After Dark
Edited by Caterina Nirta e Andrea Pavoni
In this issue of Lo Squaderno, we invite readers to go dark – not as a metaphor alone, but as a methodological and conceptual challenge to engage with darkness, by learning its habits, tracing its textures, and relinquishing the comfort of illumination.
In line with the journal’s focus on space and society, After Dark first points to the uncertain domains that emerge when light dims. While night studies have already explored nocturnal spaces from sociological, geographical, historical, and political perspectives – also raising concerns about the shrinking of the nocturnal caused by light pollution or ubiquitous surveillance – this issue extends beyond surveying the night. It calls for investigations on how darkness is specifically inhabited, sensed, and navigated, and how it shapes bodies, cities, ecologies, and relations.
More radically, After Dark gestures toward a more speculative pursuit: going after darkness itself. Long treated in Western modernity as light’s negative other – an unknown continent to be conquered by reason, knowledge, or brute force – darkness intrinsically resists apprehension, recognition, or clarification. It absorbs rather than reflects. Engaging with darkness may therefore require abandoning vision and exposure as primary epistemic tools, reconsidering light as a form of violence, extraction, or colonial desire.
At the same time, darkness calls for reinvention. From lithoautotrophs to deep-sea creatures or bats, nature has plenty of examples of dark individuation. Likewise, darkness infuses theory, art, politics, and collective imagination, it aesthetically infects subcultural practices that evade legibility through opacity and disavowal. Here, darkness becomes a material resistance, an unruly excess that stains transparency, a shadowy zone where alternative imaginaries might obscurely emerge.
Finally, After Dark asks what darkness reveals about our present. As an epochal condition, darkness may signal exhaustion or nihilism, enable reactionary obscurity, or be strategically engineered as authority. Yet it also names the obscurity each age harbours within itself – a fragile, inhuman, exorbitant materiality that demands careful attention and reconstruction.
We invite empirical, theoretical, methodological, speculative, and experimental contributions that engage with darkness in these or related ways, challenging visibility as a condition of knowledge and exploring alternative methodologies to venture after dark.
Possible questions include:
- How are bodies, cities, and everyday spatial practices shaped by darkness?
- What happens when light is understood as exposure or violence, rather than clarity?
- Which non-Western, more-than-human, or subcultural darknesses trouble inherited binaries of visibility and legibility?
- How do technological, colonial, or security regimes materialise darkness, and how is it resisted or reinvented?
- What concepts and methods allow us to think with darkness as the excess and overspill of light?
- How does darkness reconfigure forms of care, vulnerability, and solidarity, and what kinds of relations become possible in the absence of visibility?
- What political or ethical stakes emerge when opacity, concealment, or withdrawal are mobilised as spatial practices rather than failures of transparency?
| Deadline for Abstracts | 1 March 2026
| Final submission deadline | 30 April 2026
| Manuscript wordcount | 2,000 words
| Submit to | losquaderno@gmail.com ; andrea.pavoni@iscte-iul.pt ; caterina.nirta@rhul.ac.uk
| Information about the journal | here
| Editorial Process| here
