Lateral is published semi-annually, fall and spring. General submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, and deadlines for special issues/sections are noted below. All submissions should follow the instructions on the Submission Guidelines page unless otherwise noted below.
Issues | Aporias | Platforms & Agency | Pol & Arts | Positions | Years
Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (edited volume) [in contract]
Issue 13.1 (Spring 2024)
Regular issue, preferred deadline October 15, 2023.
Issue 13.2 (Fall 2024)
Regular issue, preferred submission by May 1, 2024.
Rolling submissions are accepted thereafter, but articles accepted with revisions may be delayed to the following issue.
Years in Cultural Studies
What forgotten historical moments or contexts shaped the trajectory of cultural studies? How have individual scholars and broader social movements contributed to the cultural studies we know today? The special section of Lateral—“Years in Cultural Studies”—seeks to answer these questions and more through essays that interrogate cultural studies’ diverse, fragmented, and provocative history. Essays in this collection focus on specific years in the history of cultural studies.
“Years in Cultural Studies” seeks to provide a pedagogical resource, a place for documentation and excavation, and a forum for storytelling. We see this work as heeding the call Ted Striphas to do “care work”—that is, infrastructural, cultivating work—to support the field of cultural studies. Striphas asks, “What would it mean to imagine cultural studies as a ‘care discipline,’ or better yet as a field in which criticism and care cohabitate?” In this spirit, “Years in Cultural Studies” provides a collection of open, accessible, teaching-friendly histories of the field that allow all of us to learn more about its intellectual genealogies, struggles, and contexts.
Contributions to this collective endeavor might, for instance:
- Revisit the years within the half-century history of the field formally called “cultural studies,” including the creation of university programs around the world, the publication of important texts, and summaries of conferences.
- Trace how historical and political contexts have shaped the ethos, foci, and goals of cultural studies.
- Respond to existing essays through discussions of more publications, social and political events, or geopolitical contextualization. The goal of such responses would be supplemental, to build upon a collective project.
- Interrogate the history of cultural studies’ position(s) apart from, between, and within, other disciplines and/or that ask how institutionalization has shaped the character and goals of cultural studies.
- Discuss years before the formal foundation of cultural studies in the 1960s. We anticipate discussions of the historical and intellectual contexts that influenced the works of key figures like Antonio Gramsci. But we also reiterate Carol Stabile’s call for excavation of work outside the currently-accepted cultural studies canon and ask for work that grapples with marginalized and subaltern cultural studies.
Thus, our call for more Years essays is a call for more care work in our field, to add to a collective project, to set aside virilophilism in favor of the hidden and marginalized, all with a goal to tell the cultural studies story once more and make its history even more legible to the next generation of cultural studies scholars.
For further guidance, we invite potential contributors to look at published essays in the collection: https://csalateral.org/years/
Potential authors should submit 500–750 word abstracts to the Years in Cultural Studies editor, Robert W. Gehl, at rob@robertwgehl.org with “Years in Cultural Studies” in the subject line.
In keeping with the journal’s current practice, submissions will undergo rigorous peer review, including screening by the editor and review by at least two anonymous referees.
Aporias
Cultural studies has never been a stranger to controversy, disagreement, or drama. But these debates emerge precisely because there are stakes to the minutiae, because something as seemingly trivial as a term can make the most profound of differences in how we see and understand the world. Other times, analysis yields to sites where memory, justice, or even life itself may be on the line, and so our debates take on an even greater tenor of urgency. Yet, in the desire to publish and/or perish, or to introduce some grand intervention, rarely are there the opportunities to merely limn contemporary disagreements or specific contradictions within cultural studies. What would happen if instead of meditating on a potential fix, we stayed with the trouble just a bit longer?
Enter Aporias, a new special section of Lateral, where we embrace the debate. For this section, we invite emerging scholars to write about the contemporary or historic controversies or lacunae within cultural studies or related fields that have yet to be properly synthesized, countenanced, or come to resolution. Rather than asking our writers to resolve conceptual dilemmas, Aporias instead asks them to explore disagreements or distinctions. Aporias is not oriented toward a resolution, but explicitly is devoted to the problem itself, leaving them unresolved to provoke future research. And so, this section asks about the theoretical lapses, overlaps, and contentions between and within competing theories. What are the differences in the ways scholars have been employing terms? How has cultural studies been thinking representation, liberation, or agency? Is there an outside to biopolitics? What are the politics of aesthetic production? What are the proposed differences between ontology and culture? What are the contemporary tensions in thinking diaspora or hybridity? How have scholars thought the networks, particularities, and contours of Black culture(s)? How do we understand the sonic? What can psychoanalysis tell us as a method? Is the medium actually the message?
In particular, this section is devoted to publishing the research of early career researchers and junior scholars because these researchers—through their training, lived experiences, and deep immersion in texts—bring unique insight into the field that can reorient canonical thinking and provide nuance to earlier conversations. Aporias offers a site of disciplinary memory to mine cultural studies and provide a resource benefitting both junior and senior scholars by offering both a space to publish and through that publication present a review of the field. Namely, Aporias will feature short articles (1,000–5,000 words) that serve as snapshots of the current state of cultural studies.
