Edited by: Magdalena Moskalewicz, Katarzyna Bojarska, Dorota Sosnowska

ATTENTION deadline for abstracts extended to March 31, 2025. Feel encouraged!

All social upheavals in history have been accompanied by a heightened prosecution of witches, predominantly women, who were seen as a threat to the religious and political status quo. The social phenomenon of witch hunts continued in modernity, as it does today, in the prosecution of certain religious, ethnic, and gender groups, who are cast as dangerous and “demonic.” Witches threatened patriarchal forms of governance and the hegemonic style of knowledge production through their own, unsanctioned and unregulated methods and practices. Afterall, “witchcraft” is a form of “craft,” that is: a material-based skill, and, in the Polish language, the word “witch” (wiedźma) and “wisdom” (wiedza) share the same linguistic root. Consequently, the contemporary turn to the pre-modern forms of folk/indigenous wisdoms that counter knowledge models established since the Enlightenment provides renewed forms of anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and decolonial resistance as well as political empowerment and belonging; it allows to imagine and conjure entirely different, old/new cosmologies. At the same time, magical and esoteric practices also attract science-deniers and conspiracy theorists, providing a fertile ground for retro-vernacular escapism, often fueled by hate.

This issue of View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture will explore this full spectrum of the rising interest in the occult, supernatural, and magic in contemporary visual culture. We will examine it as a form of feminist empowerment, non-anthropocentric thinking, and a radical proposition for a fully decolonial future, while also considering the conservative backlash grounded in the libertarian desire for an idealized folk community of the mythical past. We are welcoming article proposals that fit this farmwork and that can touch on the following subjects:

• Contemporary use of folk and indigenous forms, materials, and practices, especially in the feminist, queer, antiracist, and decolonial contexts.
• New forms of visual culture and visual knowledge production that draw on the pre-modern methods and cosmologies—both in the progressive and the retrograde way.
• Artistic practices of the witchcraft lineage: spellcasting, sorcery, divination.
• Practices that undermine the established, modern-era divisions between science and superstition.
• Witchcraft, paganism, and new spiritualities as critique of modernity.
• Relationship between magic (spiritual powers) and political power: ritualistic and spiritual practices as a form of political empowerment against patriarchy, capitalism, and cultural hegemony.
• The (gendered) body of the witch.
• Alternative institutional and community models proposed by magic-oriented practitioners: alternatives to racial capitalism, dangers of authoritarianism.
• Turn to pre-modern cosmologies as a response to climate crisis.

Please send your abstract (max. 250 words) and a short bio to the following address by March 1, 2025. Extended March 31, 2025

Full articles (4400–8800 words in length) will be due by May 16, 2025.

Before submitting, please consult our guidelines. When submitting the paper, please include: illustrations, author's bio, abstract (in Polish or English), key words and bibliography (Chicago Manual of Style). Should you have any questions, please contact us. The issue will be published in late 2025.