About

Editors | Editorial Board | Indexing | Open Access | Preservation | Ethics | Publisher

Lateral (ISSN 2469–4053) is the peer-reviewed, open access digital journal and production site of the Cultural Studies Association. Lateral is designed to foster experimentation and collaboration among cultural studies practitioners and researchers. It is committed to critical studies of culture that advance and extend the reach of cultural studies as a field and method of inquiry and as an intellectual/political project.

The journal is currently published on a semiannual basis, fall and spring. Please review our submission guidelines for information about submitting to the journal and review policies. This journal does not charge any type of article processing charge (APC) or any type of article submission charge.

Editors

The editors may be contacted at lateraljournal@gmail.com

Robert Carley, Texas A&M University (carley@tamu.edu)

andré m. carrington, University of California, Riverside (andre.carrington@ucr.edu)

Eero Laine, University at Buffalo, State University of New York (eero.email@gmail.com)

Yumi Pak, Occidental College (ypak@oxy.edu)

SAJ, punctum books (write.saj.an.email@gmail.com)

Alyson K. Spurgas, Trinity College (alyson.spurgas@trincoll.edu)

Chris Alen Sula, Pratt Institute (csula@pratt.edu)

The co-editors are responsible for recruiting, developing, evaluating, and curating publishable material for Lateral and for ensuring the future success of the journal while maintaining consistently high quality of standards. Duties include:

• Recruiting new and innovative work that develops and expands the field of cultural studies;
• Evaluating and soliciting reviews for submitted materials;
• Providing feedback on multiple drafts of articles;
• Regular correspondence with authors, section editors, book review editors, reviewers, and fellow co-editors;
• Participation in monthly editorial meetings; and
• Various other responsibilities leading up to and following the publication of each issue.

Book Review Editors

The book review editors may be contacted at lateralbookreviews@gmail.com

Beenash Jafri, UC Davis (bjafri@ucdavis.edu)
Laura J. Kwak, York University (ljkwak9@yorku.ca)

Forum Editor

Rayya El Zein, Wesleyan University (rayyaelz@gmail.com)

Copyeditor

Anne Donlon

Editorial Board

Members of the Lateral Editorial Board serve as ambassadors of the journal to the wider field of cultural studies. Board members are established members of the academic community with a clear research interest and international profile in cultural studies. New members are appointed by the Lateral editor(s) in consultation with the Cultural Studies Association Governing Board.

Moustafa Bayoumi, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Harris Berger, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Ashley Dawson, The Graduate Center and College of Staten Island, CUNY
Bishnupriya Dutt, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
Rob Gehl, University of Utah
Silvija Jestrovic, University of Warwick
Deepa Kumar, Rutgers University
Roger Lancaster, George Mason University
Minh-Ha Pham, Pratt Institute
Trace Reddell, University of Denver
Mark Rifkin, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Shirley Steinberg, University of Calgary
James Tobias, University of California, Riverside

Editorial Board members are responsible for:

• Providing counsel and guidance on the future of the journal
• Identifying new topics and contributors for the journal
• Encouraging submissions, and encouraging proposals for special issues
• Providing content by writing occasional editorials and other short articles
• Reviewing articles on occasion, helping to identify peer reviewers, and providing opinions on papers (e.g. where there is a conflict between reviewers)
• Endorsing the journal to authors, readers, and subscribers and encouraging colleagues to submit their most significant work

Indexing

Lateral is indexed by Crossref, Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) EBSCO, Google Scholar, MLA International Bibliography and listed in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. Articles are prefixed with the journal DOI: https://doi.org/10.25158/L

Open Access Policy

In compliance with BOAI, we allow “any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose” without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.

All content published in Lateral is distributed under a Creative Commons license specified on the article page and in article metadata. Authors retain copyright without restrictions and may archive pre-print and post-print or publisher’s version/PDF. In all cases of republication or self-archiving, the original source (citation) should be provided, including the link to the original Lateral article (using the DOI found in the article details), and a note should be included that the work is licensed under the Creative Commons license indicated on the article page.

The journal currently uses a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Under the terms of this license, you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made; you may not use this material for commercial purposes.

Some earlier issues of the journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) License, which does not allow work to be used for commercial purposes and requires that adaptations be distributed under the same conditions, or a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which requires you to give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.

Preservation

All content published in Lateral is uploaded to a collection in the Internet Archive for long-term, open access preservation. Articles are uploaded as individual PDFs with accompanying media files. Preservation PDFs are linked from each article page. This preservation is in addition to routine crawling of journal webpages conducted by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The Internet Archive is a member of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, whose members include national libraries around the world, and is an official library of the State of California.

Publication Ethics Statement

Lateral follows the COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics Code of Conduct for Journal Editors. As a publication of the Cultural Studies Association, Lateral is also governed by the CSA’s Code of Conduct. Decisions regarding the journal rest with its editors, and may be appealed by procedures outlined at the end of this statement.

