Featured articles

Color photo of La Academia de Oficiales de la Guardia Civil in Aranjuez, Spain. Long passageway with rectangular pillars on the side. The light passing through the pillars makes a checkered pattern on the floor.
Nueva Academia de Oficiales de la Guardia Civil en Aranjuez, 2015. Courtesy of Pablo Bayón (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Airing Grievances: Academic Hoaxing and the Performance of Boundary Work

Ian Reilly
A medicalized undead two-faced figure, facing forwards and looking back, navigates past and future endings from the position of present doom. Made from a baby dress, infant hospital gown, plaster casts of CPR dummy face, plaster, clay, glue, ash, iodine, and plaster bandages.
KS Brewer, Post-Chronic Divisionations (2021). Used with permission of the artist.

Subjunctive Grief: Affective Methodologies for Articulating Futures

Matthew Wolf-Meyer
Photo of soldiers and a man in a suit shaking hands in front of a menorah
IDF soldiers shake Yitzhak Shamir’s hand during Channukah celebrations at an Israeli defense base in January of 1987. Photo by Israeli Defence Forces Spokesperson’s Unit.

The Spectre of Antisemitism

Emma Kauffman
Gloomy painting of a person standing next to a heart. The person is facing away from the viewer, and heart dripping red, like lava.

Cringe Theory

J. Logan Smilges

Latest book reviews

Review of Making the Human: Race, Allegory, and Asian Americans by Corinne Mitsuye Sugino (Rutgers University Press)

Sarah Hae-In Idzik

Review of Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind (Verso Books)

Laura Goldblatt

Review of Heavy Processing by T.L. Cowan & Jas Rault (punctum books)

Avey Nelson

Review of Indians on Indian Lands: Intersections of Race, Caste, and Indigeneity by Nishant Upadhyay (University of Illinois Press)

Tapaswinee Mitra

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Lateral is the peer-reviewed, open access digital journal and production site of the Cultural Studies Association, published semiannually each fall and spring.

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Special sections

Illustration by Danijel Žeželj.

Photo courtesy of Hartmut Schmidt Heidelberg.

Photo by Tom Wagner.

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Positions

Produced by Mark Nunes and Elaine Venter

The Positions podcast aims to provide critical reflection and examination on topics in cultural studies for scholars, students, and a general audience.

Each episode is co-hosted by a different Cultural Studies Association Working Group and accompanied by a scholarly commentary.

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Crip Silences, Crip Futurities, Crip Joy
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Positions
AI Literacy and the Changing Digital Political Landscape
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Years in Cultural Studies

Edited by Josen Masangkay Diaz

How do we practice cultural studies by attending to a year? What are the multiple, myriad, overlapping, and conflicting stories that a year holds? How do these stories upend and undo each other? How does one attend to the historical in ways that remain committed to the messy, unwieldy transformations of cultural life? How does one grapple with culture in ways that heed the urgency of politics?

The year as prompt asks who and what is made possible by a particular retelling and who and what is occluded by that retelling.

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Logo, CCRRRC in block letters

The Cultural Constructions of Race and Racism Research Collective (CcRrrC) is an open access platform bringing together original analysis and curated resources about race and racism outside of the US. ⁠The platform hosts a global network of media makers, scholars, and activists turning to local and regional media and popular culture to identify and dismantle colorism and anti-Black racism. CcRrrC is a ResearchAMP project funded by SSRC.⁠

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Caribbean

The Caribbean is the convergence point for a culture of modernity, forged through histories of slavery, indentureship, migration, genocide, and colonialism. This section offers critical reflections on how this culture of modernity has informed constructions of race and anti-Blackness in popular culture. The Caribbean regional committee has chosen the spectral as its organizing theme to track how anti-Blackness haunts, lingers, appears and disappears in popular culture and quotidian life. This section is thus dedicated to tracking the spectral qualities of racism and anti-Blackness, by mapping its visual, material, sonic, and cultural apparitions in the everyday.

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East Asia

It is still widely believed that race and racism are not relevant to East Asia because of its perceived ethnic homogeneity. Yet race-based or ethnocentric violence—both physical and symbolic—are not only part of the social fabric in contemporary East Asia, but also rooted in the region’s modern history. On the other hand, complex issues of local politics and discrimination across East Asia are often flattened out in the eyes of Euro-American observers, who try to make sense of the local ethnoracial politics according to the Western racial hierarchy. Thus, the East Asia Regional Section aims to tackle this difficult question: How do we talk about race in the first place, when race is not considered a significant part of East Asian cultures?

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