boundary 2

Another journal founded in the poststructural moment of early 1970s, boundary 2 today has taken a turn away from its initial concerns, but seems unsure of where it's going. Initially edited at SUNY-Buffalo, it once mixed theory with postmodern poetry (Black Mountain and SUNY-Buffalo poets like Creeley, Olsen, and Bernstein), publishing as many poems as essays in its early issues. boundary 2 implicated itself in the debates around deconstruction and postmodern aesthetics through the 70s and 80s. Postmodernism for this journal was, with few exceptions, celebrated as a sort of Nietzschean anti-enlightenment discourse full of liberatory potential, leveraged against the totalizing knowledges of scientific modernity and the ambitious aesthetic and architectural works of high modernism.

Now edited at the University of Pittsburgh, boundary 2 has reimagined itself. In the early 2000s, its submissions page was revised to read the following:

The editors of boundary 2 announce that they no longer intend to publish in the standard professional areas, but only materials that identify and analyze the tyrannies of thought and action spreading around the world and that suggest alternatives to these emerging configurations of power. To this end, we wish to inform our readers that, until further notice, the journal will not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

(We should note in passing that they haven't closed submissions: each issue tends to contain CFPs for upcoming special issues.) Whether they've lived up to this re-politicization, though, is a matter of debate. They haven't entirely abandoned the literary forms on which they staked their initial reputation (recent special issue on contemporary poetics from Chistian Bok to flarf; another on “big” novels since Gravity's Rainbow; essays discussing Bernstein, Ashberry, and Baraka). But beyond these literary interests, boundary 2 appears to have taken seriously questions raised by the globalization of culture. Special issues on Chinese cultural politics and political form, as well as on the 1960s as a multi-polar “event” (in France's May '68, but also Latin America, Poland, the Caribbean, and the “New” South [U.S.]), as well as a continuing interest in global film, suggest a genuine attempt to engage with non-western epistemologies and political forms. This despite the obvious constraints of a journal published and largely written within the American academy.

Other recent concerns include the fate of the university; the Tea Party; techno-animality; the Catholic Church's relationship to science; Said on Zionism; Gramsci on civil society; Virilio on Virilio; states of emergency and republican power; and, at last, a “zombie manifesto”.

Critical Inquiry

A prestige journal in the humanities that seems quite aware of its status. But given the academic celebrity of many of its contributors, and its generally forbidding editorial standard (it very rarely publishes grad students), it tends to reflect, and occasionally set, many of the current agendas of (American) humanities research.

The journal is supported at the University of Chicago, from which it draws much, but not all, of its editorial board. It was founded in 1974, a latecomer in the spate of journals founded after “theory”'s introduction to the American academy. Here's editorial board member James Chandler on the journal's reticent engagement with theory:

There was something latent in [CI's] strange unfashionability that gave the journal its chance. I want to describe this as a distinctive kind of attention to the disciplinary system of the cold war university. Not exactly theory—at least not theory in the sense that we have come to associate it with, say, the famous Johns Hopkins symposium on structuralism in 1968. It was something more, well, Aristotelian than that, a methodological self-consciousness about critical practice that might better be described as a sense of where one is in the disciplinary scheme of things—at least in that part of the scheme that pertains to the arts, the humanities, and the interpretive social sciences. (James Chandler, “Critical Disciplinarity”, CI 30.2 (Winter 2004): 355-60)

Ambivalence towards disciplinarity in the wake of 1960s poststructural critiques of the human sciences has always informed CI's sense of itself. It continues to tack closer to the literary uptake of high theory (or at least high seriousness) than cultural studies. Where cultural studies's interdisciplinarity has always been a critique of academic disciplines, direct or implied, CI's focus on a meta-disciplinary idea of the humanities is far less willing to dismiss past scholarship, for better and for worse.

