קול קורא // למאמרים (אסופה): השיבה הביתה אחרי המלחמה [אנגלית] דדליין לתקצירים=30.6.23

Edited Collection Call for Papers: Warwick Series in the Humanities, Routledge

Editor: Niels Boender (University of Warwick)

On the 20th of May 2023 we welcomed scholars at the University of Warwick to discuss postwar homecoming from a wide range of geographical, temporal, and disciplinary perspectives. We now wish to continue this momentum of this gathering into an edited collection with Routledge’s Warwick Series in the Humanities. We are now opening the call for 300-word chapter proposals for circa 8000-word chapters to bring together that scholarship in a way accessible to a greater number of students, fellow academics, and interested practitioners. We broadly expect chapters to cohere to the major theme of post-war homecoming. This field of study, while long of interest to various scholars across the Humanities, has been primarily theorised from within the Social Sciences. Normative, prescriptive, and based primarily on conflicts post-1989, work on ‘demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration’ has failed to acknowledge the intense subjective experiences of discombobulation accompanying a return into a radically altered ‘home’ sphere. We as scholars are sensitive to the myriad conceptions of ‘home’ incipient in post-war situations, as well as the different ways in ex-combatants are represented, listened to, or neglected. A multitude of topics are related to return after conflict: ideas of end and beginning, guilt and trauma, victory and defeat, occupation, and liberation; new possibilities, but also the persistence of older problematics.

As we move to the edited collection, we hope to keep this broad scope, stretching beyond the immediate moment of homecoming to the longer-term legacies of this key moment in postconflict transitions; the ways in which societies are still influenced by the silences that emerge around homecoming, and the place of return in individual, institutional, and national memory. Ex-combatants’ own agency, in shaping their own homecoming, was one of the core conclusions of the conference. The collection, by placing different perspectives side-byside, should produce an innovative and important discussion to great benefit to future scholars.

We invite proposals (from both attendees and non-attendees) specifically on these broad themes, from a Humanities perspective (i.e using methodologies based in History, LiteraryStudies, Classics, Religious Studies, Anthropology, Philosophy, Art, and Media Studies etc.):

• Difficult post-conflict ‘homecomings’ and diverse meanings of ‘home’

• Literary reflections on moments of post-conflict return

• Gender diverse experiences of homecoming

• Ex-combatant’s struggles for rights

• State and institutional management of post-war transitions

• Wider political significance of post-war homecoming

• Disability-centric experiences of post-war homecoming

• Veteran’s post-war ‘silences’ and methodologies of ‘listening’ to ex-combatant stories

We invite abstracts up to 300 words, with a biographical note to be sent to homecomingconference@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals will be the 30th of June, with draft chapters expected in early 2024, pending acceptance with the Warwick Series in the Humanities (Routledge). Please contact us on this email address for any further question and see updates on our twitterpage: @homecomingconf.