Soapbox Journal 6.0: On the Uses of Absence Launch

Can we speak of a turn of absence? Across the contemporary academic conjuncture, whether in queer theory, trans studies, Black studies, Eastern European studies, or literary studies, enduring scholarly investments in re-presenting and re-presenting the absented body have become supplemented by an affirmative interest in staying with absence as such, allocating absence at the heart of myriad resistances against explotiation, approporiation, undoing, and normativity. As an object of study, a critical figure, and theoretical tool, absence is given a shape, meaning, form; it is put in writing, where it has a function, a flavour, and a politics. Absence, in other words, falls every time to be purely nothing. How, then, to hink the contraction and the provocation of a contemporary aesthetics of absence?

Soapbox is a student-run publishing platform founded in 2018. It has since promoted scholarly, artistic, and interdisciplinary work that engages provocatively with cultural artefacts, concepts, and contemporary phenomena within the humanities. Soapbox advocates for multiplicity. They encourage the submission of creative, experimental, and boundary-pushing works, as well as more traditional essays that share their differing perspectives on the cultural objects, concepts, and phenomena shaping our worlds. 

The platform operates both in print, in the form of a peer-reviewed journal, and on the web, where we accept submissions all year-round. The floor is open to students, graduate, and early career researchers, as well as writers and creatives from various backgrounds. We aim to open up the route to publication and to share with new audiences the dynamic work of cultural analysis in the Netherlands and beyond.