OPEN CALL: SOPHIA JOURNAL 12 | LANDSCAPES OF REPAIR | LEARNING REPAIR - SITUATED PEDAGOGIES, CIVIC LANDSCAPES AND VISUAL PRACTICES

Repair as a Situated Practice

Sophia Journal 12 invites contributors to consider sites of repair as sites of learning.

Universities, workshops, public institutions, neighbourhood organisations, civic associations and cultural initiatives can provide spaces in which different forms of knowledge encounter one another. Through fieldwork, photography, film, drawing, mapping, oral history, archival research and collective experimentation, these encounters may generate more attentive approaches to architectural and territorial transformation.

Situated learning challenges the separation between observation and intervention. It recognises that documenting a place is already a way of entering into a relationship with it, and that images participate in the construction of public understanding, cultural value and political possibility.

Visual practices can reveal neglected conditions, but they may also support processes of listening, comparison, memory, maintenance and collective imagination. Photography and film can record the gradual transformation of materials and landscapes, examine the relationship between designed spaces and everyday life, and make visible the labour through which buildings, gardens and infrastructures continue to function.

At the same time, visual practices must be examined critically. Who produces images, from what position and for which audiences? How can visual research avoid transforming vulnerability, deterioration or social inequality into aesthetic spectacle? How might collaborative forms of representation redistribute authorship and enable communities to participate in the interpretation of their own environments?

Civic Landscapes and Public Life

This issue is particularly interested in civic landscapes: parks, gardens, swimming pools, sports facilities, schools, housing complexes, cultural buildings, streets and other forms of shared infrastructure.

Such places embody social and political ideas concerning public life, wellbeing, education, recreation and collective encounter. Many are also sites in which historical structures, modern interventions, ecological systems and contemporary forms of occupation coexist.

Their repair cannot be limited to the preservation of architectural form. It requires renewed attention to accessibility, inclusion, maintenance, public use, environmental responsibility and institutional care. It also demands an understanding of how inherited civic projects can continue to answer changing social needs without losing their cultural and architectural significance.

Sophia Journal 12 asks how architecture, landscape and visual practices can contribute to this ongoing negotiation between continuity and transformation.

Call for Papers and Visual Essays

We invite theoretical articles, visual essays, documentary projects, pedagogical reflections and experimental research formats that investigate repair as a situated and collective process of learning.

Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following questions and themes:

Repair as a pedagogy of attention, care and responsibility;
Field-based, interdisciplinary and transnational models of architectural education;
Visual research as a method of situated learning;
Public landscapes and civic infrastructures as spaces of collective life;
The adaptation and continued social relevance of modern architectural heritage;
Maintenance, custodianship and everyday practices of care;
Relations between historical structures, modern interventions and contemporary uses;
Architecture and landscape as evolving material and ecological processes;
The role of photography, film, mapping and archives in practices of repair;
Participatory and collaborative forms of visual representation;
Ethical questions concerning observation, authorship and the representation of vulnerability;
Pedagogical experiments connecting universities, communities and public institutions;
Intergenerational and more-than-human forms of knowledge;
Repair at the scales of the architectural detail, building, public space, city and territory;
Institutional conditions that enable or obstruct long-term care;
Speculative and experimental practices that imagine alternative civic futures.

We welcome contributions from architects, artists, photographers, filmmakers, educators, students, scholars, practitioners, activists, public institutions and transdisciplinary research groups.

Submissions may take the form of scholarly articles, photographic or filmic essays, critical field reports, interviews, conversations, mappings, collective texts, project-based research or hybrid formats combining written and visual material.

The Repair Laboratory

Sophia Journal 12 will include a special section dedicated to situated pedagogical and research practices developed through workshops, field investigations and collaborative forms of teaching.

This section will consider the workshop not simply as a method for applying established knowledge, but as a laboratory in which knowledge is produced through encounter, observation and collective interpretation.

The Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair will provide one important context for this enquiry. Through its transnational programme, visual research methods and situated investigation in the Porto Metropolitan Area, the BIP will explore how architecture, photography, film and narrative mapping can reveal and engage with contemporary conditions of public space, heritage and collective life.

Selected contributions arising from the BIP may be developed for publication alongside work from other pedagogical and research contexts. Their inclusion will establish a dialogue between a specific situated experience and broader international debates concerning the teaching, representation and practice of repair.

Rather than presenting the workshop as a finished or exemplary model, the journal welcomes critical reflection on its processes, limits, contradictions and possibilities.

From Visibility to Engagement

The transition from Sophia Journal 11 to Sophia Journal 12 marks a movement from visibility towards engagement.

Making fractures visible remains essential. Yet visibility alone does not constitute repair. Repair requires sustained attention, forms of responsibility, institutional commitment and the capacity to work collectively with uncertain and sometimes conflicting conditions.

How can architectural and visual education prepare students and practitioners for this work? How might the study of existing civic landscapes generate knowledge capable of informing their future transformation? How can images move beyond evidence and critique to become part of longer processes of care, dialogue and public reflection?

Sophia Journal 12 invites contributions that understand repair not as the recovery of an ideal or original condition, but as an open-ended practice of learning how to inhabit, maintain and transform a shared world.

Submission instructions

To submit your abstract proposal, please send a 500-word text (including references and a maximum of five images) and a short bio for each author (up to 70 words each) by the 1st of January, 2027.

Submission of abstracts is done through our OJS platform by registering and submitting at: https://www.up.pt/revistas/index.php/sophia/index

Selected authors will be notified by the 28 of February 2027 and will benefit from Sophia´s Editorial orientation and instructions in order to deliver a full paper (between 3000 to 6000 words) or a visual essay (length between 6 to 8 pages, plus text between 750 to 1500 words) by the 1 of May 2027.

Authors who have not sent in this first stage their abstract can still send a full manuscript until the 1 of May 2027.

Please note that all theoretical papers will be subject to blind peer review. The other modalities of submissions we publish (visual essays, interviews, and critical reviews) are subjected to peer review.

Full paper submission: 1 May 2027

Conference dates (TBC): 24–25 July 2027
Publication (TBC): December 2027

Acceptance of an abstract in any of these modalities does not guarantee publication.

Sophia Journal International Conference

Sophia Journal International conference "The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair” will take place at FAUP - Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, continuing the successful annual cycle of international forums dedicated to the critical exploration of the intersections between image and architecture.

The conference emerges as a dynamic platform for addressing descriptive, analytical, and interpretative projects that offer a unique perception and new knowledge about how can visual and spatial practices once again confront the invisible pressures shaping contemporary cities, and how might they contribute to acts of repair—material, social, ecological—capable of lightening their weight?

Abstracts for conference presentation will be published in the e-book of abstracts, which will have also the program and will be accessible and free to download through Sophia Journal OJS platform at the time of the event.

Subsequent publication of the most relevant (expanded – full manuscripts) contributions will be published in Sophia Journal - Volume 11, No. 1 - Landscapes of Repair: The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair

The international conferences enhance our global outreach and foster deeper international collaboration, and are closely aligned with Sophia's peer-reviewed publication. Sophia supports and disseminates scientific research by publishing theoretical articles and visual essays that critically explore the intersections between image and architecture.