In addition, recognizing that research and publication are as imbricated with issues of power, inequality, access, and justice as any other arena, we acknowledge that Lateral must take intentional actions to respond to its context. This ethics statement has been written and agreed upon by the collective of editors, and is subject to biennial review and revision, or at the request of any of the editors and/or the editorial board.

The Lateral editors work collectively and embrace the ethos of a horizontal structure. Decisions are made through discussion and consensus among the journal editors. Section editors are appointed by the journal editors based on qualification and interest and afforded maximum autonomy over their areas, with the understanding that every piece published in the journal is read by a majority of the journal editors prior to publication.

Lateral is committed to the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors. The editors have initiated a comprehensive review of journal practices using this heuristic and are committed to a process of continued improvement in furthering anti-racist scholarship. If you find that the journal has fallen short in any of these practices, please contact the editors with your feedback.

Access & Inclusion

Many factors limit or enable access with respect to scholarly publishing, from who and what is printed in a journal, to how content is presented to readers. Central to this process is recruitment, review, and selection of scholarship. Informed by research and praxis in cultural studies, along with resources such as the Coalition for Diversity & Inclusion in Scholarly Communications principles and the Diversity and Inclusion Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing by the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, Lateral strives to intervene in and guard against the reproduction of unwritten biases and hierarchies that shape academic publishing, including author’s backgrounds and positions. While an author’s experience, identity, or position is never the reason for publishing their work, a mere “colorblind” or “identity-less” approach to publication is insufficient.

Acknowledging the entrenched racial, gendered, abled, and classed hierarchies in scholarship, the Lateral editors are committed to practices of continued learning, experimentation, and alternatives to disrupt these hierarchies, amplify marginalized voices, and offer non-traditional paths to publication within the larger context of publishing of which the journal is a part.

• Lateral complies with the BOAI definition of open access and makes all content available free of charge. The journal does not charge authors any type of article processing charge (APC) or submission charge, enabling them to submit and publish work regardless of financial support for publication.
• Editors deliberately cultivate familiarity with scholarship and practice on the nature of bias and hierarchy in publishing and academia as institutions, with particular attention to hierarchies of race, gender, ability, and class.
• The editors deliberately cultivate familiarity with and invite the contributions of structurally-marginalized scholars in the field, and in adjacent fields, with particular attention to the arenas where editors hold structural privileges and/or are in positions of structural power. For example, white editors dedicate additional attention to scholarship by writers of color, men focus on work by women and trans and non-binary people, able-bodied people attend to the contributions of scholars with disabilities, etc.
• In “writing produced in and about a native land and people,”¹ the journal may deviate from the Chicago Manual of Style’s practice of italicizing the first instance of unfamiliar words and phrases from other languages (§7.53), recognizing that English is the language of colonization where much of the academy works and lives. In general, the preferences of Indigenous authors and peoples on italicization of their words will be respected, while languages of colonization other than the primary language of the document should follow CMOS (e.g., italicizing the first instance of French words if the article is written in English).
• Furthermore, as white supremacy perpetuates itself by always displacing and decentering the question of ending anti-Black racism, all co-editors will retain that question at the center of the journal’s inquiry and publishing practice by paying particular attention to anti-Black racism, racial hierarchization, racial capitalism, and white supremacy.
• The editors recruit and invite editorial board members who bring diverse perspectives and experiences to the field and the journal, paying particular attention to the academy’s and the field’s disproportionate distributions of authority and power in the realms of race, ability, gender, and class.
• The editors invite and give equal consideration to non-academic authors (such as community members, activists, and artists), independent scholars, and junior scholars, including graduate students.
• Editors disseminate content through multiple channels, recognizing that traditional academic venues rarely reach artists, activists, and others outside of narrow conceptions of “scholars” or “researchers.” Current examples include: publicizing articles on social media using relevant hashtags and experimenting with visual means of access to articles.
• Lateral strives for accessibility, broadly conceived. Current examples include: evaluating the website using accessibility tools, requiring image alt text from all authors, and requesting transcripts and captions for sound-based media.
• Recognizing that ideas and discourse within a field may be opaque to others, the editors ask all authors to explicitly position their work within cultural studies for the broad readership of the journal. In addition, the editors encourage authors to engage with plain language approaches, which benefit all readers and provide critical access for some.
• While Lateral is primarily an English-language journal, the editors welcome translations of its articles into other languages, especially where articles concern people, cultures, and places associated with a language other than English. Translations are publicized, indexed, and preserved using the same high standards and quality procedures as original articles.
• Lateral strives for inclusive language that reflects how people and groups talk about themselves and their lived experiences, informed by language’s role in structuring power. Current examples include: using person-first and inclusive language when a person/group does not identify their preferred language for themselves, capitalizing terms like “Black” and not “white,” leaning toward gender neutral language for all references where the referent’s gender is unknown (including “they,” “them,” “Latinx,” and syntactic strategies), referring to cited authors’ full names in first reference and only last names in subsequent ones, and requesting that all authors use their pronouns in their biographies (if they use pronouns).
• The editors consider the impact of language and media on many different readers. Where particular examples may be harmful, disturbing, or offensive to readers from structurally-marginalized groups, the editors weigh the merits of publishing this content (in conversation with authors) and consider mitigating strategies such as contextualization and content warnings.