Possible topics include:
- (post)humanism
- Afro-pessimism and Black optimism
- ontology and culture
- (im)material labor
- potentials and limitations of aesthetics
- digitalization and translation
- authorial intention, ownership, and copyright
- freedom of information
- porn, agency, and power
- caste and race
- the right to violence
- tensions and disagreements between the post-/anti-/de-colonial
- archives and their uses
- objectivity, subjectivity, and science
- self-determination or collective struggle
- psychoanalysis and anti-Blackness
- the racialization of affect
- activism, theory, and praxis
Authors should submit a 300–500 word abstract to Aporias editor Joshua Falek at jbfalek@yorku.ca. Proposals are reviewed on a rolling basis. Accepted proposals will be invited to develop a 1,500–5,000-word entry for the section for peer review and potential publication.
Digital Platforms and Agency
How do digital platforms shape our agency, and how do we shape digital platforms in turn? What is the role of digital platforms in forming our social, cultural, and political practices? How and whom do digital platforms (dis)empower? This special section of Lateral invites scholars from diverse fields to advance critical cultural inquiry at the convergence of platforms and agency on digital, networked, and/or new media.
A digital platform is a standard which facilitates computational interactions between users and systems, according to Ian Bogost. Ubiquitous but self-effacing, platforms increasingly mediate the constitution and expression of consciousness. Troubling clean divisors between humanity and technology, platforms pose a challenge to monolithic, individuated, and humanist notions of agency that the field of cultural studies is uniquely poised to address.
Thus, this section calls for scholars to attend to the ways in which platforms differentially amplify, accelerate, diminish, and subvert the agency of users, systems, and communities. We see this work following Beth Coleman’s characterization of networked agency as “the disruptive technology of our time” which troubles clean divisors between human/nonhuman, virtual/actual, and individual/system. This section will deepen Coleman’s provocation by demystifying discrepancies of access, leverage, and capacity that characterize the emergence of platforms within our stratified political system.
We seek a diverse collection of essays that reflect the interdisciplinarity of cultural studies and platform studies. We encourage submissions from myriad traditions and approaches including media studies, political economy, performance studies, communication, composition, science and technology studies, gender studies, sociology, computer science, and more.
Contributions to this section may, for instance:
- Evaluate the entanglement of platform cultures within the politics of representation and regimes of symbolic violence
- Critique structures of power on/of platforms, such as anti-Blackness and digital colonialism, which inhibit and afford agency
- Reveal the ramifications of platform capitalism, mediated labor relations, and the development and/or subversion of political consciousness
- Develop posthuman challenges to agency by scrutinizing the impact of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence
- Trace the political ramifications of digital platforms and agency at play: video games, streaming, and/or social media
- Compare imaginations and practices of algorithmic governance
- Interrogate datafication as a constraint against or catalyst of networked subjectivities
Please send all submissions and inquiries to digitalplatformsandagency@gmail.com. Potential authors should submit a 500-word abstract by June 30, 2023 to Platforms and Agency co-editors Elaine Venter and Reed Van Schenck to be considered for publication. Abstracts will be reviewed by the editors by August 30, 2023. Final submissions for publication of 5,000–9,000 words expected by March 1, 2024. All submissions will undergo a double-anonymous peer review process according to journal policies.
Political Economy and the Arts
How does political economy affect artworks and art practices? How do artworks and art practices reflect on and critique the political economy in which they are embedded? This section of Lateral stages dialogues with scholars and professionals from the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, visual cultures, politics, economics, human geography, social theory, and health and well-being on topical issues. It seeks to interrogate the knowledge and insights arts and political economy might offer to one another. In doing so, it aims to address arts’ and political economy’s impact and futurity.
The section’s first issue will emerge from the research seminar series “Performance and Political Economy: Bodies, Politics, and Well-Being in the 21st Century” with contributions from speakers as well as dialogists following the research series’ three events.
Subsequent issues of the section will be developed from open calls, dialogical exchanges, and provocations on timely topics. Contributions to these subsequent issues might, for instance:
- Comparatively examine artworks within different political economies.
- Trace how polico-economic contexts have shaped artworks/artistic practices.
- Reveal racial capitalism’s impact on artistic practices.
- Enter into dialogue with existing essays to offer a point of view from a marginalised perspective.
- Offer a textual or audio-visual provocation that invites/necessitates response from a different disciplinary perspective.
- Discuss artworks that have made impactful statements about the political economy in which they embedded and/or offered important insights about reimagining the role of political economy.
- Discuss labour/work/productivity/the growth economic paradigm and its relation to bodies/well-being/artistic practices.
For enquiries, please email the Political Economy and the Arts editor, Katerina Paramana, at katerinaparamana@hotmail.com with “Political Economy and the Arts” in the subject line.
In keeping with the journal’s current practice, submissions will undergo rigorous peer review, including screening by the editor and review by at least two anonymous referees.
Positions
Each episode of the Positions podcast will engage a topic of critical concern in cultural studies, but discussed and framed in such a way that it will resonate with a wider audience. Each episode is co-hosted by a different Cultural Studies Association Working Group. Our lineup for the first season will be: New Media & Digital Cultures; Performance; Environment, Space, & Place; and Black & Race Studies.
The podcast will serve primarily as an “in house” production, showcasing the diversity of our organization and the scope of work covered in our working groups. We plan to host the podcast on the Lateral website, but we will also release it through streaming services in order to reach the widest audience possible.
We are seeking participants!
We currently have an editorial team representing the four Working Groups who will be hosting individual episodes. We are seeking additional participants who are interested in joining our production team. In particular, we are looking for individuals with experience in–or desire to develop skills in–the following areas:
- Editorial liaison
- Scheduling
- Recording
- Producing
- Editing
- Post-Production
- Export to streaming services
- Promotion & Distribution
If you are interested in assisting in this project, please contact Mark Nunes at nunesm@appstate.edu