After a first call dedicated to Sensing Bodies, our second call focuses on the voice and its materiality. We approach the voice from a new materialist perspective, recognizing the framework's ability to go beyond binaries and to acknowledge multiple entities and processes in relation to each other. To which extent is the voice understood to be shaped by politics, aesthetics, and ethics? How can the voice (or voices) be understood to have the capacity to unsettle power structures?

We invite texts that address the potential of the materiality of the voice, its agency, the role of tone, grain, volume, pitch and timbre, as well as questions such as: How does voice(s) speak through us and with others? How can we think about the absence of voice?

We welcome genre-bending formats that foreground the poetic and engage with language(s) experimentally. Contributions may draw from writing practices across registers - from the analytical to the lyrical - as long as they resonate with the inquiry into the materiality of the voice and its critical and creative potential.

This call is part of a wider project focusing on the singularities of the European and South Asian contexts. Contributions should be primarily in English and the contributors should be based in Europe or South Asia.

Guidelines:
– Maximum length: 6 A5 pages or 5,000 characters (including spaces)
– One contribution per person
– Texts should be previously unpublished
– For anonymous review, please include your name only on the first page of the document

All selected contributions will be edited in close dialogue with the authors. The final selection will be made by the co-founders of DEARS together with the invited editor Kamayani Sharma.

Please send your text as a Word or PDF document until 31.01.2026 per email: write@dears.ch