Research Misconduct

The editors take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data misuse, among others. In the event that we are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article, we follow COPE’s guidelines for dealing with the allegations. Please contact lateraljournal@gmail.com with any concerns about research misconduct.

Peer Review Process

Lateral strives to create a positive environment for all who engage with the journal as a means of developing and growing the community of scholars in cultural studies. Regardless of their review decision, reviewers have a responsibility to make their decisions on the basis of the content of the submission, and to provide constructive, grounded feedback in an ethical way to all authors. We encourage reviewers to treat authors as respected collaborators, albeit anonymous ones, who may span a spectrum of discipline, focus, expertise, employment status, and professional status, as well as a spectrum of social positions. Reviewers may see the Contributor Covenant’s Code of Conduct for examples of behavior that contributes to a positive environment as well as examples of unacceptable behavior.

• All articles are sent for double anonymous peer review with at least two reviewers. In rare cases, the editors may deviate from this practice, in which case a published article will state details about its review process.
• Peer review labor is uncompensated and thus presents disproportionate demands on people of different class positions; and recent studies indicate that a disproportionate burden of academic labor (such as peer review) falls on junior faculty of color. Cognizant of this broader environment in academia and publishing, the editors are currently exploring ways to recognize the labor of peer reviewers.
• To maintain anonymity of the review process, all authors are asked to remove identifying information from manuscripts prior to submission, and editors check for any such information before providing a copy of the manuscript to reviewers. Responses from peer reviewers are stored separately from submissions, and only editors have access to records that link submitter information with reviewer information. 
• To avoid competing interests, including conflicts of interest, in assigning peer reviewers, all authors are asked to disclose such interests upon submission and provided with examples from COPE. Reviewers are also asked to notify the editors immediately if they become aware of competing interests, so another reviewer can be assigned in their place.
• The editors recruit peer reviewers who bring diverse perspectives and experiences to the field and their objects of study, paying particular attention to the academy’s and the field’s disproportionate distributions of authority and power in the realms of race, ability, gender, class, nationality, and sexuality. In particular, editors seek out peer reviewers who are especially qualified to reflect on power dynamics that are often neglected with respect to the topic, method, context, etc. of each submission sent for review. Diversity of reviewers more accurately represents the field, appropriately interrupts inherent biases of authors and editors, and leads to higher quality of published material.
• The editors summarize and contextualize all reviewer reports, noting which opinions reviewers share in common and where they might disagree. In doing so, the editors may explicitly address any concerns they share with the peer review reports, including the use of unfair or unusual standards with particular authors or topics (e.g., applying white expectations to scholars of color or scholarship on race).
• In most cases, reviewers provide the same recommendation or adjacent ones (e.g., “accept” and “accept with revisions”). In the rare instance that reviewers provide conflicting opinions, the editors discuss the reports and offer a final decision to authors, along with feedback from the reviewers. In contextualizing the conflicting reports, the editors attempt to convey the feedback from both reviewers, noting relevant strengths and concerns raised by each reviewer, even if the editors diverge from that reviewer’s overall recommendation.

Intellectual Property and Copyright Issues

In cases of suspected plagiarism, fabrication, and other misconduct, the editors follow COPE’s guidelines for dealing with allegations.

• All contributors to articles published in Lateral should be credited appropriately. Accepted authors are provided with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations for determining authorship before production and publication of an article proceeds. 

Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections

Lateral follows COPE guidelines on appeals to journal editor decisions and complaints about the journal’s editorial management of the peer review process or post-publication issues.

• In the rare instance that an article version of record is changed following publication, a note is appended explaining the change, which may include corrections, statements of concern, retractions, or in the rarest of circumstances, removal of the article.
• The editors welcome submissions that build on articles previously published in the journal, including critical contributions. Authors of criticized material will be notified of any forthcoming critiques and offered an opportunity to respond.

Appeals

Lateral follows COPE guidelines on appeals to journal editor decisions and complaints about the journal’s editorial management of the peer review process or post-publication issues. All communications regarding appeals should be sent to lateraljournal@gmail.com. Appellants should specify, in detail, why they disagree with the decision and provide any new or updated information for consideration. Appeals should begin with the individual who made the decision before proceeding through the following levels:

• Decisions of reviewers and section editors may be appealed to the Lateral editors.
• Decisions of the Lateral editors may be appealed to the editorial board.
• Decisions of the editorial board may be referred to COPE’s Facilitation and Integrity Subcommittee (for member publications only) [membership pending for Lateral].

Publisher

Lateral is published by and through the support of the Cultural Studies Association, which can be contacted at:

Cultural Studies Association
1658 Milwaukee Ave # 100-7388
Chicago, Illinois 60647
www.culturalstudiesassociation.org

Administrative Office:
Michelle Fehsenfeld: admin@culturalstudiesassociation.org