Current open calls for submissions

Volume 32, Issue 1 - On Spirituality

Deadline: 1 June 2026

 

Issue Editors: Theron Schmidt (Utrecht University) and Evelyn Wan (Utrecht University) 

 

This issue invites the study of spirituality via a performance studies lens, considering the ways in which attention to spiritual practice can foreground alternative lineages of knowledge transmission, subaltern histories and marginalized figures, and non-standard views on media, technology, ecology, and embodiment. Spirituality encompasses a vast tapestry of practices and beliefs across time and space, including, among others, Indigenous wisdom traditions, shamanic lineages, earth-based religions, witchcraft, and Western esotericism. It extends from ancient arts of astrology and energy healing to contemporary New Age and post-New Age practices, and finds new followers in the digital sphere. Today, the popularity of astrology apps like CHANI and Co-Star, tarot readings on TikTok, and the rise of spirituality and wellness influencers testify to renewed interests in such discourses. Some of these practices are inspired by Indigenous and animist cosmovisions of the world from ancestral and diasporic cultures, and embrace the active agency of nature and non-human species. But also, in Euro-American contexts, New Age and New New Age practices are part of a specific historical and cultural shift towards the ‘celebration of the self’ (Heelas 1996), and their focus on individual development should be understood as both antidote and symptom of contemporary neoliberalist attitudes.

Spirituality in contemporary performance practice and critical thought can be seen as resistance towards colonial science and Eurocentric epistemes. Arturo Escobar in Pluriversal Politics points out, 

The Western realist episteme translates non-Western reals into beliefs, so that only the reality validated by science is real. We have science (and thus the true perception of the real); ‘they’ can only have ‘beliefs’ (myths, ideologies, legends, superstitions, local but never universal knowledges, and so on). (Escobar 2020: 15) 

How might tuning into these ‘beliefs’ open up alternative epistemological structures? How can spirituality and re-enchantment decentre longstanding European standards of civilization, reason, logic and scientific reality? 

Max Weber argues that modernity brought about the disenchantment of the world. One could view the revival of spiritual practices as a contemporary attempt to re-enchant the world (Partridge 2004–5), and imbue day-to-day living with the ritualistic, the mythic, the magical and the spiritual. For some, this is also a process of reclaiming ancestral traditions that have been displaced by colonialist modernity. In experimenting with spirituality, artists may consider magic and witchcraft as practices of worldbuilding and fictioning that open up space for care and repair (O’Sullivan 2024). Spirituality can also be used to build communities of resistance – think witches gathering to hex Donald Trump when he was first elected in 2016; covens for #BlackLivesMatter; Alice Sparkly Cat’s ‘postcolonial astrology’ (Sparkly Kat 2021); or adrienne maree brown’s fables and spells (brown 2022). 

However, one should remain critically attentive to the ways in which spiritual practices are also part of structures of cultural appropriation and neoliberalist commodification, from the ways in which ‘white women killed yoga’ (Patel and Parikh 2019) to the rise of ‘McMindfulness’ (Purser 2019), where spiritual well-being and holistic attitudes are harnessed to increase worker productivity. Moreover, the rejection of scientific logic can make platforms for spirituality vulnerable to conspiracy theories and white supremacist visions, as forms of ‘conspirituality’ (Ward and Voas 2011; Cotter et al. 2022). 

This issue thus welcomes articles on performances and practices of spirituality that argue for their significance in today’s world as well as those that remain critical to the implications of the spiritual episteme. Indeed, Silvia Battista identifies performance as a privileged site to investigate spiritual practices as ‘both a scientific laboratory and a sacred space’ (2018: 4). Through performance, we experiment with human perception and explore the unfoldings of the material world. Through the spiritual, we probe the critical edge between science and knowledge, belief and superstition. As such, rituals, enactments, supernatural entertainments (Natale 2016), collective experience, and daily spiritual practices can be apprehended through a performance lens. We invite scholarly articles that consider both spiritual(ist) practices and histories, as well as multi-layered theatrical events, and those that blur the lines between the two.

We also invite artist pages, typically two to four pages, in the form of spells, magick, incantations and other practices that can be practiced by the reader – that is, not documentation or discussion of one’s existing practice, but a manifestation of that practice in textual and/or visual form on the page. As Joshua Edelman writes, ‘the performative can serve as a “technology of the spiritual”– a means of accessing, deploying, and understanding it, even if in ways that frequently evade language’ (2023: 3). 

