Keyword: cultural studies

Editors’ Introduction: Opening Access

Aerial photo of Euphrates River, 2009. Courtesy of NASA.
By Robert F. Carley, SAJ, Eero Laine and Chris Alen Sula

This introduction discusses the importance of open access scholarship and its relation to the academy. The introduction provides an overview of the articles in the journal, which include responses to the forum on universal basic income (UBI) published in issue 7.2. Finally, this issue marks the beginning of the Years in Cultural Studies project.

Introduction: Years in Cultural Studies

Courtesy of Snapwire.
By Robert W Gehl

This special section is another iteration of cultural studies telling its own story. In our particular iteration, we offer here essays focused on specific years in the history of cultural studies. Our aim is to provide a pedagogical resource, a place for documentation and excavation, and a forum for more storytelling.

Editors’ Introduction: Expanding Laterally

Courtesy of Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Department of Energy (CC BY NC-SA 2.0).
By SAJ, Eero Laine and Chris Alen Sulawith Robert F Carley

This issue marks a number of important milestones for the journal and features a combination of peer-reviewed academic articles, a forum on universal basic income (UBI), and book reviews. With this issue we are also pleased announce a number of changes to the Lateral editorial team. These changes significantly extend the possibilities for the journal into the future, while reinforcing the work that is already underway.

Editors’ Introduction: Marxism and Cultural Studies

Si Griffiths, 2005
By SAJ, Eero Laine and Chris Alen Sula

Cultural studies as a discipline and intellectual practice is deeply indebted to Marx, even as the field of cultural studies has contested, revisited, and updated Marx’s work. This issue points to a number of resonant threads currently active under the umbrella of cultural studies and opens possibilities for historical mapping of the many and varied aspects of marxist thought, in and out of the academy. The authors in this issue direct us toward and augment our understanding of the multi-faceted and inextricable links between questions of capital and questions of race, class, and gender power that have been the focus of US research in cultural studies especially within the past thirty years. In this issue, we continue and expand our editorial emphasis on the role of cultural studies in explaining and challenging the ongoing, intersectional significance of material power relations.

Introduction

By Gwyneth Shanks

Gwyneth Shanks discusses the scope of Not a Trump Issue, which privileges resistant actions that are never reducible to nor fully concerned with the Trump Administration’s policies and actions. In the wake of the Administration’s tacit and overt support of white supremacist and sexist ideologies, deregulation, global climate change denial, and attempts at voter suppression and the criminalization of communities of color, “Not a Trump Issue” questions how radical, anti-racist, feminist scholars, artists, activists, and educators can enunciate their own forms of resistance. The issue privileges actions that are engaged with surfacing deeper historical structures of inequity or dispossession; the issues at stake for the authors in “Not a Trump Issue” is not not Trump nor our political present, but always already our collective pasts.

Review of Foucault and Neoliberalism, edited by Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent (Polity)

By David Zeglen

Foucault & Neoliberalism modestly argues that Foucault’s project, particularly after May 1968, bore striking similarities with neoliberalism. Although scholars have debated this issue since at least the French publication of The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault & Neoliberalism shows that, since the English publication of the same lecture series in the inauspicious year of 2008, the American university has increasingly deracinated Foucault from his French context and thereby misread his attitude toward neoliberalism. Thus Foucault & Neoliberalism, an English translation of Zamora’s previous anthology in French, Critiquer Foucault, seeks to revive the debate—and has done so in the pages of Jacobin magazine thus far—by situating Foucault back into his proper historical milieu.

Editors’ Introduction: Cultural Studies and Intersectionality as Intellectual Practice

By SAJ, Eero Laine and Chris Alen Sula

As a “critical social theory,” intersectionality already lies at the roots of contemporary cultural studies, and the best work in cultural studies has the capacity for or is already engaging with intersectionality as method. This is work that accounts for the multifaceted nature of subjects, institutions, processes, and structures as it asks its questions about cultural objects, experience, ideology, history, or discourses. Intersectionality as, along with dialectical materialism, a core intellectual practice of cultural studies, offers expanded possibilities for political traction, relevance to the world and people’s lives, and transformative potential. We see models of such work throughout this issue, including with part two of a special forum on emergent analytics of critical humanities.

Review of Hegemony, Mass Media, and Cultural Studies: Properties of Meaning, Power, and Value in Cultural Production by Sean Johnson Andrews (Rowman & Littlefield)

By Andrew Wood

Sean Johnson Andrews has produced an engaging text of multifaceted value. His work, particularly the opening chapters, provides a concise history of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), the (early) Frankfurt School Critical Theory, and the Political Economy of Communication (PEC). Although the histories and notable figureheads of these schools will be broadly familiar to most scholars working in the realm of cultural studies, these opening chapters would be an excellent introduction to the field for either a general readership or students. Indeed, this would make a good textbook in many contexts.

Cultural Studies Should Gamify

By Steve Luber

I’ve created GamifytheCSA.org, an experiment in gamifying the academic conference. Gamifying the CSA will enhance serious play in discourse and practice and expand the scope of the conference, with models in business and social networking with programs such as FourSquare, and extending to health and fitness, with programs such as Zombies, Run!, and the list goes on.