CFP: Issue 65 (submission deadline: 30 September 2026)

Mountain People (Górale) – Interfusion – Symbiosis

As a journal focused on minority issues, we propose to look at mountain communities from a minority perspective – as groups peripheral to political and cultural centers, negotiating their own identity, language, heritage, social representation, and strategies for mobility and survival. We take into account Góral (mountain) issues not only regionally, but also culturally, socially, and sometimes politically.

Mountain people (Górale), as a borderland community, participate in processes of cultural interfusion and symbiosis in the contemporary world. This thematic issue focuses on the multidimensional image of mountain (highland) communities (not only Polish) operating on cultural, linguistic, and ethnic borderlands. As a space of contact, transfer, and identity negotiation, the mountains have fostered intense processes of interpretation of traditions, languages, artistic forms, and social models. This issue aims to capture these processes from an interdisciplinary perspective, incorporating both historical and contemporary approaches.

We invite you to reflect on the phenomenon of non-obvious mountain culture, understood not as a homogeneous entity but as a dynamic form of borderland culture, in constant dialogue with other traditions from the Carpathian, Alpine, and Sudeten regions, the Balkans (including Vlach communities), the Pyrenees, and the Caucasus, as well as with national and supranational cultures.

Suggested thematic areas:

• regional identity on the cultural and ethnic border and its relationships with other (non-) Góral groups (mountain groups);
• górale as a national minority: a case study of Slovakia;
• language codes and dialects as a space of language contact;
• mountain toponomastics and onomastics on selected examples of villages, towns, or cities;
• dialect and culture in diasporic communities;
• migration, mobility, and transculturalism in Góral (mountain) communities;
• ethnoliterature and borderland narratives;
• góral studies at the university level;
• leaders, pioneers of Góral studies, and the young generation of Górale;
• people with disabilities in mountainous areas – conditions, adaptations;
• the image of Górale in art, media, and popular culture;
• cultural symbiosis in Góral and non-Góral communities;
• Góral tangible and intangible heritage.

Guest editors of the issue: Marek Liszka, Head of the Góral Studies Center (Ignatianum University in Cracow), marek.liszka@ignatianum.edu.pl.