An anniversary issue in 2004 (from which I pulled the above quote) asked many contributors to comment on the project of “critical inquiry” today. Responses varied, but a major preoccupation was the disconnect between theory and politics. The immediate occasion was the beginning of the Iraq invasion, which caused some soul-searching about the (non-)effects of theory. Since then, the journal has published more explicitly political content, especially on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (translation of an exchange between Blanchot and Levinas; controversy over the Frank Gehry-designed Museum of Tolerance planned for Jerusalem). Incidentally, major theorists's contributions tend to stay within the limits of some narrower idea of politics: Zizek (tolerance, pluralism), Jameson (space flight, Sokurov), Butler (academic freedom) and Nancy Fraser (justice) all apparently shop their more committed Marxist or feminist writings elsewhere.

Other recent directions: science studies and ecology; translations of essays by Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, and Roberto Esposito; interrogating multitude and governmentality; art histories and media materialities; literature and reading, considered within a broader framework of media studies; individual essays on Agamben, Deleuze, Foucault; memorials for Edward Said and Derrida; and, laudably, more writing from social scientists than most other cultural studies journals. University of Chicago anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins, Michael Taussig, and Jean and John Comaroff publish here, bringing a different tradition of thinking about culture to bear.

TOPIA

TOPIA was established in 1997 and emphasizes, but does not limit itself to, investigations of Canadian culture and society. Published out of offices at York University through the combined efforts of Wilfrid Laurier Press and Cape Breton University Press, TOPIA remains Canada's only journal explicitly dedicated to cultural studies.

Papers published in TOPIA tend to consist of applied critical theory, or cross-disciplinary cultural analysis, with an emphasis on the political role culture plays as a vehicle for social transformation. The online archive emphasizes in TOPIA's mandate a concern for the reading, and re-reading of history in light of the mulitdisciplinary space offered by cultural studies, as well as encouraging reflection on the dynamics and politics of disciplinarity itself. In the editorial of the tenth anniversary issue, editor Jody Berland points out the advantage of cultural studies' relatively open status as a discipline in Canada: being one of the few Canadian journals dedicated to this emergent approach to the human sciences, TOPIA is able to escape the kind of splintering and specialization that might be produced by a more diversified field (Fall 2007).

Alongside its acceptance of diverse critical approaches to the study of culture, TOPIA offers a shifting focal point of analysis in the form of special issues dedicated to particular topics. It is also possible to detect in the journal's recent publication history an increased emphasis on globalism and the international. Recent issues have focused on diaspora (2007), Islam (2008), ecology and the environment (2009), a double issue on "Cultures of Militarization" (Oct 2010) and an issue on Bollywood (forthcoming, Fall 2011). Earlier special issues focus on feminist cultural materialism (2005), and technology and culture (2004).

Areas of research relevant to TOPIA are: the historical, institutional, and aesthetic formation of Canadian culture; analysis of visual art, film, television, music, literature and popular culture in Canada; the sociology of museums, galleries and the art market; the evolution of environmental geopolitics, city planning, architecture, landscape and new approaches to nature; cultural studies of science and technology; social, cultural and spatial configurations of new technologies; Canada's cultural industries; nationalism, multiculturalism, and the contemporary nation-state in the era of global integration. What unites these very diverse areas of investigation is the central role played by culture in contemporary social transformation. (TOPIA website)

TOPIA is published twice a year, and submissions are subject to blind peer review. In addition to essays, the journal publishes reviews, and regularly includes a catch-all section called "Offerings" which presents shorter pieces, round-table discussions, etc. The journal also publishes a regular column on "Cultural Studies and Political Economy". For the past two years, TOPIA has received funding from SSHRC.

Cultural Critique

Bashful, cryptic, or something else altogether - I'm not sure what the reason is, but Cultural Critique doesn't have much information about itself posted online.

Perhaps not bashful, since one of the few statements the journal does offer includes the term "path-breaking." Its scope and content are meant to be "international," engaging in "cultural analysis" and "[e]mphasizing critique rather than criticism." It's unclear what precisely is meant by this last distinction. It's left up to the reader to discover that through reading through essays the journal has published.

