory starts with a wide view of the literature of the impossibility of transgression and closes in on a text by the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. His concept of the limit experience was like a rough guide to and a gentle push down the bottomless pit that is shaped like an ‘I’. This bottomlessness makes subjectivity insufferable and impels us to jump ship, not to reach a safe haven, but to orchestrate a jump worth living for. The reader is invited to study the narrative part for its intellectual insights and enjoy the theoretical part for its literary merit.
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Spaces of Encounter / Spaces of Contamination

Spaces of Encounter / Spaces of Contamination

Leading up to the theme of our forthcoming issue "Impasse," we introduce some creative works dealing with the subject in the upcoming weeks. Read the second one here.
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nonmovement #1

nonmovement #1

Leading up to the theme of our forthcoming issue "Impasse," we introduce some creative works dealing with the subject in the upcoming weeks. Read the first one here.
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Launch Issue 2.0: Contamination

Launch Issue 2.0: Contamination

A year ago, we singled out contamination as the common thread traversing the events, conversations, and research unfolding within our networks. At the time, contamination had not yet embedded itself into our thoughts and actions as a virus overwriting all else. There is not only a conceptual need but a physical inevitability to re-configure the meaning and effects of ‘contamination’.
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Out of the Blue - Art and Activism (series)

Out of the Blue - Art and Activism (series)

In this series, students from the Graduate School of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) explore the complex overlaps and conversations between art and activism. They seek to illustrate how artistic practices often speak to the urgency of protest and activism, and how activism intertwines with the demands of art.
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Gardening Tools for My Balcony

Gardening Tools for My Balcony

Jordi de Vetten is a maker based in Amsterdam, currently studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He works across various media (photography, painting, film) to explore ideas surrounding narrative and point-of-view, evaluating their implications.
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Wasted Vanity: A Photo-Series Exploring the Meaning of "Vanitas" in Late Modernity

Wasted Vanity: A Photo-Series Exploring the Meaning of "Vanitas" in Late Modernity

This series, composed out of the juxtaposition of three short texts and photographs, questions the meaning of vanitas in late modernity. By employing the ternary principle of reducing, reusing and recycling, it explores the ephemerality and the futility of wasted objects, while also giving them new life through their dead beauty and empty pleasure.
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Anxious Altars: Material Renderings of Mental Space

Anxious Altars: Material Renderings of Mental Space

How do our material work spaces embody or inspire our mental space? How are these spaces entangled with the emotional labour of writing?
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Lights, Camera, Investigation: A Roundtable Discussion on Research and/as Video-Making

Lights, Camera, Investigation: A Roundtable Discussion on Research and/as Video-Making

This article is part of the series ‘Research/Practice’, which explores the intersection of (academic) research with (creative) practice, or otherwise questions this distinction.
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Thinking Through Things

Thinking Through Things

This feature is part of the series ‘Research/Practice’, which explores the intersection of academic research and/as a creative practice.
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Erwin Hurenkamp: Touching/Feeling

Erwin Hurenkamp: Touching/Feeling

Can objects care for us? And if so, in what ways? How does texture mediate our relations with our close environment? What is it about softness that makes us want to feel it, touch it? What kind of associations and affects does soft material evoke? Why do children attach so much affective value to their plush animals?
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Roselinde Bon: S/Censor

Roselinde Bon: S/Censor

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José Luis Viesca Rivas: Travelling Crystals - Dissidentifications

José Luis Viesca Rivas: Travelling Crystals - Dissidentifications

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Ana Mustafa: Leather-Hard

Ana Mustafa: Leather-Hard

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Luca Soudant: Traces of a Momentary Queer Community

Luca Soudant: Traces of a Momentary Queer Community

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Corina van Beelen: The Myth of Exceptionalism

Corina van Beelen: The Myth of Exceptionalism

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Erica Moukarzel: I Sometimes Find You in the Strangest of Places, and Wonder, Did I Ever Leave?

Erica Moukarzel: I Sometimes Find You in the Strangest of Places, and Wonder, Did I Ever Leave?

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Ilse van der Spoel: As Above, So Below - Drone Cinematography, Aerial Vision and the Vertical Perspective

Ilse van der Spoel: As Above, So Below - Drone Cinematography, Aerial Vision and the Vertical Perspective

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Isadora Ponce: Sonic Textualities

Isadora Ponce: Sonic Textualities

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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 

  • Keep track of website analytics.
  • Sorting out any website or email related issues (communicating with web designer, working through the website’s backend (Webflow), and sorting out Google domains and hosting).
  • Uploading content to the website.

Podcast

  • Assisting the podcast team with scripting, recording and sound editing. 
  • Coordinating episode production and releases in tandem with the journal calendar. 
  • Acting as a point of contact with funding and communication departments
  • Experience with editing program (Audition, Ableton) or willingness to learn! 

Finance and Distribution

  • Keeping track of ingoing/outgoing expenses via bank account and spreadsheet, approving transactions.
  • Paying invoices.
  • Keeping track of journal sales and posting orders, sending out free copies to contributors, responding to email orders.
  • Managing the journal’s Big Cartel account and associated payment systems (Stripe, PayPal, iDEAL).
  • Keeping an inventory of stock.
  • Reaching out to bookshops who might be interested in stocking the journal, taking copies to them and checking-in with sales.