Call for Submissions

Intelligence

Mosaic invites interdisciplinary submissions for a special issue on Intelligence. We are in the thick of a crisis, not so much generated by AI, which is one of a number of symptoms, but in terms of how we define intelligence itself. We are interested in essays broaching the ecological and species biases that contour definitions of intelligence, in work on other than human intelligence, say, that of animals, plants, and the language of inanimate things, but equally in the “wisdom” of democracy vs collectives and/or identitarian concerns, the literalization of centralized intelligence in our increasingly technical milieu, linear vs. non-linear thinking processes, two-dimensional vs. multi-dimensional conceptual sequencing, and the language of crisis surrounding all of these limit cases. With an emphasis on decentring ontology, an expanded ethics and criticism keyed to these and other prosthetic attachments stamped by time and exteriority, we invite submissions on the plastic substrates of intelligence, how literary and artistic works narrativize these forms of hyper-materialist cognition, and how current theoretical work challenges metaphysics in the name of “animal cognition,” “rhizomatic thought,” “plant thinking,” the geological and planetary humanities, the “intelligence of art,” and so on.

Deadline: Aug 31, 2026

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Water

Mosaic invites interdisciplinary submissions for a special issue on Water. We are interested in the current plight of the world’s lakes, streams, rivers, and oceans, and inseparably from that, the global threat to survival of aquatic species. For example, the recent and rapid development of aquaculture has already impacted traditional fisheries and longstanding life cycles and behavioral patterns of Pacific salmon and Orca whales. Inland factory farming of animals, which has all-but displaced the traditional family farm, is now recognized as contributing significantly to freshwater and ocean pollution. From interdisciplinary critical theorists, in particular, we invite perspectives on the conceptualization of water—beyond the Western colonialist discourse of rights and privatization, a framework in which water does not fare at all well. How might literary theorists write about—and write—water, apart from relying on this oppositional framework? “Writing water,” we suggest, is a major concern for interdisciplinary theorists today.

Deadline: April 30, 2026

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Suicides

The precarity of life—that intimacy between life and death—is a recurrent motif of published works at Mosaic. With special emphasis on death, the journal has consistently highlighted how the latter has variously impacted the history of philosophy, the questions of writing and reading, the aporias of the ethical encounter or autoimmunity, and finally, the slippery proximity of death to suicide. Suicide with a positive valence, in an intimate relationship with life, and so often touched by time, is at the core of Mosaic’s call for submissions on Suicides. Ecocide, writing, repetition, our reliance on technology and fossil fuels, increasingly artificial intelligence, the very practice of self-criticism, the problem of “petty-bourgeois sado-masochisms,” and the increasing contradictions of capital are all symptomatic. Mosaic invites innovative and interdisciplinary submissions on suicides that brush up against becoming, conversion, autobiography, resilience, precisely “not dying,” love, and affect. We are especially interested in essays that address these critical tropes in theory, literature and art, and in connection to the work of those artists, poets, and thinkers who risk their lives for their chosen medium by accepting the inadequacies of form; in some cases, taking their life in apparent continuity with the logic of a life’s work.

Deadline: April 30, 2026

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Psychoanalysis to Psychographics

The chronology and developments that lead from psychoanalysis to psychographics are cloudy ones to say the least. From 1950 alone, it is a history marked as much by the emergence of consumerism, the problem of reproduction, work in sociology, the spectre of fascism, and the monetization of the unconscious as much as the breaks and inversions members of the Frankfurt School call the “end of psychology” and “psychoanalysis in reverse.” Mosaic invites innovative and interdisciplinary submissions on moments in this long history that focus on studies in prejudice and racism, character analysis, projection/introjection, the emphasis on behaviourism or reaction, aggressivity, or scapegoating and its now standardized inversion, proliferation, and merger with subjecthood itself as misanthropic or disenfranchised critique. We are interested in essays that address these issues in theory, literature, or art, and especially that approach these histories in terms of the attention economy, affect, plasticity, technics, anti-fascist politics, our addiction to screens where identity is felt as a meaningful social interaction (MSI), and, upstream from this, as crowd-forming algorithms that foster disarticulated collectives.

Deadline: April 30, 2026

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Current Issue

Special Issue: Prevailing Pandemic (March 2023)

Guest edited by Xiaohui Liang and Claire Chambers, this special issue explores pandemic literature in contemporary English and Chinese fiction.

View details »

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