There seems to be a fair amount of breadth in what the journal is willing to cover, anything involving "culture, theory, and politics," it seems, from analysis of media texts and cultural issues, to close readings of theory and dialog with theoretical frameworks (including "Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, political economy, and hermeneutics"). In addition to essays they regularly publish fairly substantial book reviews with an explicit emphasis on work that might not get reviewed elsewhere.

The journal has three main editors, all from University of Minnesota, and Cultural Critique is, in fact, housed in Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. The larger editorial collective mostly comprises American scholars but includes a couple from elsewhere  (UK, Canada).

Although our understanding is that the journal is peer-reviewed, the website doesn't say so. Unsolicited manuscripts seem to be welcome, but allow for a minimum four-month response to contributions.

Cultural Critique publishes three times a year, and since it's onto issue 75 now it's probablyt 25 years old, though again, the website doesn't say.

They do have a sense of their readership though, and state that the journal is subscribed to by:
"Academics and students in English, cultural studies, drama, literary theory, language studies, sociology, political science, and comparative literature."

There are themed issues but also many issues with no particular focus. Essay topics range widely. But in general there seems to be an emphasis on issues and theories more than texts.

Culture Machine

Established in 1999, Culture Machine (CM) is an annual, online, open-access journal that presents itself as a site of “fundamental research” in cultural studies and cultural theory, with a goal to undercut existing paradigms and assumptions of the field. Based in the UK, the editorial board of CM is dominated by younger scholars such as Gary Hall, Clare Birchall, Joanna Zylinska and Jeremy Gilbert (all featured in the 2006 New Cultural Studies anthology). In opposition to the prior generation of cultural studies journals, such as Social Text, CM explicitly rejects any particular agenda or project (cultural, theoretical, social, ethical or, perhaps most interestingly, political) and retains a traditional system of peer-review. Despite this, many of the articles published in CM seem to favour a lighter, playful style of scholarship which would seem to indicate a common editorial tone.

Central to CM is a particular focus upon issues of “experimentation.” While the journal seems to follow the recent trend towards themed issues – all 11 issues of CM have been themed – articles often take up familiar themes such as “biopolitics” and “deconstruction” in unusual ways, whether through shifts in interpretation and emphasis (for example, biopolitics is understood in terms of scientific biology, such as biotech, cellular biology and drugs) or through experimental forms of presentation, particularly with respect to new media. In recent years the journal seems to have become increasingly concerned with new media, both as a site that speaks to wider cultural concerns, and as a means to offer new forms of more open-ended, speculative and risk-taking scholarship.

Even more interestingly, CM seems willing to let these experiments fail if they’re not working out, as evinced in their somewhat abandoned supplementary projects, such as the under-stocked Csearch Archive, and the Interzones, a section for non-standard forms of scholarship (which mostly consists of shorter or longer, lyrical or polemic pieces). They do, however, retain their rolling reviews section, which takes advantage of the ease of online publishing to stay as up-to-date as possible, and the more unorthodox wiki-inspired Liquid Theory project (http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/w/page/11135951/FrontPage).

Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies

Continuum is the journal affiliated with the Cultural Studies Association of Australia (CSAA).

They've been around for a couple of decades, publishing around 6 peer-reviewed issues a year. They claim to be a venue for new voices and renowned scholars, looking at "new areas for investigation" and "new agendas for enquiry." The papers they print might engage with teaching or thinking about media and culture, but they're generally expected to focus on the "relationship between media texts and wider questions of culture."

Stated themes and issues:

• communities, publics, nations
• taste and value
• international mediascapes
• policy, industry, academic interventions
• disciplinary issues in history, media studies, cultural studies, philosophy, visual arts
• technologies, identities, cultures

As all the above suggests, the articles in the journal tend to hone in on particular media texts as an entry point into broader cultural and social issues, but in a way that reads these texts not simply as indicators or symptoms but looks at the kind of work they do and how they do it. The emphasis on media tends to lead to a lot work (including themed issues) on various facets of popular culture, particularly film and television.

