{"id":2616,"date":"2026-07-18T20:55:39","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T17:55:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cbg-lab.uom.gr\/en\/?p=2616"},"modified":"2026-07-18T20:58:30","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T17:58:30","slug":"call-for-paper-submissions-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cbg-lab.uom.gr\/en\/?p=2616","title":{"rendered":"CALL FOR PAPER SUBMISSIONS"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Making Coexistence through Time:<\/strong> Practices and Lived Temporalities from the Balkans and the Caucasus, inside and beyond the Mediterranean<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Invitation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Culture-Borders-Gender\/Lab of the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, and the Editorial Committee of its annual, open-access electronic journal Culture-Borders-Gender\/Studies (https:\/\/ojs.lib.uom.gr\/index.php\/cbgs) invite submissions of original research papers for Volume 5 (2026). This call concerns the main section of the volume (research articles). The special thematic section and the book reviews are handled separately.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1. The Point of Departure: Living Together in Uncertain Times<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the Balkans, the Caucasus, West Asia\/Middle East, and North Africa, people live together amid political uncertainty, shifting borders, displacement, environmental transformation, economic hardship, and fragile institutions. Everyday life rarely pauses while awaiting political settlements or definitive resolutions. Neighbours keep interacting, families sustain relationships across political, ethnic, and religious divides, rituals are performed, markets function, memories are transmitted, and new forms of belonging emerge. Shared life persists, not despite this uncertainty, but through the ordinary practices by which people inhabit it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. Temporalities as an analytical lens<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Living together is accomplished through temporal practices rather than simply experienced in time: coexistence is better understood as an accomplishment than as a condition, and its analytical significance emerges from the temporal organisation of everyday life. We propose the temporalities of living together as an analytical lens for rethinking coexistence, one in which waiting, for instance, is not the suspension of coexistence but a condition through which it is produced. The question thus shifts from whether people coexist to how they continually organise their living together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By temporality we mean not the measurable time of the clock or the calendar, but the socially organised rhythms, durations, sequences and orientations through which social life is ordered. Temporality is not a domain apart from the body, affect, power or discourse but an aspect through which these are constituted: embodied in rhythms of work, rest and the life course, affective, as anticipation, impatience or dread give time its shape, positional and gendered, since some wait while others set the terms of waiting, and some rhythms are imposed while others are interrupted, institutional and discursive, as states, bureaucracies, markets, calendars and hegemonic narratives enforce particular times, and biographical and collective, as memories and inheritances, imperial and colonial among them, are reworked in the present. To study temporal organisation is therefore not to exclude bodies, affects, voices or power, but to ask how these are lived and negotiated in time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These temporalities do not form closed categories but are interconnected dimensions, including waiting and anticipation, patience and endurance, repetition and rhythm, synchronisation and asynchrony, interruption, breakdown and repair, care, memory and inheritance, and expectation and imagined futures, through which coexistence is constituted, negotiated and transformed. They rarely unfold neatly: intimacy can coexist with distrust, hospitality can shade into exclusion, and care can sit alongside friction. Attending to their temporal making lets us describe this without assuming that things must end in reconciliation or breakdown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. Why These Regions?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We name the Mediterranean advisedly: not as a bounded cultural area to which these regions belong, but as a relational horizon they touch as much as they exceed. This is why our framing reaches inside and beyond it, from the Balkans and the Caucasus to West Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. The Balkans, the Caucasus, West Asia\/Middle East, and North Africa offer especially fertile settings for this conversation, not because they can be reduced to regions of conflict or instability, but because in them the multiple temporalities of living together become unusually visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Long histories of mobility, imperial and colonial legacies and their postcolonial afterlives, border-making and displacement, state formation, environmental change, and cultural plurality intersect with daily practices that continually reshape social relations. We approach these regions not as bounded areas but as empirical settings in which the temporal organisation of coexistence is particularly visible. We read them not as spaces of violence but as places where everyday coexistence is made, even as hierarchical orders shape unequal experiences of time. Like coexistence itself, they are not neutral givens but are made and imagined over time through power and hegemony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. From Existing Conversations to a Further Analytical Shift<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent scholarship has increasingly shifted attention from region-as-cultural-entity to the practices through which regions are inhabited and reimagined: remapping the Mediterranean as a relational formation (Ben-Yehoyada, Cabot and Silverstein 2020), everyday life in the Balkans (Montgomery 2019), the postsocialist Mediterranean (Brkovi\u0107 2022), the political in and of Europe (Dzenovska and De Genova 2018), displacement in the Middle East (Volk and Inhorn 2021), and austerity in Southern Europe (Knight and Stewart 2017).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This issue extends that trajectory with a further shift: it proposes the temporalities of living together not as one more topic but as the analytical entry point itself, joining a cross-regional field without presuming a single cultural area, and treating temporality as a relational and political dimension through which bodies, institutions, inequalities and imagined futures become socially visible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5. Possible themes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We invite contributions from across the social sciences and humanities (anthropology, sociology, history, geography, political science, gender and border studies, and cultural, media and literary studies). We particularly welcome ethnographically grounded, historically informed, comparative, and theoretically innovative contributions. We therefore encourage contributions that examine how temporal practices shape various domains of social life, including but not limited to the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n