Vol. 28, no. 3

Submissions due on March 12th, 2018

Vol. 29 no. 1 on "Haunting"

‘To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.’ 

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940).

This special issue of Fabrications seeks to explore the trope of “haunting” to open new scholarly ways of thinking about the reconfiguring of the histories of past places and their representations. Despite the recognition of memory studies in the 1990s as a discrete field of academic inquiry which built on a rich tradition of scholarship and theory, there has been a more hesitant uptake in challenging how we might re-think the persistence and fallibility of memory in connection to architectural history. This special issue therefore invites papers that explore how the architectural past reverberates – in sometimes troubled ways – in our present consciousness. How can complex concepts of the traumatic [as in Maria Tumarkin’sTraumascapes (2005)], the uncanny, and the haunted, be reconsidered in architectural history today? How might we productively review historical places as memory theatres for moments of dangerous recall?

In particular, we seek new explorations on:

  • How the life and death of architects and their creations may haunt archival scholarship or present experience?
  • Why particular architectural typologies or spaces are often perceived as ‘haunted’ by confluences of fiction, memory, and acts of commemoration or desecration?
  • Or how can architectural history and heritage engage more productively with the disconcerting affects of decay and ruination?1

In this issue we also welcome scholarly challenges to historiographical conventions and authorial voices in capturing the reverberations and atmospheres of historical sites and their representations.

  • Rebecca McLaughlan [rebecca.mclaughlan at unimelb.edu.au 
  • Katti Williams [katti.williams at unimelb.edu.au 

Guidelines for Authors

Papers should be submitted online at  www.edmgr.com/rfab by the due dates identified above.

The Editors consider essays of 7000 to 9000 words (including foot notes). Papers should be submitted as Word documents. Authors should use the footnote function of Word, but no automatic footing programs such as Endnote. Papers should be submitted with an abstract (200 words) at the beginning of the paper and a brief author biography (80 words), images and image captions. Abstracts are published at the beginning of papers. All papers published in Fabrications are blind peer-refereed by two readers.

Instructions for authors can be found on the Taylor & Francis website here:
http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfab20/current

Proposals for reports or for reviews of books, exhibitions and other events of interest to the membership of SAHANZ can be made to the Reviews Editor, Farzaneh Haghighi  [f.haghighi at auckland.ac.nz].

Image Specifications

For the refereeing process, please submit low-resolution images of illustrations as separate files {or embedded in a separate pdf file with captions} (72dpi jpeg files).  Once a paper is accepted for publication, high-resolution images should be submitted as 300 dpi tiff files, at a minimum of 100mm wide with a separate list of captions indicating permissions.

Authors are responsible for securing all permissions and paying all fees to reproduce images in Fabrications. Authors must meet UK copyright regulations. For information, see: http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/preparation/permission.asp

Anoma Pieris and Mirjana Lozanovska
Co-Editors

  • 1. For example, Stephen Cairns and Jane M. Jacobs’ Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture (2014), and Caitlin deSilvey’s Curated Decay (2017), point to new ways of interrogating the materiality and functionality of buildings and places over time.