Call for Papers /// Spatial Practices of Transnational Care - Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand
- s-architecture
- Jun 25
- 3 min read
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 36 No. 2) on the theme of “Spatial Practices of Transnational Care”, edited by Petros Phokaides and Olga Touloumi. The deadline is November 1st and the publication is scheduled for June 2026.
This special issue aims to instigate a critical conversation on the history of transnational networks of care and their associated spatial practices. Although interdisciplinary conversations on care have proliferated in recent years, we are yet to explore their transnational dimensions in the history of the built environment. How have care practices travelled across national boundaries and what kind of spatial politics and practices have they enabled? How have transnational kinship bonds transformed the built environment and what kind of spaces have they created? Acknowledging that care can also serve as a mechanism of governance and control (especially when practiced on the level of the state), this special issue wishes to explore those transnational care systems that rise from the ground-up to reimagine the politics and spaces of social reproduction and to critique the economies and knowledge systems that sustain them.
We aim to investigate both epistemic and embodied forms of care—ranging from state-sanctioned initiatives to informal and insurgent strategies—that imagine, create and sustain spaces for vulnerable communities. We wish to write into history the grassroot efforts across professional domains and social strata (including designers, architects, and planners but also diplomats, doctors, nurses, teachers, and more) that participated in the making of hospitals, schools, orphanages, and other sites. Besides interrogating gender roles typically ascribed to care practices, we welcome papers that critically address the deployment of “care systems” beyond national borders promoted as vital components of mutual aid practices and gift economies, or even as levers of diplomacy. We invite research that examines the invisible (and sometimes visible) work, as well as the multiple ways in which individuals, collectives, and communities have understood and articulated transnational care as an instrument, lens, framework or polemic to reimagine life itself. More importantly, we wish to understand the modalities and spatial practices that forge networks of solidarity and transcend national domestic and public spaces, mobilizing transnational imaginaries of emancipation and empowerment. Innovative historical research that moves beyond the anthropocentric context to also address human-to-nonhuman care systems, transspecies kinship, and planetary care is particularly welcomed. We are especially interested in intersectional feminist histories of worldmaking and solidarity built across geographies.
This special issue invites papers that investigate spatial practices of fostering and sustaining transnational kinship in “soft”, every day, or insurgent forms that directly challenge capitalist, colonial, heteronormative, ableist, patriarchal, and racialized systems. We particularly encourage submissions that focus on spaces—from camps all the way to retail shops— that act as key sites of socio-economic mobility and resistance, fostering transnational solidarity and care practices for human and more than human worlds.
Questions about the special issue can be directed to the guest editors: Petros Phokaides (pfokaidis@uth.gr) and Olga Touloumi (otouloum@bard.edu).
For submission instructions and portal, go to: https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/rfab20
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