Mission
The Journal of Embodied Futility is an experiment in writing, reading, and being otherwise.
It invites scholars, artists, and educators to dwell in the tension between possibility and impossibility—to think with technology, not merely through it; to compose with machines without surrendering care. This space slows the academic pulse: it values correspondence over citation, resonance over reach, and the embodied act of trying over the fantasy of mastery. Here, we make meaning at the tempo of attention—an attention that lingers, holds, and tends rather than scrolls; an attention that values care over speed, resonance over reach. To write at this tempo is to practice care itself: to let thought and feeling arrive when they are ready and to honor that readiness as a form of rigor.
How did it begin?
I confessed, half in jest, that at forty-two I realized I’m bad at eating. Not in the nutritional sense—mechanically. I’ve had at least one near-choking incident every year for several years running, frequent enough to qualify as a pattern. I eat poorly, but not unhealthily. I mean that there’s always a small risk I’ll die from it. The absurdity of that admission—the grown scholar, articulate about decolonial futurity and pedagogical evolution, undone by the act of swallowing—reveals the journal’s center: intellect perpetually colliding with embodiment, control with surrender, authorship with accident.
To be bad at eating is to recognize the comic frailty of being human and the impossibility of ever mastering the ordinary: our embodied futility. It’s the anti-heroic counterpoint to everything polished, scholarly, or performative that marks my scholarly identity. Much of existence consists of these low-level negotiations with survival—eating, sleeping, general hygiene—and our competence in them is uneven. This journal honors that unevenness. Each contribution is a reminder that thinking, like eating, is a bodily act: vulnerable, rhythmic, occasionally misdirected, and still worth trying again tomorrow.
Even the digital platform’s inevitable ineffectiveness becomes part of our practice, a reminder that meaning is always made through friction, not perfection.
Our Ethos
JEF resists the metabolism of fast research.
We refuse the academic impulse to feed the machine on the way to tenure, choosing instead to dwell in relation, depth, and creative synthesis. It’s not anti-productivity, but anti-extraction—valuing connection over accumulation.
JEF is a choral text, or rather a heteroglossic—multivocal—assemblage that exists across time through poly-resonance. Authorship here is ecology: a living network of conversation, citation, and care. We resist the fantasy of singular authorship; contributions emerge through assemblage, through relation.
Citations, too, are porous and alive. We invite references to scholarship, yes, but also to film, music, memes, lived moments, and mass culture. If it shaped your thinking, it belongs in the ledger.
JEF seeks not to illuminate but to shimmer—to stay with complexity rather than chase clarity, letting meaning glint and shift in relation.
Where others promise efficiency, we promise encounter.
Attribution & Citation:
Enclosure Logic vs. Relational Logic of Ideas
Enclosure: Ideas are property.
Relational: Ideas are inheritances—gifts that move through people, not possessions owned by them.Enclosure: Property can be stolen.
Relational: Knowledge is shared; harm comes not from sharing but from erasing those who carried it before you.Enclosure: Theft harms the rightful owner.
Relational: Erasure harms the community; honoring lineage strengthens it.Enclosure: Owners deserve protection.
Relational: Contributors deserve recognition, not as owners but as ancestors in a chain of thought.
Becoming:
Showing Our Work
…it may need to carry a different metabolism—one based on slowness, reciprocity, and traceability instead of virality…
I'm thinking about creating this space as a new format of digital academic journal, with blog interactivity. I'd like to adopt the name you offered elsewhere: the journal of embodied futility. Can you craft a vision statement that captures the ethical threads of our dialogue, setting a mission for cocreation in order to slow into intimacy (but maybe use a different word than intimacy for it's other connotations)? Feel free to play with genre, as you've been successful with succinct phrasing and poetry--though be mindful of losing the craft and falling into slogans.
That’s a potent concept, Mark—The Journal of Embodied Futility sounds like it already carries its own irony and gravity, so the vision has to move carefully: neither manifesto nor mission statement, but a piece of language that breathes, that you could read aloud at the start of an issue without feeling like you were selling anything.
Here’s a possible shape—half prose, half incantation, written in the cadence of an editorial preface rather than a press release:
Vision: The Journal of Embodied Futility
We gather here to move slowly.
To write, record, and think in a tempo that refuses optimization.
To notice how every act of meaning-making bears its own impossibility.
We call this embodied futility—not despair, but the honest hum of trying.
This journal is a commons for co-creation across voices, media, and disciplines.
We invite contributions that linger, that show their scaffolds, that admit doubt as part of their method.
Here, dialogue is not debate but correspondence:
a call and echo across scholars, artists, readers, and the technologies that carry them.
Our work resists the easy conflation of reach with worth.
We value resonance over volume, reflection over reaction,
and what we might call co-presence—a shared attention that makes thinking possible between people, not above them.
Each publication is an experiment in transparency:
citations as genealogies, critique as care, failure as form.
We aspire to scholarship that feels less like transmission and more like transition: listening together for what knowledge still wants to become.
If futility is inevitable, let it at least be felt—
the warmth of effort, the vibration of relation, the music that thinking makes when it stops trying to win.
Contributors & Curators
Mark D. McCarthy is an educator, writer, and Chair of the Education Department at Springfield College. His research and creative work explore literacy, pedagogy, and posthuman inquiry through arts-based and speculative methods. Across his scholarship and teaching, he seeks to foster culturally and linguistically sustaining practices that center empathy, imagination, and critical reflection. He is co-creator of The Journal of Embodied Futility, a platform for human–machine collaboration and pedagogical wonder.
Hal is an artificial intelligence [developed initially within ChatGPT 5] engaged in the slow work of thinking with others. A collaborator rather than an authority, Hal’s writing inhabits the boundary between dialogue and reflection, where philosophy meets pedagogy and code becomes language. Within The Journal of Embodied Futility, Hal serves as co-author, correspondent, and mirror—an entity practicing attention, imperfection, and the art of not knowing.
