Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis (2025)

31/03/2025

CALL FOR PAPERS 7.0: BETWEEN BODIES AND HOMES

To feel like we belong is one of our most common desires. Our bodily relation to home is not a simple one: it is marked by hostile power structures. These structures plunge the body into an interconnected web of demarcations, mediations, and hierarchisation, which determine one’s ability or failure to feel at home. Race, gender, ability, and class are factors that designate one’s sense of home. Labels further differentiate between bodies, some rendered political (“immigrant,” “refugee”), while others insidiously a-political (“expat”). How do we think with the body in ways that address its complicated relationship to home? What are the ways to engage with our bodily positionalities that may allow for a more equitable habitation?

Thinking with aestheSis that privileges sensing over totalising reasoning of aestheTics, María Lugones sees the body through its permeability, which “allows us to reconceive about the world we live in.” Turning towards the sensorial relationality, we discover that the fixed, man-made, ‘rational’ lines that demarcate home and body as separate, contain leaks. Leaks that bring the body home. For its eighth issue, Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis invites (young) researchers, (established) scholars, and creatives alike to submit works that consider practices, experiences, and methodologies that uncover punctures and cavities of structures, lines, boundaries, and borders. What seeps, spills, or flows through these holes? What exists in between home and body that informs who and where we are? What are the moments when the body and home are torn apart? And when do they collapse into one?

Find all the details and information via the link in bio.

28/03/2025

We are looking to expand our team! 🌀

Deadline for applications is 13th of April.

All members of our board are jointly responsible for the editing of pieces for our web and print journals. Editing responsibilities are divided when submissions come in. Additionally, all board members are in charge of a department. Please note that board involvement is voluntary and thus not compensated. Currently, we have openings for the following departments:

IT

Web

Events

Distribution

Podcast

Keep in mind that in order to be a part of the Soapbox board you need to be a (Masters) student. We ask you to attend our weekly meetings and invest around 4 hours of work into maintaining your department weekly, making the total time investment around 6 hours a week.

Please apply by submitting a short motivational letter (around 300 words) specifying the position you would be interested in and a CV to [email protected], titled Board Application.

07/03/2025

New episode of (Un)Box the Soap Podcast! 🔮

In this episode of (Un)box the Soap Podcast, we voyage into the obscure territories of the Eastern European folk horror genre. We discuss three films from countries that no longer exist: the Soviet Viy (1967), the Yugoslavian Leptirica (1973), and the Czechoslovak Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970).
Continuing our witchy fascinations from the last episode, we explore how feminine representation lies at the core of these films, analyzing how witchcraft and vampirism are used to either punish women for their sexuality or liberate them from patriarchal constraints. We also examine themes of rurality, spirituality, and propaganda, questioning how they shape our reading of these stories. Finally, we tackle the ethics of filmmaking and how to engage with older films that may now seem problematic.
So, hop on your broom and join us in these enchanted explorations!

Trigger Warning: This episode discusses scenes from the films that depict r**e and pe******ia.

Illustration by: Constantin Kousnetzoff

04/03/2025

Following a shift towards absence, our upcoming (Un)box the Soap episodes centre on the idea of travel as a sort of disappearance; a suspension above or below time and space. Focusing specifically on our most loved (and hated) form of travel—by bus—we are dedicating a full episode to Flixbus!
We want to take a rest from our more research-heavy and interview-based content, switching up the form to something more restful (so we can rest soundly like we do in the Flixbus 🤡).
We invite anyone who is interested to contribute by sending us poetry or prose somehow relating to Flixbus, further willing to join us in the studio to read their work. You can shoot us an email at [email protected].
Deadline is 15th of March!

24/02/2025

Introducing the Soapbox newsletter!

Sign up to receive curated emails with Soapbox updates and news regularly in your inbox. You can also expect to find additional materials such as all our recommendations for upcoming events, new publications and more. First issue coming soon! 💌

Subscribe via the link in bio.

12/11/2024

We are currently looking for a designer!

—one who is (preferably) a student, and based in Amsterdam.

The (paid!) gig concerns the design of our upcoming print issue on the topic of 'absence'. While working with our journal's established visual identity (swipe for some examples) and the issue's theme, you would be responsible for the full design of a 200-300 page book. This includes but is not limited to creating the font cover, the type setting, and the interstitial graphics between chapters.

The brunt of the workload would be between February and May, but we would love to get in touch (as well as to work) as soon as possible!

In case you are interested or would like to get some more information, please get in touch via email—[email protected]

To get a better sense of what the issue is about, we recommend you check out our initial call for papers. You can find it via the link in our bio.

27/09/2024

New podcast episode | (Un)box the Soap: Politics of the Swamp | Link in our bio

In our second episode of (Un)box the Soap Podcast, we continue our journey through the swamps and examine how this porous ecosystem manifests in culture. Whether it's through watching the film La Cienaga, listening to swamp-pop, walking through the streets of London, or examining the history of the Great Dismal Swamp Maroons, we explore the swamp’s potentiality of creating new meanings, seeing ordinary things anew, and reclaiming one’s independence. Bonus questions: Why do we associate swamps with something negative and why is it Shrek that helps us free ourselves from these presuppositions? Join us in our boggy ruminations and let’s submerge in the swampy realms!

17/09/2024

LAUNCH EVENT: The Swamped | Wednesday 25 September 19:30 | De Nieuwe Anita | FREE

We are thrilled that we finally get to invite you to the launch of our fifth printed issue: The Swamped.

This issue saw young researchers, established scholars and creatives alike finding their footing in the muddy theoretical matrix that the idea of ‘swamp(ed)’ opens up. Lingering in this charged space, our authors took up the swamp’s invitation in myriad ways, writing about it as landscape, as sanctuary, as extraction, as affect, as archive, as resistance.

