Upcoming Issues & Calls for Papers

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.

Cultural Studies in the Interregnum (edited volume) [in contract]

Issue 14.1 (Spring 2025)

Regular issue, preferred deadline October 15, 2024.

Issue 14.2 (Fall 2025)

Regular issue, preferred submission by April 1, 2025.

Rolling submissions are accepted thereafter, but articles accepted with revisions may be delayed to the following issue.

Years in Cultural Studies

How does one tell the story of a year? What stories might a year hold? How, when, and where does the story begin, and what marks its end? Which objects and methods are privileged in that telling and retelling? How might one reimagine an event or an object from different or multiple historical and cultural vantages?

By way of example, the year 1968, by several accounts, marked a period of political crisis in the United States. Amidst the US war in Vietnam and a fervent antiwar movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4. Uprisings in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, New York City, Chicago, and Kansas City arose in the immediate aftermath of the assassination and joined already active social movements growing in response to the structures of white capitalist supremacy. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists at the medal stand of the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City as a protest against US human rights abuses and act of solidarity with these movements. This same year, Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez established the Young Lords Organization in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. The Young Lords, moved by the Black liberation struggle of the Black Panthers Party, organized its own movement for self-determination by focusing on the needs of Puerto Ricans in Chicago and New York City. The student movement, animated by calls to address racial injustice and to implement ethnic studies, emerged in 1968 through the organization of the Third World Liberation Front and student walkouts in East Los Angeles. Indeed, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 did little to quell the tide of social movements.

To describe this year as one of crisis—and not as one of revolt, rebellion, movement, and imagination—articulates a temporality defined by the historical time of the nation and unfolds along a linear, progressive trajectory. Here, crisis denotes a singular break rather than a series of catastrophes and becomings. Yet, divorced from the articulation of crisis, 1968 can also invoke continuity, affinity, and relation rather than a mere beginning or end.

The significance of 1968 for US-based social movements privileges a particular location that can and should be expanded. The emergence of the Third World Women’s Alliance, whose origin might be attributed to 1968 yet begins much earlier with the Black Women’s Liberation Committee, traces an emergent internationalism rooted in anti-imperialist critique. Moreover, with the 1968 Olympic Games as its backdrop, a popular student movement in Mexico City demanded an end to the authoritarianism of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party). A turn to this movement lends itself to narrating the rise of authoritarian regimes throughout Latin America and throughout Africa and Asia throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In places like the Philippines and South Korea, martial law maintained US military dominance throughout the period of the US war in Vietnam. The study of martial law provokes a necessary understanding of regimes of policing that undergirded these military regimes, regimes against which transnational activists organized their liberation struggles. This includes trans and queer people whose organizing before, during, and after the Stonewall uprising of 1969 is often obfuscated by the singularity of the event.

In her work on Black method, Katherine McKittrick poses an important provocation: “The story does not simply describe, it demands representation outside itself. Indeed, the story cannot tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell” (Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press (2020), p. 7). Years as Cultural Studies is an effort to reimagine the terms and frames of the historical by asking who and what is made possible and who and what is occluded by the articulation of a particular history. Rather than remain fixed to the “eventness” of a year, it encourages an exploration of the moments and objects that are helpful for charting the intersections and overlaps between years—for illuminating the capaciousness of temporality itself and the limitations of history. It is, following McKittrick, a willingness to imagine what the story cannot tell. In this way, it also aims to highlight the multifarious and divergent ways of practicing and un-disciplining cultural studies.

Years as Cultural Studies invites submissions that reimagine the “story” of the year/years in creative and multifaceted ways. Submissions may focus on any year and may engage a variety of approaches. Some examples include but are not limited to explorations of the following:

The “world” of a cultural object that reflects the events, moments, and figures that constitute it
Black, Indigenous, feminist, third worldist histories of cultural studies
A critical year in cultural studies histor(ies)
The year as mode for studying its longue durée
Anachronism as method

Authors should submit a 250–500 word abstract and all inquiries to Years Editor Josen Masangkay Diaz at josendiaz@ucsc.edu. Authors will be invited to submit 3,000–6000 word entries that will undergo peer review according to journal guidelines.

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

Lateral’s special section “Political Economy and the Arts” seeks to address how art and political economy might impact, critique, and reflect on one another and their futurity through the staging of conversations across the fields of visual and performing arts, cultural studies, visual cultures, politics, economics, human geography, social theory, and health and well-being. It invites the submission of articles, manifestos, provocations, interviews, dialogical exchanges, and artist contributions that aim to, for example:

Examine labor, work, productivity, or the growth economic paradigm and their relation to bodies/well-being/artistic practices.
Analyze artworks that have made impactful statements about the political economy in which they are embedded and/or offered important insights about reimagining the role of political economy.
Comparatively examine artworks within different political economies.
Trace how politico-economic contexts affect artworks or artistic practices, and vice versa.
Reveal racial capitalism’s impact on artistic practices.
Enter into dialogue with existing publications on art/performance and politics to offer a point of view from a marginalized perspective.
Offer a textual or audio-visual provocation that invites or necessitates a response from a different disciplinary perspective or from another author.

The section’s first issue emerged 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.

Authors should submit a 250–500 word abstract and all inquiries to “Political Economy and the Arts” editor, Katerina Paramana, at katerinaparamana@hotmail.com with “Political Economy and the Arts” in the subject line. Accepted proposals will be invited to develop a 3,000–6,000 word entry for the section. 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