Archives

• 

  Outside/rs 2022 - SPECIAL ISSUE

  Vol. 13 No. 1 (2023)

  Outside/rs 2022 conference was held on 2nd - 3rd April 2022 at the University of Brighton. The conference aimed to build a common understanding of the challenges in accounting for Outsider experiences and positions, as they relate to gender, sex and sexualities. We invited criticisms, definitions and explorations of what Outside/rs might mean in relation to queerness, transness and beyond. This Special Issue contains a selection of traditional articles and essays, as well as more innovative formats such as an essay in conversation and a photo essay. These papers showcase the themes of this conferences to continue the conversations we began at Outside/rs 2022.

• 

  Home

  Vol. 12 No. 1 (2022)

  Home has long carried connotations of safety, comfort, warmth and familiarity. However, in an increasingly interconnected world, the term ‘home’ takes on new meanings. Widespread media coverage of mass migrations resulting from political turmoil shed light on alternative understandings of home, with issues of statelessness, national identity, forced relocation, longing/belonging, acculturation, and assimilation becoming increasingly pressing. It is also a site of inequality; inequality in accessibility, inequality of ownership, and inequality in the division of domestic responsibility. As the articles, essays and exclusive interview with Mohsin Hamid contained in this issue show, home is a complex signifier, a space which every individual will experience differently, imbued with contradiction, and deserving of academic attention. 

• 

  (Re)Connect

  Vol. 11 No. 1 (2021)

  To connect is an integral part of the human experience. We are wired to make connections with other people, with things, with events; as well as between people, between things, and between events. At the same time that we are social (connected) beings, we also see (connecting) patterns everywhere. An opportunity to reconnect is an opportunity for a second look: a (re)examination of the connections created in those first instances, a chance to go deeper, notice something new, re-establish or disrupt bonds and patterns. In this issue, Excursions Journal invited researchers to (re)connect. The articles assembled here highlight the (re)connections that shape our social and individual lives. 
  

• 

  Reflections

  Vol. 10 No. 2 (2020)

  This commemorative issue is our gift to Excursions readers, our thank you to past authors and editors, and our legacy to future board members. It is a celebration of ten years of providing a platform for exceptional, creative and original research conducted by postgraduate students that is exceptional, creative and original in its own right. In Reflections, we are offering our readers the opportunity to revisit what we hope to be some of the best papers to have graced the pages of Excursions during its first decade. More than just a re-print of a handful of articles, this issue brings contemplations and musings on each paper, written by a member of the respective Editorial Board and/or the original author, which precede each piece.

• 

  Chaos

  Vol. 10 No. 1 (2020)

  Disorder, confusion, mayhem, havoc, turmoil, disruption... chaos. Within this issue, chaos opposes order and is fuel to a new order; chaos is violence and inspiration; chaos is part of being human. Alongside eight articles, we also published eight essays by Doctoral Researchers examining the challenges in doing Research in Times of Chaos - our response to the global pandemic that has undoubtedly shaped this issue of Excursions.

• 

  Fake

  Vol. 9 No. 1 (2019)

  This issue of Excursions aims to shed light on that previously ignored, uncomfortably dusty, intentionally darkened corner: the fakery and fakeness of history, culture, society and academia.

• 

  Networks

  Vol. 8 No. 1 (2018)

  In Networks, we wanted to recognise and reflect on the constraints and opportunities provided by networks that empower but also exclude; ingrain practices of exclusion, hierarchy, and privilege; but also break them down, and change the rules. We wanted to allow a critical focus on the movements of change, and of resistance to change, in our personal lives, at work, in academia, in politics, and in society.

• 

  Failure

  Vol. 7 No. 1 (2017)

  Throughout this issue, we are confronted with a desire to address and articulate the inherent complexities and ambiguities of failure, to trouble the simplistic, binary distinction between failure and success which characterises so much contemporary discourse.

• 

  Occupations

  Vol. 6 No. 1 (2015)

  It is impossible for us to occupy space, time, ourselves and our lives in an indifferent or apolitical manner: even proclaimed indifference is in itself a stance. We define ourselves and each other through the work that we do, the places that we live and visit, the things and people that occupy our thoughts. This is so much so that anxieties about others’ failures to occupy themselves properly are manifest, and often sit in contradiction with the ideals of different people or groups.

• 

  Boundaries

  Vol. 5 No. 1 (2014)

  All events, ideas and physical entities require boundaries to exist. Boundaries are felt and seen everywhere. Yet on closer examination they are often nowhere in particular. The paradox of a slave without a master, a weakness that does not provoke strength, is the paradox of the boundary: the separation that unites. Taken as a whole, the essays in Boundaries propound and elaborate this contradiction without diminishing its vital tension.

• 

  Purity

  Vol. 4 No. 2 (2013)

  Purity, on first glanced, appeared to be an almost benign word, something that perhaps wouldn’t give us enough ‘traction’ in our Call for Papers. However, once conceived, it proved a difficult term to dislodge from our conversations — something about the concept demanded our attention. As an idea it seemed to travel and expand almost limitlessly through the sciences and humanities to encompass, define and embody what Excursions is always looking out for: connections. Academics working across a wealth of disciplines aptly demonstrated that purity is a real concern in research today.

• 

  Science/Fiction

  Vol. 4 No. 1 (2013)

  That science is the dominant discourse of truth in our society is now undeniable. Yet one does not have to repudiate the truths science can offer us in order to question its relation to power, its seeming stranglehold over truth, which is tragically reflected at university level by the disproportionate funding cuts to the humanities. It is not that we should simply cast the humanities as the victim, here; rather, and equally pertinently, the many merits of science are adversely affected by such a political alignment, too. Can fiction not offer us another kind of truth?

• 

  States of Emergence, States of Emergency

  Vol. 3 No. 1 (2012)

  The felt belief that we reside in a state of emergency is a powerful rhetorical feature of contemporary life. If the experience of anxiety induced by that belief provides an efficient means of governmental control, its prevalence and efficiency are consolidated in a globalised world by ever-broadening modes of technological production and interaction. There is a sense that ‘emergency’ is thus involved in a reciprocal relationship with ‘emergence’.

• 

  Virus

  Vol. 2 No. 1 (2011)

  In the contemporary world, notions of the viral are infused, as was impossible in a pre-globalised time, with connotations both positive and negative. Even as the AIDS pandemic, caused by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, continues to rage worldwide, marketeers use the same terminology of infection when they speak of their success; they have “gone viral”. Meanwhile, on the software front, a campaign of “biological/viral warfare” has reached the next stage of its analogy with (allegedly) state-sponsored malware, such as the Stuxnet worm, attacking industrial and nuclear facilities with hitherto unprecedented levels of sophistication. From this slim set of examples, a host of possibilities arise. Where does the virus sit in the realm of aesthetics? What could be the political side of the viral? Is such a terminological analogy ethically appropriate?

• 

  In-Sight

  Vol. 1 No. 1 (2010)

  The condition of holding ‘in sight’, as a means of externalisation as belonging to the image, is realised in the easy conceptual slippage from ‘in sight’ to ‘insight’ - originally ‘internal sight’ or seeing with the eyes of the mind, that later becomes a seeing into a thing or subject. To bring an object within sight is to affect the ‘inner eye’, to re-formulate the relationship of the visible to the invisible, presence to absence.