H-Celebration brings together the far-flung fields of Celebration Studies, Festive Studies, and Holiday Studies. Our aim is to unify the scholars who work in these areas but need to fit their interests into other departments, publications, conferences, and networks. H-Celebration will provide a fertile place and digital tools for this growing field to thrive through a range of publication formats, including a peer review journal, digital imagery, blogs, books reviews, and informal discussion.
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From the Editors...
Welcome to H-Celebration!!!
The editorial staff and advisory board of H-Celebration are very pleased to introduce H-Celebration. Please take a look around, and subscribe!
In the coming weeks we will be initiating The Editors' Blog where we will each give some introduction of ourselves and our work in the study of celebrations, festivals, and holidays.
H-Celebration will soon be the home of The Journal of Festive Studies, edited by Ellen Litwicki and Aurélie Godet, a new semi-annul peer reviewed journal of the study of festivities, including holiday celebrations, family rituals, carnivals, religious feasts, processions and parades, civic commemorations, etc. Please see below for the journal's first CFP.
To the right, see our growing collection of visual studies of celebrations around the world. Our collection begins with two photo essays by two H-Celebration editors of two very different processions. Carolyn Kolb presents images of Walking Clubs from Mardi Gras 2017, and Eva Rapoport offers her images of the Phuket Vegetarian Festival in Thailand. We'll soon be adding more projects like this and video ethnographies of celebrations.
H-Celebration welcomes your posts, announcements, queries, calls, contributions, and discussions.
T h e J o u r n a l o f F e s t i v e S t u d i e s
The Journal of Festive Studies, a new peer-reviewed journal published on H-Celebration, invites submissions for its first issue, scheduled for March 2018.
The journal’s stated aim is to draw together all academics who share an interest in festivities, including but not limited to holiday celebrations, family rituals, carnivals, religious feasts, processions and parades, and civic commemorations.
The editors in chief -- Dr. Ellen Litwicki, Professor of History at the State University of New York at Fredonia and Aurélie Godet, Associate Professor of US History at Paris Diderot University -- welcome submissions of original research and analysis from both established and emerging scholars worldwide. Besides traditional academic essays, authors may submit video and photo essays, archival notes, opinion pieces, as well as contributions that incorporate digital media such as visualizations and interactive timelines and maps. Academic essays should be between 6,000 and 12,000 words; other pieces should be between 2,000 and 5,000 words. When submitting, please indicate whether the work is to be peer-reviewed as an article or whether you would like to offer something in a different format.
For its first issue, the journal will look at festive studies as an emerging academic sub-field since the late 1960s and seeks submissions that consider some of the methods and theories that scholars have relied on to apprehend festive practices across the world. The specific contributions of the historical, geographical, sociological, anthropological, ethnological, psychological, and economic disciplines to the study of festivities may be explored but, more importantly, authors should offer guidelines on how to successfully integrate them. How can one reconcile, for instance, the discourse of “festival tourism,” dominated by the positivistic, quantitative research paradigm of consumer behavior approaches, with a more classical discourse, mostly flowing from cultural anthropology and sociology, concerning the roles, meanings and impacts of festivals in society and culture?
Contributors may also choose to focus on some of the methodological issues faced by scholars doing qualitative research on festivities across the globe. For example, the practice of participant observation -- one of the main data-collection strategies used by scholars of festivities -- raises significant ethical and epistemological concerns, as affective involvement with the observed inevitably develops and may range from sympathetic identification to projective distortion.
Finally, authors may reflect on whether conclusions about festivities can be derived from the thousands of case studies that are produced every year by scholars, government agents, city officials, and various stakeholders. Can cross-cultural, interdisciplinary theoretical paradigms still be expected to emerge from this growing literature?
All texts should be sent by November 1 2017 to submissions-festive-studies@mail.h-net.msu.edu along with the author’s bio and an abstract of c. 250 words. Please contact Ellen Litwicki (ellen.litwicki@fredonia.edu) and Aurélie Godet (augodet@yahoo.com) with any questions. Please consult the guidelines for authors in advance of submission.