Social Text – some collected thoughts

After perusing the Social Text website, multiple recent abtracts, and a few articles (including the 30-year anniversary introduction) we have emerged with a few general impressions about the journal.

Social Text seems to be particularly invested in examinations of concrete political issues and events, often alongside the generation or discovery of new archives to investigate. However, there seems to be an ongoing, or at least recurring methodological debate, about the role and usefulness of formal analysis in relation to cultural and social theory. Cultural objects seem to serve primarily as starting points for reflections and critiques (on/of ideology, power, etc.).

The way the journal operates through an editorial collective (eschewing anonymous peer review) has changed over time but remains a distinguishing feature. It's hard to determine, without doing further research, the composition of the current collective or what impact this has on what the journal publishes.

According to the introduction we read, the journal has sustained its interest in the "politics of academic labour," the "complexities of war and imperialism," postcolonial theory and queer theory, while debates focusing on mass culture or postmodernism seem to have fallen by the wayside (17) – the latter inevitably(?) tied up with the misleading Sokal incident of 1996.

There appears to be little explicit referencing of Marxism in what the journal publishes now, but its Marxist origins might be glimpsed in its continued emphasis on material and empirical matters. Though Social Text still describes itself in terms of the leading edge it probably lies much closer to the centre now in terms of cultural studies scholarship and research. Key words like "globalization," "diaspora," "corporate culture" and "transnational history" seem to reflect predominant more than groundbreaking concerns in contemporary cultural studies.

This last point led us to broader, open-ended questions about the role of journals in contemporary academia and the inherent conventionalism of a standard print journal of academic essays. Food for future thought...

journals and new knowledge, part 1: Social Text

For the year and a bit we've been active, we CSRG folks have been organizing our ongoing reading and discussions thematically, focusing on particular trends and topics in contemporary cultural studies. So far that has meant spending some time trying to get a handle on how cultural studies sees itself now, intersections between cultural studies and science, and critical studies of popular culture.

This fall, we will be looking at journals, e-journals and new media sites that publish contemporary scholarship in the field (as well as developing a list of such sources). We're interested in the various ways in which questions in cultural studies are being approached and researched (and also in looking at what is left out of these approaches), which questions seem most pressing within the field and which aren't being asked. Can we see a strong consensus on what counts as new knowledge or original research in cultural studies? What types of research (ethnography, for example, or textual analysis) are being privileged or, perhaps, marginalized?

Our starting point for this exploration is the journal Social Text, taking our cue from last week's listening adventure in the form of a podcast by Toby Miller (see "tobymiller's culturalstudies #1"). Miller identifies Social Text (a journal he has been affiliated with) as a pre-eminent publication in cultural studies, and you'll find a similar claim in the journal's own "about" statement as well. Have a look around the Social Text website, and browse through some recent tables of contents and abstracts. If you have time, read the 27.3 (2009) anniversary editorial by Brent Hayes Edwards and Anna McCarthy (available online through our library catalogue), which gives some background about the journal as an organization. Try to keep in mind some of the questions above and come prepared to talk about what Social Text's version of cultural studies looks like.

A Preliminary List of Cultural Studies Journals

Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Angelaki “was established in September 1993 to provide an international forum for vanguard work in the theoretical humanities. In itself a contentious category, 'theoretical humanities' represents the productive nexus of work in the disciplinary fields of literary criticism and theory, philosophy, and cultural studies. The journal is dedicated to the refreshing of intellectual coordinates, and to the challenging and vivifying process of re-thinking.”

ariel

ariel “is a refereed journal devoted to the critical and scholarly study of the new and the established literatures in English around the world. It welcomes particularly articles on the relationships among the new literatures and between the new and the established literatures. ariel is published four times a year.”

boundary 2

“Extending beyond the postmodern, boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, approaches problems in these areas from a number of politically, historically, and theoretically informed perspectives. boundary 2 remains committed to understanding the present and approaching the study of national and international culture and politics through literature and the human sciences.”

