Lateral is Back

by Bruce Burgett, Patricia Ticineto Clough and Randy Martin    |   Issue 2 (2013)

ABSTRACT     Lateral II is also, like the first, a braiding of research threads. This time we offer a triple helix. The Cultural Industries thread, curated by Jaafar Aksikas, presents a conversation between two nodes of cultural studies that move in and outside the academy Ien Ang’s Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney, and the Cultural Studies Praxis Collective at the University of Washington. This intersectoral work hints at an alter-economy, what it terms a negotiation with partners for critical purchase that complicates the reductive rubrics of neoliberal exchange. The Theory Thread, curated by Patricia Clough features a dossier on digital feminism assembled by Katherine Behar. This too is an effort to find value beyond measure, but also to refuse the algorithms of success, to assert the ungoogleable, the necessary failure, in pursuit of an anti-search engine that might power other reservoirs of thought. The Universities in Question Thread, is curated by student activists Megan Turner and Niall Twohig, and art from the smARTaction collective curated by Tina Orlandini. This dossier of manifestos and art works from various university mobilizations and occupations from Quebec, Cairo, Occupy Wall Street, University of California, and University of Puerto Rico, document the creativity that lies within critical mobilizations and the contagious proliferation of forms that this emergent politics takes.

KEYWORDS      cultural studies, journal, publishing

Credits—Design/Development

JAMIE “SKYE” BIANCO
(Design Editor/Lead Developer) is an activist eduMaker (and Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Pittsburgh). Most recently she has published, “This Digital Humanities That Is Not One” in Debates in Digital Humanities (U Minn, 2012) and Dogwalking in Cemetery Woods in Enculturation. She has been chosen for inclusion in the 2013 Carnegie Museum of Art International exhibition and catalogue for her video series, AffectEyes (Machining Affect: Seeing More than [Human] Eyes Can See. Her sound work on method, #designed_affections, appeared in Fembot: Feminism, New Media, Science and Technology and a pedagogical iteration of the large-scale media project, #inhabitation: the foreclosed remains of living, appeared in the inaugural issue of CCC Online. Other work appears in FibreCulture (“Composing, Compositing, and New Media: Integrated Digital Writing and Academic Pedagogy”), Women’s Studies Quarterly (“Social Networking and Cloud Computing: Precarious Affordances for the ‘Prosumer’”), The Affective Turn (Duke UP), Rhizome, and Comparative Literature Studies. Forthcoming publications include: #bottlesNbones #7 & hurricanes remain (a video and algoRhythmic text) in the inaugural issue of O-zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies and “Petro-Agentessimal: Plastic Media Intervention” in The Petroleum Manga [featuring the artwork of Marina Zurkow], (Punctum Books).

ZAC DAVIDM
(Developer) is the Web Developer at PittsburghArts and a student at the University of Pittsburgh. Recently he has completed a teaching assistantship at the University of Pittsburgh in Composing Digital Media where his focus was on the dynamic web and teaching and assisting students in their own digital media creations. His interests lie in using technology as a power for social good, and making the world better through innovation. He has started forgoodstudios with these intentions in mind. A supporter of open source software and creative resources he runs redjacketarts where he publishes open web development plugins and offers freelance services.

[This article was originally published at http://lateral.culturalstudiesassociation.org. A PDF the original version has been archived at https://archive.org/details/Lateral2.]

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.\