Summary
- Topic Call For Papers — CfP Special Issue: Humor as an epistemic practice
- When to (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)
- Where Frankfurt (Main) — Germany
- URL https://nojoke.net/
- Download date as file get iCal file
Description
Call for Papers for Special Issue:
"Humor as an epistemic practice: comic methods and the politics of knowing"
What if laughter were not a distraction from knowledge but one of its conditons? This special issue approaches humor as an epistemic practice: a critical qualitative method of perceiving, testing, and generating knowledge in worlds marked by contradiction, exhaustion, and uneven power. Rather than treating humor as an object of study, the contributors work with the comic – timing, irony, absurdity, play, interruption – as a mode of inquiry. Laughter, here, is not decoration around an argument; it is a technique through which arguments emerge.
Across ethnographic, performative, and conceptual pieces, the issue asks how comic practice operates as a method for grasping what often resists conventional representation: affective intensities, moral unease, dissonant attachments, and the everyday labor of living with political and institutional realities. Humor can disclose the limits of dominant explanations – moments when categories falter and certainty is performed rather than possessed. It can also sharpen the ethical stakes of inquiry, making visible when the “serious” becomes a ritual posture that blocks attention, vulnerability, or critique.
We invite authors who have used laughter as a method for their research.
Send us an abstract of 500 words to: goepfert[ at ]em.uni-frankfurt.de
Deadline: 30 June 2026
Journal: Departures in Critical Qualitative Research
Guest editors:
Mirco Göpfert
Raúl Acosta
Cassis Kilian
Prateek
[team of the ERC funded project NoJoke]
