The International Journal for Comparative Culture Studies (IZfK) is an interdisciplinary Open Access Journal, contributions to which are published under the Creative Commons Namensnennung 4.0 International Lizenz. This license provides that articles may be used and disseminated freely, and may be reproduced in any other media, under the condition that the authors and IZfK, as source, are mentioned explicitly indicating the year, the volume, and the page numbers. The journal’s volumes are conceived as thematically coherent units, which may be downloaded as a single volume and printed as a book (e.g. using an online publishing / print-on-demand service). Publication in IZfK requires that articles undergo a successful peer review, which is usually conducted in a double-blind format. A plagiarism check is done via the iThenticate software licensed at the University of Trier.

Culture

The Journal’s concept of culture is based on an understanding that encompasses humankind’s cultivating, formative and creative activities and their results. Culture is not only related to narrowly defined products of cognition like art, literature, and philosophy or the social conditions of life or technology, but also to nature intertwined with human activity. All of these areas are situated in multiversal connectivities and mutual dependencies. Culture is changing in an ongoing process of historical genesis proceeding in transformations and manifesting itself in diachronic sedimentations. And culture emerges within the here and now of concrete connections, which are developing configurations subjected to permanent change. Here, combinations of spatial and temporal continuities with distant fields might occur. Culture means a variety of connections: agitating, networking and, at the same time, delimiting and interacting within themselves.   

Transdisciplinarity

This conception of culture corresponds to our journal’s transdisciplinary orientation, granting the various academic fields space to inquire about connections between their specialized research areas. Beginning with philological subjects and philosophy, our journal remains, as a matter of principle, open to other academic subjects, provided they inquire into the connections of their own research within the versatile relatedness of culture, thus transcending the boundaries of narrowly defined topical and subject areas. Since cultural phenomena require approaches from many perspectives, we welcome crossovers of methods and theories of one or more disciplines, as well as international multilateral research. 

Comparative Studies

The concept of culture defines our journal’s orientation towards comparative studies. Its authors are analyzing equivalences, which are creating connections as coincidence of unity and difference. Equivalences are formations of three, transcending identity and difference through similarities in relation to a third formation. They are potentially polyvalent and are dynamizing the process of thinking, since the search for similarities can also be mediated between phenomena, perspectives and positions situated far apart from each other. Their function of constituting variably changeable form relationships, permits them to take a perspective above opposition or contradiction, and, in the same vein, to think about processes of transformation. The comparison not only applies to the object (of research), but also to the research activity itself, which in the change and synthesis of perspectives in individual research or collaborative projects undertaken by academics of various disciplines turns the search for equivalence into the principle of knowledge acquisition.         

Multilingualism and Coherence of Topic Units

IZfK welcomes contributions in any language. However, we expect every article to be accompanied by an abstract of at least 300 words in English. Moreover, IZfK only considers thematically coherent collections of at least five articles for publication, while individual contributions, i.e. articles and reviews, are strongly discouraged. The application process to publish one of the journal’s guest editions is described on our website in menu item 2 under “Submission”.