Call for Papers for the 6th Volume of Intersections
MICHEL FOUCAULT AT 100: A REAPPRAISAL
Concept Note
The year 2026 marks the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth, a milestone that invites a profound reassessment of a thinker whose “grey, meticulous” genealogies have fundamentally altered the landscape of the humanities. For the students of literature, Foucault remains an indispensable figure, not merely as a philosopher of the prison or the clinic, but as the premier architect of the “space of language.” His move to dissociate the text from the sovereign “Author”, famously articulated in his 1969 essay What is an Author?, transformed the literary work from a vessel of personal genius into a site of discursive struggle. By framing literature as a “discursive formation,” Foucault provided critics with the tools to see how power operates not just through what is said, but through the very rules that allow certain things to be said while others are consigned to silence. This special volume celebrates a century of Foucault by acknowledging his role in bridging the gap between the aesthetic and the political. His influence on New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, led by scholars like Stephen Greenblatt, allowed for a “poetics of culture” where the literary text is seen as an active participant in the social energy of its time. As we approach 2026, the necessity of a Foucauldian lens is underscored by the shifting nature of our own episteme. Literary and cultural texts continue to be the primary laboratories where the “order of things” is tested, contested, and reimagined. We commemorate Foucault because his restlessness—his refusal to accept “the natural” as anything other than a historical construct—remains the most vital pulse in contemporary literary interpretation, urging us to look beneath the surface of the prose to find the scaffolds of power that hold our reality in place.
Scholarly journals have, quite often, been saturated with writings that treat Foucault as a static stencil, simply identifying “panopticism” in a 19th-century novel or “madness” in a contemporary memoir. This special volume distinguishes itself by eschewing the “pedestrian application” of Foucauldian thought. Instead, our current volume, titled Michel Foucault at 100: A Reappraisal, seeks to be a transformative intervention.
Thus, we are keen to focus on the interrogation of Foucauldian tools at a new, critical historical moment. Foucault’s 1966 masterpiece The Order of Things traced the ruptures that defined the Classical and Modern ages. Today, we posit that we are in the midst of a third major rupture—an “Order of (New) Things” defined by digital architectures, ecological collapse, and post-human subjectivities. This volume is unique because it asks contributors to use literary and cultural texts as diagnostic tools to uncover the “invisible rules” of the 2026 present. We seek to investigate how the “Author-function” survives in an age of generative AI, and how “Biopower” has expanded from the management of human populations to the management of planetary ecosystems.
In doing so, this volume seeks to join a sophisticated international dialogue that has already begun to move Foucault into more radical, contested territories. By citing and expanding upon these recent international developments, we ensure that our journal contributes to a cutting-edge global discourse that views Foucault as a catalyst for new questions rather than a source of final answers. However, as primarily a literary and cultural studies journal, our vision is anchored in the belief that the “archaeology of the present” can only be fully realised through the lens of the aesthetic text. While we encourage interdisciplinary inquiries, we sincerely urge all contributors that every critical re-interpretation must be grounded in literary and cultural formations. Literature, as Foucault noted in his early essays on Raymond Roussel and Maurice Blanchot, is a unique “heterotopia”: a space that is both within and outside the social order, capable of reflecting and distorting the world simultaneously. Our journal wishes to achieve an interdisciplinary synthesis where the “literary” is not just a case study for “theory,” but is itself a form of theory. We look toward the legacy of works like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), which famously bridged Foucault’s “discourse” with the study of the novel, or more contemporary works like those of Sandra Mills, who uses Foucault’s “lateral thinking” to explore modern subjectivity. We seek papers that analyse, for instance, how the “order of nature” is being rewritten in “Cli-fi” (climate fiction) or how the “human” is being de-structured in the experimental prose of the digital age. This approach finds its precedent in scholars such as Cary Wolfe and Donna Haraway, who, while operating across disciplines, continually return to the narrative structures that define our understanding of life.
We therefore invite submissions that explore, but are not limited to, the following areas:
- The “author-function” in the era of generative AI, algorithmic writing, and machine learning.
- Environmental biopolitics, ecocriticism, and the management of planetary ecosystems in literature.
- New materialism and the agency of non-human objects and natural forces in contemporary narratives.
- Biopower and the politics of global health in post-pandemic literature.
- Neo-Marxist readings of Foucault: consumer culture, desires, and the aesthetics of existence.
- Necropolitics and sovereign power in post-colonial literatures and conflict zones.
- Identity construction, surveillance, and “technologies of the self” on social media.
- The changing definitions of normality, neurodiversity, and the “clinical gaze” in life-writing.
- Parrhesia (truth-telling) in an age of misinformation and digital deepfakes.
- Representations of the modern prison and the carceral system in 21st-century writing.
- The transformation of the university and the school as disciplinary institutions.
- Gender, sexuality, and the history of the “self” in modern queer and feminist literature.
- Archaeologies of the future: how climate fiction and sci-fi imagine the “unthought” of tomorrow.
Submission Guidelines
Interested Faculty, scholars and researchers across all disciplines are invited to submit their abstracts for this special centenary volume. Please ensure your submission adheres to the following guidelines:
- Abstract Length: 300 words with the possible title of the paper, along with 5 keywords.
- Short Bio Note: 150 words as a separate document.
- Your name / personal details should not be mentioned anywhere on the document containing the abstract.
- Abstract Submission Deadline: 22nd March, 2026
Submission link: https://forms.gle/DhCMErtfdiZ7Nb5VA
For queries: kceng.journal@paleturquoise-monkey-122737.hostingersite.com
Intersections is an online, double-blind, peer-reviewed journal. The journal provides a platform for the publication of quality research. The journal also wishes to publish articles that are interdisciplinary in scope, or related to issues which bear significant social or cultural impact.
We do not charge fees for the submission or publication of articles. Intersections does not receive any funding or sponsorship from any organisation or individual. For more details about our journal, kindly use the following link: https://intersectionsonline.in/about/
