Current Calls for Submissions

The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association invites submissions for a Spring 2024 special issue on the theme of “Intelligence.”

In 2021, as a consequence of the pandemic, schools and colleges across the country placed a temporary freeze on standardized testing, reinforcing doubts regarding the necessity and efficacy of such tests to assess intellectual potential. Soon thereafter, the November 30th 2022 launch of ChatGPT-3 elicited responses ranging from the apocalyptic (the software is a huge step toward artificial general intelligence) to the skeptical (the software is not and cannot be intelligent).

The rapidity and volume of opinions surrounding both events reveal deep investments, insecurities, and frankly, gaps in our wider understandings of intelligence. This special issue of the JMMLA responds to the opportunity presented by such massive, messy cultural discourses to rethink the very notion of intelligence. In particular, we seek essays that consider what the humanities–excluded from the STEM-oriented intelligence conversation for basically the entire 20th-century–can contribute to discourses on intelligence in terms of social, cultural, historical, and critical depth.

To this end, we welcome contributions that explore what intelligence is, what it has been, and what it might be, particularly from a humanities perspective. Our goal is to produce an issue that reframes discussions about which mental capabilities constitute intelligence, how to measure them, and what these measurements say about an individual; that challenges the long-dominant premise that numbers (IQ scores, grades) tell empirical truths about a person’s intellectual ability and potential; and that considers literature and other cultural productions as active participants in the conceptual formation of what “intelligence” is, does, and looks like.

• What roles should the humanities in general and the modern languages and literatures in particular play in the public sphere?
• How can our pedagogy and scholarship help foster balance between the collective and the individual?
• How have the humanities/scholars/authors/texts/pedagogy addressed these issues in the past?
• How can our profession help value difference, recognizing and stressing the importance of diversity across a wide spectrum, including gender, race, class, and ideology while simultaneously encouraging the consensus and principled compromise necessary for functional democracies?
• How do we minimize our own political and personal biases and critically interrogate our own race, class, and gender privileges to ensure true equity and diversity?
• How do we as a profession ensure that our knowledge and practices support and encourage democratic principles?

Papers presented at the convention liberally and fruitfully interpreted this theme, addressing language, literature, and pedagogy in historical and contemporary contexts. We heard how democratic voices can be raised when teaching business Spanish, developing core curriculums, exploring the post-pandemic classroom, engaging banned book clubs, training tutors, and even when designing assessment. We learned to recognize democracy in action when colleagues engage in public-facing writing or study medieval forms of public address. Scholars at the convention explored democratic practices of knowledge, public humanities projects, and texts and authors committed to democratic engagement. We encourage scholars who presented a paper at the 2023 MMLA convention and those whose work engages with the convention theme of “Going Public” to submit critical articles for publication in this issue.