Contrasts is an online magazine featuring public-facing works that can speak to a broad audience about the intersections of science, technology, and society. Through multiple genres—including creative nonfiction, visual essays, and short films—it aims to foster critical reflection on STEM projects by highlighting the role of the humanities in making visible the politics and social contexts of science, technology, and medicine.

Contrasts is sponsored by MIT’s Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) and edited by graduate workers in its doctoral program.

[about our theme]

For our inaugural issue, we invite submissions that think with and through “portals.” From space- and time-bending teleportation devices to online hubs to hinged, wooden doors at the entrance of a home, portals index the fantastical and mundane passageways to and between worlds. They often mark the betwixt-and-between state of metamorphosis, liminal thresholds ripe with risks and possibilities. As a recurring motif in the worlds of science and technology, both fictional and real, portals emblematize exploration and transformation in the quest for new knowledge and innovation.

For this issue, we invite submissions that consider “portals” expansively and creatively, drawing from perspectives in history, anthropology, literary studies, geography, media studies, architecture, and other disciplines as they intersect with STS, broadly construed. Submissions may address facets of “portals” including, but not limited, to:

  • Liminality, Thresholds, and Borderlands: How does attention to portals reveal the politics and potentialities of spaces and states in-between, and what does the state of liminality reveal about worlds that it shuffles between? What portals (have) enable(d) entry into worlds so radically different than their “before” that they preclude any return? What are the social, emotional, spiritual, political, or technological preconditions for crossing through a portal? What are the stories of science, technology, or medicine on the cusp of possibility?
  • Entrances and Exits: If portals are entryways into other worlds, timelines, and relationalities, what does it mean to open a portal—and to close it? How do discourses, representations, and architectures of openings (and closings) inspire and confine access to other possibilities for life?
  • Travel, Space, and Time: How do portals compress, interrupt, and transmute space and time? How do these transmutations generate or foreclose opportunities to remake their very fabric? How do particular technologies/documents/objects/media modulate movement between and through spacetime?

[how to submit]

All features should be geared toward a broad, public audience. We invite submissions of pitches for three types of nonfiction feature related to the theme:

  1. Long-form pieces (preferably 3000–4000 words or equivalent), in any genre or form that speaks well to an online audience (e.g. creative nonfiction, visual essays, short films, interviews);
  2. “Broadcasts” — bite-size, very-short-form pieces (under 300 words);
  3. “From the Source” — showcase a primary source connected to the theme (e.g. an archival document, image, film, textexcerpt from a longer work), alongside a brief contextualizing introduction (100–200 words). Please include additional suggestions (50–100 words) for how it might be incorporated into classrooms (assignments, paired readings, etc).

To submit any of the above pieces, please prepare a 200-250 word pitch that includes the following:

  • a summary of the proposal
  • the format (i.e. long-form, broadcasts, or “from the source”)
  • how it relates to the theme of “Portals”

We will also request a brief biography (under 200 words), addressing the question: How are you positioned (personally, professionally, etc) in relation to the piece? We’d like to hear a bit about yourself and your stakes in this work.

Pitches should be submitted by 11:59:59 ET on Saturday, March 1st via this form. We invite submissions from MIT graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and affiliates and especially welcome contributions from queer, disabled, BIPOC, and other underrepresented scholars. You are welcome to submit multiple proposals, but please note that we will prioritize featuring a range of contributors. Please direct questions to contrasts.mag@gmail.com.