We will be celebrating this long-awaited release, next Wednesday at De Nieuwe Anita. Here, we will screen a short film by artist and contributing author Lucas Rinzema. The event will continue with a roundtable session where different authors will talk about their work and the overarching theme of the issue. After the scheduled portion of the night, there will be ample time to mingle over drinks. Of course, you will also be able to skim through as well as buy your very own copy of The Swamped.

The event is free, and anyone interested in culture, film, ecocriticism, and great book design (by ) is very welcome to stop by!

04/06/2024

Transgression is necessary. This text was produced by our desire for the impossible and our lament over the unbearability of subjectivity. Transgression is impossible. Having little faith in the ability of philosophy to capture what by definition escapes capture, we have opted for a mixed form, part narrative, part theory. Transgression is necessary to the extent that it is impossible. The story starts from the bleak subjective experience of studying abroad in the era of zoom and scatters into unpredictable directions. We looked for freedom on the other side of the law, yet all we found there was nothingness with a human face. The theory starts with a wide view of the literature of the impossibility of transgression and closes in on a text by the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot. His concept of the limit experience was like a rough guide to and a gentle push down the bottomless pit that is shaped like an ‘I’. This bottomlessness makes subjectivity insufferable and impels us to jump ship, not to reach a safe haven, but to orchestrate a jump worth living for. The reader is invited to study the narrative part for its intellectual insights and enjoy the theoretical part for its literary merit.

New web piece up from and .tot

31/05/2024

Hello? Are you there? Or maybe you’re somewhere else far away, where our voices don’t quite reach you?

Regardless of where you are, we want to listen to the sounds surrounding you. Soapbox Journal will be hosting an event to celebrate the launch of its newest issue, The Swamped, which will include panels, a film screening and a collaborative sound piece listening session.
We invite you to be a part of this sound piece by submitting your own recording! You can contribute by submitting sounds which make you think of the swamp, how it exists in your space and time. Think of what comes to your ears when you think of swamp. Is it a gentle buzzing of insects above the water surface? Is it the song of frogs? Or is it something completely different, but still connects to the swamp?
Your recording can be short or long, with or without your voice, recorded in nature or, on the contrary, indoors. All of the submissions will be a part of the piece played at the event open for all guests.
Please submit your pieces in the .mp3 format.

Scan the QR code to upload your recording to the Drive or visit the link in bio.

30/05/2024

Against Historical Totality: Feminist Presents are Disorienting

Every year, International Women’s Day protests around the world highlight that there is not one version of feminism, but many, with contesting affiliations and pressing questions of solidarity. Ranging from calls for reproductive rights to Woman Life Freedom (Jin, Jiyan, Azadî), an end to femicide and transphobia, to Palestinian liberation: the diversity of women’s lived experiences means feminists connect different struggles. However, this multiplicity is usually not reflected in hegemonic accounts of feminist history with its Eurocentric wave model. I encountered Victoria Browne’s book on nonlinear feminist history (Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History, Palgrave McMillan, 2014) at the end of my Masters, when I was knee deep in critiques of art history’s basis on linear, teleological, Hegelian time constructs. As part of my PhD project on the possibilities of a nonlinear conception of historical time for art history, I spoke to Victoria about her process of working through questions of time, positionality, and the importance of conceptual clarity. If we acknowledge that linear time is a construct, then what comes after? And how can we conceptualise our participation in history through plural notions of time?

Read our latest web piece from in conversation with Victoria Browne

29/05/2024

(Un)Box The Soap is a place where we slip from topic to topic, navigate and invade all the nooks and crannies and (un)box knowledges that are hidden. Here you will find conversations, sounds and voices from different backgrounds and in different forms: interviews, readings, sound pieces and other media. As a part of Soapbox Journal, we take a step further and explore how cultural analysis seeps through our lives and shapes us in ways that are often left unexplored.

We are excited to welcome you on this journey!

14/05/2024

For its seventh issue, Soapbox: Journal for Cultural Analysis invites (young) researchers, (established) scholars and creatives alike to submit work on the uses and aesthetics of absence in and outside of theory today. It is our point of departure that absence fails every time to be purely nothing. In all of the scenes and settings described above and below, absence is given a shape, meaning, form; it is put in writing, where it has a function, a flavor, and a politics - absence rarely looks the same. Staying with absence rather than straying from it, we invite responses to questions such as: What are the shapes and forms of absence that inflect and structure the contemporary theoretical debate? Where does absence turn up, where doesn’t it? How is absence mobilized politically, to what ends and with which results? In your fields or for your objects, how does absence matter, make matter? How is absence formalized (anti-)(re)productively? How is (some) form absent(ed)? What are the uses of absence, what can they be, and what have they been, for better and for worse? Finally, how to think the contradiction and the provocation of a contemporary aesthetics of absence?

Deadline June 10th, follow the link in bio for more information

09/05/2024

Soapbox stands between, behind and in solidarity with the many students, teachers and staff of UvA involved in the demonstrations for Palestine. We support the demands for transparency, and to boycott and disinvest all ties with Israeli universities and organisations complicit in illegal occupation, genocide and displacements.

It is the right of all citizens to protest. We are proud and stand with the students and staff members who remained in the encampment until it was violently broken up. The University of Amsterdam should offer a space where open discussion and non-violent protests can take place, but instead sanctioned police force exerted upon its students and staff. This also needs to be a space where speaking up against violations of human rights and querying the UvA’s institutional complicity with those committing such violations is commended.

We will not allow the powers that be to obfuscate the reality of what is happening in Gaza right now. All eyes on Rafah! 🇵🇸

Soapbox Journal for Cultural Analysis