V!30 Call for papers | MULTILATERAL DIALOGUES: PRAXIS, INTERLOCUTIONS, AND CONFRONTATIONS
How can we conceive a technical-scientific contribution to a multilateral world of increasingly multicultural societies in which the globalization of processes and products has accentuated practices of domination and power struggles in all spheres of life and areas of knowledge? How can we articulate differences, conflicts, and convergences, whether theoretical, historical, political, or cultural, through the simultaneous construction of reflection and action, ensuring the horizontality of dialogues and aiming at producing knowledge and social transformation?
The thirtieth edition of V!RUS journal focuses on the place of conflicts, confrontations, dialogues, and challenges on local, regional, national, and global scales, which are present in the connection between different theoretical-methodological stances; conflicting technical and technological conceptions; the divergent interests that characterize the ways of approaching, designing, and producing the city, its buildings, and urban life; different cosmogonies and world views and international power struggles, from the perspective of the various disciplinary fields that investigate the production of the city, the processes of communication and culture in society, inter and intra-national relations, their dynamics and reverberations.
Unpublished scientific articles and critical essays that discuss the articulation of elements coming from different universes constituting praxis, establishing dialogues, and investigating confrontations, and that explain in their theme, in summary, and the body of the text, clear evidence about the relationship between the research they present and the issue's theme will be accepted for evaluation.
We are interested in works that approach the subject in a critical and well-founded way from various disciplinary fields, in particular, Architecture, Urbanism, Arts, Cinema, Communication, Design, Law, Psychology, Social, Environmental, and Political Sciences, Education, Cultural Studies, History, Geography, among others, dealing particularly – but not only – with the following topics:
+ Concepts and references: problematizing the notion of the Global South, the center/periphery binarism; the notions of praxis, interlocutions, and confrontations; references from the North and South;
+ Metatheories: systemic thinking, complexity, cybernetics, conversation, communication ecology, transdisciplinarity;
+ International tensions: the (new) world order, the notions of multilateralism, globalization, internationalization, imperialism, and worldization; BRICS and rising powers, transnational migrations; Africa, Eurasia, Latin America, and the emergence of the South; the North transmutations;
+ South-South dialogues: consensus and dissent; principles, foundations, strategies, and ways of doing things; historical development and tensions; transmodernity and intercultural dialogues; multilateralism in the South;
+ Environmental issues: the contradictions involved in environmental preservation facing national and group interests, Indigenous and traditional populations, climate change and large extractive corporations; sustainable development, metropolitanization; agro-industrial, agro-family and agroforestry models; North-South and South-South relations;
+ Amazon(s) and ecologies, cultures, knowledge, ways of living and building; historical perspective on territory occupation forms; international conferences and local actions; economic development and conservation;
+ The modern universalist North Atlantic architectural and urban planning model as an instrument of domination; contributions and conflicts between models from the North and criticism in architecture and urbanism in the South, their reflections on teaching and production methods; disqualification of local, popular, and traditional conceptions;
+ Habitation and ways of living: the imposition of dwelling models and ways of life; housing modalities and contemporary behavioral trends; spontaneous and traditional ways of living and housing design; inhabiting the city, confrontations and insurgencies;
+ New international formal paradigms and regional architectures: architectures with complex geometries, parametric modeling, digital fabrication, digital design, and production processes; hybridity between analog and digital ways of thinking and making architecture; complex shapes and ancestral architectures;
+ Ways of building: global production and distribution chains versus local production arrangements and knowledge; low carbon emission architectures; digital-aided construction techniques from the South; the construction site, the design and maintenance of class, race, and gender hierarchies; the contribution of African-based construction cultures to the constitution of Latin American built heritage;
+ Heritage and memory: valorization of the memory and heritage of social minorities; heritage historically made invisible; insurgent decision-making processes on the preservation of architecture, places, landscapes, and monuments; architectural and urban design in historic sites, retrospective construction techniques;
+ History and historiographies: the contrast between regimes of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic historicity, institutional and insurgent narratives; oralities as memory devices and the dispute over the discursive construction of historical temporality; silencing, erasure, cancellation;
+ Disputes over narratives: co-optation of political agendas, depoliticization of discourse as a strategy for silencing and maintaining power; fake news, hate speech; false neutralities as a tool of manipulation and control;
+ Ecology of Knowledge: intercultural dialogues, Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples; traditional, popular, ancestral, and scientific knowledge; the decolonial perspective, other concepts of modernity, transmodernity; cosmotechnics and technodiversity;
+ Claims in participatory processes of design, construction, and management of the city: community actions, online digital platforms as a locus of participation; bottom-up citizen actions, solidarity networks, models of political representation;
+ The conflict between rural, platform, and informal workers and the economic, political, and technological structures of precariousness; work and intersectionalities of race, gender, and social class;
+ Insurgent economies: social and solidarity economy, new economies of sustainability, greenwashing, substantive economy, and other development models; buen vivir and other economies in the Global South, degrowth;
+ The city under dispute: social movements and the struggles of vulnerable populations; ethnic, migrant, and gender minorities and intersectionalities for the right to the city and citizenship; insurgencies and social movements; counter-hegemonic urban thinking and power games;
+ Between city and countryside: the fallacy of the urban-rural dichotomy, peri-urbanities, metropolization, urban networks; plans as disputed scenes, top-down and bottom-up public policies;
+ University and praxis in teaching, research, and extension; disciplinary compartmentalization and transdisciplinarity; research networks, academic dialogue, and internationalization criteria; qualitative rankings of universities and journals; the enforcement of open science and productivism; other ways and places of knowledge production;
+ Scientific research in the South based on Northern methods and references; review of concepts and analytical categories, rethinking objectives and appropriations, identifying gaps; field boundaries, methods, and procedures; critical human-centered perspective on scientific production; the researcher as a social player;
+ Technopolitics: the dominance of big techs and the sovereignty of nations; the datafication of life, digital citizenship, social media; cyberactivism, cyberspace, and the public scene; computer applications and resources as instruments of control or insurgency; the use in the South of software developed in the North; interoperability as control; algorithmic racism;
+ Artificial Intelligence and a new colonialism; algorithmic domination, colonialist data extractivism; AI, artistic creation and intellectual production; AI and impacts on daily life; AI, digital racism and data feminism; AI and fake news, truth, and post-truth; AI and forms of surveillance; counter-hegemonic models;
+ Multilateralism and artistic expressions: visual arts, photography, music, audiovisuals, Indigenous and Afro-diasporic expressions, digital art;
+ Audiovisual as a locus of mediation: dialogues of knowledge; documentary film as a means of interlocution, recording, and expression of conflicts; collaborative projects, hierarchies in cinema, urban readings; technical appropriation, autonomy, and image control.
In addition to texts and static images, we welcome photo essays, videos, short films, sound pieces, musicals, and testimonials in audio files, artistic and architectural installation projects, urban planning and design accompanied by critical and theoretically based reflection on their conception, slide presentations and other digital languages, given Nomads.usp's interest in exploring the uses of digital media for scientific dissemination via the Internet.
Contributions will be received IN PORTUGUESE, ENGLISH, OR SPANISH through the journal's website between May 1st and August 10th, 2025, according to the guidelines for authors, available on the submissions page (https://revistas.usp.br/virus/about/submissions).
IMPORTANT DATES
May 1st, 2025: Start of receiving submissions
August 10th, 2025: Deadline for receiving submissions
From October 5th: Information for authors about acceptance and requests for adjustments
October 26th: Deadline for receiving authors’ adjustments
November 16th: Final date for receiving the translated version of the article
December 2025: Release of V!RUS 30