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies “is a journal founded in 2004 that publishes scholarship for an international readership on communication as a theory, practice, technology, and discipline of power. The journal features critical inquiry that cuts across academic boundaries to focus on social, political, and cultural practices from the standpoint of communication. It promotes critical reflection on the requirements of a more democratic culture by giving attention to subjects such as, but not limited to, class, race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality, polity, public sphere, nation, environment, and globalization.”

Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies

Continuum “is an academic journal of media and cultural studies. For over two decades it has contributed to the formation of these disciplines by identifying new areas for investigation and developing new agendas for enquiry in the fields. The journal has consistently provided a space for important new voices in media and cultural studies, while also featuring the work of internationally renowned scholars. Continuum is now one of the most highly regarded and most cited journals in media and cultural studies.”

Critical Inquiry

Critical Inquiry “has published the best critical thought in the arts and humanities since 1974. Combining a commitment to rigorous scholarship with a vital concern for dialogue and debate, the journal presents articles by eminent critics, scholars, and artists on a wide variety of issues central to contemporary criticism and culture. In Critical Iinquiry new ideas and reconsideration of those traditional in criticism and culture are granted a voice. The wide interdisciplinary focus creates surprising juxtapositions and linkages of concepts, offering new grounds for theoretical debate.”

Cultural Critique

“Cultural Critique brings together some of the most important work within cultural analysis, investigating culture from a theoretically broad perspective and from an international point of view. Cultural Critique provides a forum for international and interdisciplinary explorations of intellectual controversies, trends, and issues in culture, theory, and politics. Emphasizing critique rather than criticism, the journal draws on the diverse and conflictual approaches of Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, political economy, and hermeneutics to offer readings in society and its tranformation.”

Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies “is an international journal which explores the relation between cultural practices, everyday life, material, economic, political, geographical and historical contexts. It fosters more open analytic, critical and political conversations by encouraging people to push the dialogue into fresh, uncharted territory. It also aims to intervene in the processes by which the existing techniques, institutions and structures of power are reproduced, resisted and transformed.”

Culture, Theory and Critique

Culture, Theory and Critique “is a refereed, interdisciplinary journal for the transformation and development of critical theories in the humanities and social sciences. It aims to critique and reconstruct theories by interfacing them with one another and by relocating them in new sites and conjunctures. Culture, Theory and Critique's approach to theoretical refinement and innovation is one of interaction and hybridisation via recontextualisation and transculturation.”

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies “first appeared in 1989 at the moment of a critical encounter—a head-on collision, one might say—of theories of difference (primarily Continental) and the politics of diversity (primarily American). In the ensuing years, the journal has established a critical forum where the problematic of differences is explored in texts ranging from the literary and the visual to the political and social. differences highlights theoretical debates across the disciplines that address the ways concepts and categories of difference—notably but not exclusively gender—operate within culture.”

English Studies in Canada

English Studies in Canada (ESC) “publishes articles on topics that fall into the disciplinary purview of "English studies" broadly understood. In addition to literary criticism, the journal welcomes articles that take up the methodologies of cultural studies, critical theory, and interdisciplinary studies. ESC also publishes review articles, book reviews, and readers' forums on matters of interest to the discipline.”

European Journal of Cultural Studies

European Journal of Cultural Studies “is a major journal based in Europe which promotes a conception of cultural studies rooted in lived experience. The journal adopts a broad-ranging view of cultural studies, charting new questions and new research, and mapping the transformation of cultural studies in the years to come. The journal is interdisciplinary bringing together articles from a textual, philosophical and social scientific background, as well as from cultural studies. It engages in critical discussions on power relations concerning gender, class, sexual preference, ethnicity and other macro or micro sites of political struggle.”

