Recent world events have highlighted the ambiguity of responsibility. Reactions have reinvigorated the currency of personal, local, national, and international response: what are the relations between response and responsibility, and what does it mean on any of these levels to be responsive? What are the implications of our real actions?

Are there, for instance, different understandings of responsibility? How are these differences responded to? How does responsibility negotiate difference?

Can we articulate responsibility as both analytic and with reference to such states as love, care, trust, anger, sentiment (or others)?

What happens when responsibility is understood historically-what are implications for the present? What does it mean to be responsible for the past? How do we respond to the past?

Altitude is calling for papers for its inaugural edition that are thinking through these issues with reference to an Australian context, in terms of such things as political rhetoric, fieldwork, textual sites (media, discourse, fiction), and the everyday.

Email abstracts/expressions to altitude@api-network.com by December 20 2002. The deadline for papers is February 15 2003. See website for style guidelines.

Altitude is a fully refereed online journal published quarterly. Editors at large are Emily Potter and Robyn Tucker. The ambition of the Altitude project is to work in a collaborative, interdisciplinary and international context, in the field of Australian Studies. As part of the API Network it is committed to the ideal of democratising knowledges, concerned with enabling and provoking vibrant and exploratory textual conversations amongst new and emerging critical and scholarly writing.

Specifically this invites and publishes research that engages with topical issues, taking the form of essays, non-fiction, and review pieces. The aim is to foreground exciting, challenging, and vigorous work that encompasses both innovative and mainstream practices.