Hi, there! 

Are you a current/former/aspiring/despairing/anti-/whatever academic in the humanities? Are you tired of writing conventional journal articles for your CV for no pay, let alone readership? Have you gone into a marginally more reasonable line of work yet still find yourself reading extremely long books written by extremely dead people for fun? Has someone expressed concern about your obsession with the relationship between form and content? Do you like philosophy? Games? Interactive fiction? 

If you said yes to any of the above, then please check out the Critical-Creative Philosophy jam, on from now until September 30th, 2022! I would've posted an advertisement to this community back in March but only just realized it existed... my bad.

Critical-Creative Philosophy is a half-year jam running from the beginning of March 2022 until the end of September 2022. Participants are asked to create a “critical-creative” piece based on a canonical work of philosophy. This means that their (and their audience’s) critical engagement with the work of philosophy they’ve chosen should take a creative form. For some examples of what we have in mind when we say this, please see the FAQ on our jam page.

Artistic pieces inspired by the lives and works of famous philosophers are ubiquitous, but few of these make substantive, lasting contributions to the ways their philosophies are understood by academics or by the general public. Academic scholarship is difficult for the general public to access, too, and does not do as much as it could to enrich their approaches to the canons, traditions, and problems they’d like to learn more about or explore for themselves. 

Our jam aims to bridge this gap between academic philosophy and philosophy as an activity that anyone might enjoy. We want you — yes, you, regardless of your philosophical background and experience — to create pieces that combine the critical and the creative, such that anyone with an interest in the philosophical work you’ve chosen will learn something about it, see it with fresh eyes, or simply enjoy (re)visiting it in a new form.

To encourage participation from a wide variety of people, we offer the following prizes:

• 🔹 Panel winner (x 1): $500 in compensation and publication in the digital review. This prize is awarded by our panel of judges.

• 🔹 Runners-up (x 2 or 3): Publication in the digital review. This prize is also awarded by our panel of judges.

• 🔹 Popular winner: Publication in the digital review. This prize is chosen through itch.io’s jam voting system by jam participants. It goes to the highest ranked piece that has not been selected as the panel winner or as a runner-up.

• 🔹 Anywhere from 4 to 5 pieces will be chosen for publication in a 2023 issue of the digital review.

For more information (ex., our panel of judges, FAQ, Rules, and Resources), please check out our jam page. Feel free to ask questions here or in the FAQ board of our community. You can also find us on Twitter here. 

Thanks for reading!