Call for book chapters: Communicating Balkan Liminalities: Theorizing Communication, Meanings, and Relations. Deadlines: Abstract: 1 September 2026; Chapter: 15 December 2026.
Book to be edited by:
Liliana Herakova (University of Maine), Jennifer A. Zenovich (California State University, East Bay), and Marta N. Lukacovic (Clemson University).
There is a growing recognition that to strengthen communication studies’ practical utility and contributions in the face of the poly-crises characterizing the present, we need varied metamodels and ways of knowing that are both of global relevance and grounded in locality. While critical efforts to de-westernize and diversify communication studies have gained momentum, the Balkans remain conceptually peripheral: sometimes analyzed and studied, but rarely valued as active, place-based knowledge producers within the field. Positioned between East and West, socialisms and capitalisms, empires and independence, the region is characterized by multilayered liminalities that resist straightforward inclusion in standard post-, decolonial, or western frameworks.
In this context, editors are inviting chapter proposals for an upcoming edited volume featuring both academic and creative works, provisionally titled Communicating Balkan Liminalities: Theorizing Communication, Meanings, and Relations to be published by Peter Lang. The book will be part of the Critical Intercultural Communication Studies series (recently renamed Possibilities), with series editors Bernadette Marie Calafell (University of Oregon) and Shane T. Moreman (California State University, Fresno). Proposed contributions to the book should align with a conceptualization of Balkan theorizing not as an exportable commodity or regional case study, but as an open, dialectic movement toward knowledge-making that reflects the following orienting commitments:
● Engaging history as integral to analysis: Treating history as polyvocal, messy, and co-temporal, troubling linear chronologies and western overvaluations of “novelty” in favor of deeply situated complexities.
● Performing generative in-betweenness: Sitting within the dialectic of being in Europe but not fully of Europe; reclaiming “balkanization” as a generative stance that disrupts western linearities, stage-based (pre-, post-) transitologies, and rigid categorical binaries.
● Listening to polyvocal storytelling and personal narratives: Centering lived experiences, folklore, and counter-narratives—in their discord and multiplicities—to resist both western universalizing tendencies and essentialist traps.
Center for Intercultural Dialogue 