Call for Papers

2025 World Picture Conference

Nov 6-7

University of Amsterdam

Direction

The theme of this year’s conference is “direction.” In this moment of global political crisis, what one wants and seeks most is a sense of direction, a way of orienting ourselves in a world where borders are being either reinforced or redescribed, when our normal pathways—social, legal, and otherwise—are being disrupted. We are also trying to respond to the imposition of political directives that proliferate crisis and disruption in the name of normality. When one wonders how to act in a moment of political urgency what one seeks is a sense of direction, an effective order. Direction also describes an aesthetic act; a director is a person who decides in a play, a film, an orchestra, a museum, how things go together. Direction might in this sense be one way we can tell art from life, the planned from the fortuitous or the merely indifferent. Direction implies an act of intention in which causal relations go as they are planned; or else, it produces an unexpected effect or event that is better described in light of how an act departs from an intention. Likewise, if one directs something, one is also, in most cases, held responsible for what occurs, regardless of how close what occurs resembles what was meant. These issues of meaning and responsibility also raise questions of authorship, multiplied in instances of codirection, in which tensions arise between creative collaboration and the notion of the singular visionary. The risk of giving direction is that one takes responsibility for what cannot be guaranteed. Direction can be understood temporally as the structuring of experience through logics of progress, regression and rupture. Direction is also a way of describing a new beginning, as when we decide “to go in a different direction” in some, if not all, aspect of our lives. As a geographical concern, directions are what can be given for known routes, so that one can move through place and understand the relation between places without reflection or concern. Directions give us a sense of order in the world, of connectedness or we can be disoriented when competing responsibilities or memories pull us in multiple directions. How do we experience the place we live when we can no longer easily go in one direction or another? How does direction call us to think of migrancy? In a world where there is both too much and too little direction, can we think differently about the value of indirection?

We welcome submissions on any aspect of direction. Please send an abstract (500 word maximum) with a title, bio, and a brief bibliography related to the paper (maximum of 5 titles) to worldpicturejournal@gmail.com by July 1. Decisions will be announced by August 15.