Editors’ Introduction

by Bruce Burgett, Patricia Ticineto Clough and Randy Martin    |   Issue 1 (2012)

ABSTRACT     In this inaugural issue, Lateral takes the form of a cluster of four research threads. The initial threads converge around a consideration of knowledge formations, institutional and material location, and political intervention and implication. The initial four threads are meant as an exploration of what is possible and an invitation for further work. Theory and Method, curated by Patricia Clough, treats various forms of knowing and being in cultural studies research. Creative Industries, curated by Jaafar Aksikas, invites composite methodological approaches to intersectoral flows inside and outside the university. Universities in Question, curated by Bruce Burgett and Randy Martin, decenters established claims for disciplinary, labor, and political economic legitimations for higher education. Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy curated by Emma Dowling, pursues current transformational activisms to rethink values of polity, policy, and participation.

KEYWORDS      cultural studies, interventions, journal

Welcome to  Lateral’s  inaugural issue.  Lateral  is the publishing platform for the Cultural Studies Association (CSA). Our aims are to support, leverage, and organize the capacities of those affiliated with CSA to develop critical forms of publishing that are commensurate with innovative approaches to knowledge making, political intervention, and material forms of cultural expression.  Lateral  focuses on providing a place of experimentation in the range of material forms so that the knowing, feeling, sensibility we ascribe to the cultural can find an elastic and sustainable outlet for expression. In short,  Lateral  is interested in recasting both the form and content of what cultural studies can be.

The means for gathering, evaluating, and publishing work is called a  research thread. Threads are edited and curated by individuals who solicit, commission, and guide the peer-review process and the evaluation of submissions.  Lateral  is not subject to the time and space parameters that attend to most sponsored or proprietary journal endeavors. Work can take months to reach a point where it is ready for publication or it can be published quickly in response to readiness or timeliness. Our publishing process affords both internal spaces where work can be developed and public domains that are freely accessible. The platform can also support a wide range of publishing forms and processes.

In this inaugural issue, Lateral  takes the form of a cluster of four research threads. The initial threads converge around a consideration of knowledge formations, institutional and material location, and political intervention and implication. Rather than being organized topically or thematically, the threads provide various problematics, temperaments, tones, or dispositions toward developing work. The threads are in effect portals in which interests in identity, pedagogy, theory, violence, embodiment, or other concerns that flow through cultural studies can be joined and engaged. New threads may be proposed to the curatorial board at any time.

The initial four threads are meant as an exploration of what is possible and an invitation for further work. Theory and Method, curated by Patricia Clough, treats various forms of knowing and being in cultural studies research. Creative Industries, curated by Jaafar Aksikas, invites composite methodological approaches to intersectoral flows inside and outside the university. Universities in Question, curated by Bruce Burgett and Randy Martin, decenters established claims for disciplinary, labor, and political economic legitimations for higher education. Mobilisations, Interventions, and Cultural Policy curated by Emma Dowling, pursues current transformational activisms to rethink values of polity, policy, and participation.

We welcome your responses to what you find here and proposals for future threads. In either case, contact the members of  Lateral’s  curatorial board:

Bruce BurgettPatricia CloughRandy Martin
BBurgett@uwb.edustmart96@gmail.comrandy.martin@nyu.edu

Mashup by Erin A. Anderson

Design Team

JAMIE “SKYE” BIANCO (Design Editor) is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She works in digital media theory and composition and in the creative critical digital humanities. Recent work includes: “This Digital Humanities Which Is Not One,” in the recent Minnesota Press collection, The Debates in Digital Humanities (ed. Matthew Gold), and the creative critical multimedia composition, #inhabitation, published in the inaugural issue of College Composition and Communication Online. Her work has also appeared in several journals, including FibreCulture, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and in the collection, The Affective Turn(ed. Patricia Clough).

ERIN R. ANDERSON (Designer: Issue 1) is a PhD student in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches, studies, and practices digital media production and multimodal composition. She is the author/designer of “The Olive Project: An Oral History in Multiple Modes,” in the Spring 2011 issue of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, and has also published work in Gender, Place, and Culture and Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy. She is currently developing a dissertation project exploring the possibilities for a compositional/material ethics of digital vocality.

CURATORIAL BOARD

Jaafar Aksikas, Columbia College, Chicago

Elizabeth Bullock, City University of New York

Jonathan Cutler, Wesleyan University

Greg Goldberg, CUNY (music curator)

Tim Kaposy, George Mason University

Anahid Kassabian, University of Liverpool (music curator)

Bradley Lewis, New York University

Eric Lott, University of Virginia

Tara McPherson, University of Southern California

Giuseppina Mecchia, University of Pittsburgh

Toby Miller, University of California, Riverside

Fred Moten, Duke University

Amit Rai, Queen Mary University of London

David Shumway, Carnegie Mellon University

Kim Yasuda, University of California Santa Barbara

[This article was originally published at http://www.culturalstudiesassociation.org/lateral/issue1.html. A PDF the original version has been archived at https://archive.org/details/Lateral1.]

Author Information

Bruce Burgett

\Bruce Burgett is Dean and Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell. He is the President of the Cultural Studies Association, the Chair of the National Advisory Board of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, and the co-director of the UW’s graduate Certificate in Public Scholarship. He is the author of Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic, and co-editor of Keywords for American Cultural Studies. He recently competed a second edition of Keywords for American Cultural Studies and is currently working on a book project entitled Sex, Panic, Nation. He has taught, researched, and published widely in the fields of American studies, cultural studies, and queer studies. He serves on the editorial and advisory boards of American Quarterly and American Literary History, and the press committee of the University of Washington Press. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Humanities Washington. \

Patricia Ticineto Clough

\Patricia Ticineto Clough is professor of Sociology and Women\'s Studies at the Graduate Center and Queens College of the City University of New York. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (2000); Feminist Thought: Desire, Power and Academic Discourse (1994) and The End(s) of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, (2007) and with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011). She is currently working on Ecstatic Corona: Philosophy and Family Violence, an ethnographic historically researched experimental writing project about where she grew up in Queens New York.\

Randy Martin

\Randy Martin is professor and chair of art and public policy and director of the graduate program in arts politics. He is the author of Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self; Socialist Ensembles: Theater and State in Cuba and Nicaragua; Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics; On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left; Financialization of Daily Life; Empire of Indifference: American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management, and Under New Management: Universities, Administrative Labor and the Professional Turn. He has edited collections on U.S. Communism, sport and academic labor and, most recently, Artistic Citizenship: A Public Voice for the Arts (with Mary Schmidt Campbell) and The Returns of Alwin Nikolais: Bodies, Boundaries, and the Dance Canon (with Claudia Gitelman). He is past president of the Cultural Studies Association, serves on the board of Imagining America, and was an editor of the journal Social Text.\