Feminist Media Studies

Feminist Media Studies “provides a transdisciplinary, transnational forum for researchers pursuing feminist approaches to the field of media and communication studies, with attention to the historical, philosophical, cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions and analysis of sites including print and electronic media, film and the arts, and new media technologies. The journal invites contributions from feminist researchers working across a range of disciplines and conceptual perspectives.”

Film Journal International

Film Journal International, “celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2009, is a trade publication and website covering the motion picture industry, with special emphasis on theatrical exhibition. Articles report on U.S. and international news, with features on upcoming movies, industry trends, theatre design, equipment, concessions, digital cinema, sound, screen advertising, and other industry-related topics. Additional issues contain special guides to international distribution and exhibition, as well as equipment and concessions for the motion picture industry.”

Film Quarterly

“Combining the best of scholarship and journalism since 1959, Film Quarterly publishes wide-ranging, well-crafted, incisive, and detailed writing for thoughtful movie lovers. In Film Quarterly, you will find: In-depth review essays on major recent films; Punchy, provocative columnists; Commentary on digital technology and online moving images; Coverage of television, documentary, and the avant-garde; An unrivalled book review section; Contributions from filmmakers; Debate and argument about what matters in film culture.”

Globalizations

Globalizations “seeks to publish the best work exploring new meanings of globalization, bringing fresh ideas to the concept, broadening its scope, and contributing to shaping the debates of the future. Globalizations is dedicated to opening the widest possible space for discussion of alternatives to a narrow economic understanding of globalization. The move from the singular to the plural is deliberate and implies skepticism of the idea that there can ever be a single theory or interpretation of globalization. Rather, the journal will seek to encourage the exploration and discussion of multiple interpretations and multiple processes that may constitute many possible globalizations, many possible alternatives.”

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

“The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television is an interdisciplinary journal concerned with the evidence produced by the mass media for historians and social scientists, and with the impact of mass communications on the political and social history of the twentieth century. The needs of those engaged in research and teaching are served by scholarly articles, book reviews and by archival reports concerned with the preservation and availability of records. The journal also reviews films, television and radio programmes of historical or educational importance. In addition, it aims to provide a survey of developments in the teaching of history and social science courses which involve the use of film and broadcast materials.”

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power

Identities “explores the relationship of racial, ethnic and national identities and power hierarchies within national and global arenas. It examines the collective representations of social, political, economic and cultural boundaries as aspects of processes of domination, struggle and resistance, and it probes the unidentified and unarticulated class structures and gender relations that remain integral to both maintaining and challenging subordination. The journal illuminates the relationship between culture and power and transports the field of ethnic studies beyond descriptions of cultural diversity.”

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies “gives a long overdue voice, throughout the global intellectual community, to those concerned with inter-Asia processes. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies includes discussion, reports and analysis from global critical circles, and especially from marginalised sites, with the aim of enhancing the communication and exchange between inter-Asia and other regions of the cultural studies world.”

International Journal of Cultural Studies

International Journal of Cultural Studies “provides a lively meeting-place for international perspectives on cultural and media developments across the globe. The journal features theoretical, empirical and historical research which is based in local and regional realities, and deals with everyday practices, identities, media, texts and cultural forms. It publishes work which suggests new directions, ideas and modes of inquiry to reinvigorate cultural studies for a new generation of researchers and readers.”

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies “is a specialist peer-reviewed journal focusing on the following aspects of postcolonial research, theory and politics: The histories of imperialism and colonialism; The role of culture (academic, literary and popular) in the operation of imperialism and in the formations of national resistance; Liberation struggles, past and ongoing; The role of religion and culture in new nationalisms; The contemporary politics of identity, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality; The economics of neo-colonialism; Diaspora and migrancy; Indigenous fourth-world cultures; The connections between colonialism and modernity, postcolonialism and postmodernism.”

