CFP: FUTURES OF POLITICAL THEORY: A FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CONFABULATION

FUTURES OF POLITICAL THEORY: A FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY CONFABULATION

Call for Proposals

Submission Deadline: 8 October 2021

This coming year will be the fiftieth of Political Theory’s publication. We are celebrating a half-century of political theorizing with an anniversary issue comprised of futures: what will political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take?  We invite your proposed answers to these questions, written from an imagined future perspective. 

We call on the global community of political theorists and people who love political theory to join us in a fiftieth anniversary confabulation. Insofar as we are able in these times, let us gather over hot or cold drinks, in seminar rooms, in each others’ favorite places, and think about what we have been able to do and what we and our scholarly descendants might yet achieve. Let us also hunker down in libraries with our favorite texts and our sober senses, imagining what might be read, written, and thought many years hence. 

Please send brief (200-500 word) proposals to [email protected] by 8 October 2021. Specify the date, form, length, and topic of the proposed imaginative work, along with anything else the selection panel would need to know. For example, one might propose to write a 3,000-word lecture on the history of affluent (twenty-first century) political philosophy given by a teacher in a far future ‘broken world’ characterised by famine and extremes of weather and scarcity.[1] More cheerful confabulations are also welcome, of course, as are proposals whose form itself reflects the imaginative futurist work of the author. We welcome proposals written from positions of marginality, proposals from groups whose members are not alike in their outlook, proposals written by one person from their university office…. In short, we welcome a wide variety of engagements with the political theory of the future.

Proposals will be reviewed by a panel chaired by the co-editors, and contributions commissioned by late October. Full submissions are due 1st April 2022. These will be peer reviewed in time for final manuscripts to be submitted on the first of June 2022. 

[1] This one has already appeared in print: Tim Mulgan, Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy After Catastrophe, Acumen Press, 2011.