Passage Journal

We welcome contributions that focus on the methodology and application of creative-critical writing as research methodology in the Humanities and in the Arts. As the hyphenated name suggests, the creative-critical approach proposes a hybrid genre, combining a rigorous cultural-theoretical reflection on society, art and theory, with literary and artistic methods. Juxtaposing these two ways of knowing results in a whole that is bigger than the parts, one informing, supporting, or crashing into the other. Creative-critical writing can also encompass and combine different media and practices. Akin to literary and essayistic texts, this methodology strategically leverages personal, embodied, and emotional insights, always counterbalanced by and intertwined with a critical, reflective focus. What is at stake is an exploration of the intimate life, one’s sense of interiority and self; through autotheoretical, autofictional writing, confronting this private identity and space with the more public expressions in art and architecture, literature, philosophy, and religion.

We interpret creative-critical writing as a contemporary, rogue branch of existential phenomenology, embodied thinking that considers not only our intellectual, but also our sensual and emotional relationship with the inner and outer environment. It is a kind of phenomenology that wants to be allobiographical, allotheoretical; the exploration of a lifeworld where intimate experience is always both defined and challenged by the Other. That is why Passage contributions should consist of a critical dialogue with past and contemporary cultural practices and discourses (from cave art to memes); a dialogue that allows the analysis and creation of other modes of existence, ways of doing. We are looking for scholarship that is not afraid of asking the ethical (and aesthetical) question par excellence: how to live; yet is willing to look for answers in unexpected places, without settling for an easy morality. 

Passage Journal looks for scholarship that feels like a breath of fresh air, and is able to create new pathways, new connections, can arrange strange encounters between different domains of knowledge and experience, without abandoning the rigor of scholarly research. We want to gather forms of research that are not afraid of being, as they say in French, 'pas sage': good scholars go to academic heaven, but we want to trace, gather, and map the places where wayward ones find themselves.

ISSN 2795-6644