Author: Cara Keirstead

Deadline: November 15, 2022

Editors: Seth Graham (University College London), Rachel Morley (University College London), Beata Waligórska-Olejniczak (Adam Mickiewicz University)

1) Scope of the special issue and the relevance of the subject:

The 2022 edition of ‘Millennium Docs Against Gravity’, Poland’s largest documentary film festival, featured a Susan Sontag retrospective that included her work Waiting for Godot…in Sarajevo, made in the Bosnian capital during the siege and codirected with Nicole Stéphane. The film, which is often described as Sontag’s lasting gift to Sarajevans and which gave them hope and the possibility of responding to suppressed emotions, today inevitably brings to mind places such as Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol, whose suffering inhabitants and ruined architecture have made us doubt the existence of a civilized world. Focusing attention on the mission of art and the role of the artist as an engaged witness of reality, this special issue of “Studia Rossica Posnaniensia” will concentrate on urban experiences of all kinds of conflicts: military, political, interpersonal, ethnic, religious, environmental, etc. We would like to pinpoint the role of Eastern European cities as sites of power and powerlessness, as spaces where pain is/was inflicted, contemplated, embodied, expressed or (re)negotiated, and as intersections of different cultures and traditions (e.g. Catholicism and Orthodoxy). We would also welcome proposals rooted in gender studies, queer studies, post-colonial studies, disability studies, performative studies and animal studies, that may offer perspectives on the city space as a battlefield for one’s dignity, rights and identity. We expect that authors might refer to Sontag’s belief in the artist’s social and ethical duty to explore the link between the aesthetic and the political as well as the relationship between the mind and the body in urban environments.