 

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • Spiritual practices as political resistance and liberation, decolonization and anti-colonization

  • Counter-hegemonic epistemologies and cosmogenies

  • Esoteric performance weirding, witchcraft, magick, queering, invented religions, myth-making, the occult/occulture

  • Spirituality as technology, digital spirituality, glitching and reality shifting, media and mediums

  • Technologies of the self; practices of mindfulness/astrology and so forth as antidote and/or symptom of neoliberalist individualism

  • (Cultural) healing as performance, repair, restoration

  • Dreamtime, cloud walking, non-linear temporalities, being with the ancestors and future generations

  • Twenty-first century ritual, shamanism, animism, trance, possession, spells, liturgy

  • Cultural appropriation as well as cultural resistances to appropriation

  • Spiritual ecology as re-articulations of our relationship to Earth in the Anthropocene

  • Post-Enlightenment, end times, apocalypse, re-enchantment in the face of unknown futures

  • Alternative and revisionist histories, archives, and embodiments


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References
Battista, Silvia (2018) Posthuman Spiritualities in Contemporary Performance: Politics, ecologies and perceptions, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

brown, adrienne maree (2022) Fables and Spells: Collected and new short fiction and poetry, Chico, California: AK Press. 

Cotter, Kelly, DeCook, Julia R., Kanthawala, Shaheen and Foyle, Kali (2022) ‘In FYP we trust: The divine force of algorithmic conspirituality’, International Journal of Communication 16, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/19289.

Edelman, Joshua (2023) ‘Editorial introduction’, Performance, Religion, and Spirituality 5(1), https://openjournals.utoledo.edu/index.php/prs/article/view/1212. 

Escobar, Arturo (2020) Pluriversal Politics: The real and the possible, trans. David Frye, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 

Heelas, Paul (1996) The New Age Movement: The celebration of the self and the sacralization of modernity, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 

Natale, Simone (2016) Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian spiritualism and the rise of modern media culture, University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press.

O’Sullivan, Simon (2024) From Magic and Myth-Work to Care and Repair, London: Goldsmiths Press.

Partridge, Christopher (2004–5) The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative spiritualities, sacralization, popular culture and occulture, vols 1 and 2, London: T & T Clark. 

Patel, Tejal and Parikh, Jesal (hosts) (2019) White Women Killed Yoga. Episode 1. Yoga Is Dead, June 8, www.yogaisdeadpodcast.com/episodes/2019/6/5/ep-1-white-women-killed-yoga. 

Purser, Ronald (2019) McMindfulness: How mindfulness became the new capitalist spirituality, New York and London: Repeater. 

Sparkly Kat, Alice (2021) Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the planets through capital, power, and labor, Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Ward, Charlotte, and Voas, David (2011) ‘The emergence of conspirituality’, Journal of Contemporary Religion 26(1), DOI: 10.1080/13537903.2011.539846.

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Format

Please send abstracts as per the guidelines below for academic articles of approximately 5,000 words, or for shorter articles and provocations. As described above, artist pages, typically two to four pages, are invited in the form of spells, magick, incantations and other practices that can be practised by the reader.  These can take multimedia formats and we welcome mock-ups or examples of what these practice pages might include, which can be sent in addition to the abstract.

 

Proposals

Please submit an abstract (max one A4 page/500 words) and a short biography to info@performance-research.org  

 

Issue Contacts

All proposals, submissions and general enquiries should be sent directly to Performance Research at: info@performance-research.org  

Issue-related enquiries should be directed to Theron Schmidt and Evelyn Wan (the issue editors) at t.u.schmidt@uu.nl and P.Y.Wan@uu.nl 

 

Outline Schedule:

Proposals:Submission by: 1 June 2026.

Outcomes:July 2026. Following selection, authors will be asked to develop their full submission for editor review followed by blind-peer review.

First drafts: October 2026

Final drafts:  March2027

 

General Proposal Guidelines for Submissions: 

  • Before submitting a proposal, we encourage you to visit our website – www.performance-research.org – and familiarize yourself with the journal. 

  • Proposals should be created in Word – this can be standard Microsoft Word .doc or .docx via alternative word processing packages. Proposals should not be sent as PDFs unless they contain complex designs as for artist pages. 

  • The proposals should not exceed one A4 page, circa 500 words. 

  • A short 100-word author bio should be included at the end of the proposal text. 

  • Submission of images and other visual material is welcome provided that there is a maximum of five images. If practical, images should be included on additional pages within the Word document.

  • Submissions should be unpublished and not under consideration elsewhere. 


Full information is also available on the PR website: bit.ly/prcallsforsubmissions.