Journal of African Cultural Studies

“The Journal of African Cultural Studies is an international journal providing a forum for perceptions of African culture from inside and outside Africa, with a special commitment to African scholarship. It focuses on dimensions of African culture including African literatures both oral and written, performance arts, visual arts, music, the role of the media, the relationship between culture and power, as well as issues within such fields as popular culture in Africa, sociolinguistic topics of cultural interest, and culture and gender.”

Journal of Intercultural Studies

Journal of Intercultural Studies “showcases innovative scholarship about emerging cultural formations, intercultural negotiations and contemporary challenges to cultures and identities. Journal of Intercultural Studies welcomes theoretically informed articles from diverse disciplines that contribute to the following discussions: Reconceptualising notions of nationhood, citizenship and racialisation; Questioning theories of diaspora, transnationalism, hybridity and 'border crossing' and their contextualised applications; Exploring the contemporary sociocultural formations of ethnicity, postcolonialism and indigeneity; Examining how past and contemporary key scholars can inform current thinking on cross-cultural knowledge, multiculturalism, race and cultural identity.

Journal of Popular Culture

“The popular culture movement was founded on the principle that the perspectives and experiences of common folk offer compelling insights into the social world.  The fabric of human social life is not merely the art deemed worthy to hang in museums, the books that have won literary prizes or been named "classics," or the religious and social ceremonies carried out by societies' elite.  The Journal of Popular Culture continues to break down the barriers between so-called "low" and "high" culture and focuses on filling in the gaps that a neglect of popular culture has left in our understanding of the workings of society.”

Journal of Popular Film and Television

“How did Casablanca affect the home front during World War II? What is the postfeminist significance of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? The Journal of Popular Film and Television answers such far-ranging questions by using the methods of popular culture studies to examine commercial film and television, historical and contemporary. Articles discuss networks, genres, series, and audiences, as well as celebrity stars, directors, and studios. Regular features include essays on the social and cultural background of films and television programs, filmographies, bibliographies, and commissioned book and video reviews.”

Media, Culture, Society

Media, Culture & Society “provides a major international forum for the presentation of research and discussion concerning the media, including the newer information and communication technologies, within their political, economic, cultural and historical contexts. The journal is interdisciplinary, regularly engaging with a wider range of issues in cultural and social analysis. Its focus is on substantive topics and on critique and innovation in theory and method.”

Mediations

“Published twice yearly, Mediations is the journal of the Marxist Literary Group. We publish dossiers of translated material on special topics and peer-reviewed general issues, usually in alternation.”

New Formations

new formations “has established a reputation nationally and internationally as Britain's most significant interdisciplinary journal of culture, politics and theory. It brings new and challenging perspectives of cultural analysis to bear on the cutting edge of politics. Always at the forefront of intellectual debate, new formations has covered issues ranging from the seduction of perversity to questions of nationalism and post-colonialism.”

New Left Review

“Established for forty years as a key journal of the international Left, NLR has been transformed since 2000 into a new resource for the new century. Its range covers world politics and the global economy; state powers and protest movements; contemporary social theory; history and philosophy; cinema and literature; heterodox art and aesthetics. It stands resolutely opposed to Third Way pieties and neoliberal prescriptions, combating capital's current apologists with sharp and scholarly analysis, internationalist critique, polemic and experiential prose.”

October

“At the forefront of art criticism and theory, October focuses critical attention on the contemporary arts and their various contexts of interpretation: film, painting, music, media, photography, performance, sculpture, and literature. Examining relationships between the arts and their critical and social contexts, October addresses a broad range of readers. Original, innovative, provocative, each issue presents the best, most current texts by and about today's artistic, intellectual and critical vanguard.”

Parallax

“Founded in 1995, parallax has established an international reputation for bringing together outstanding new work in cultural studies, critical theory and philosophy. parallax publishes themed issues that aim to provoke exploratory, interdisciplinary thinking and response. Each issue of parallax provides a forum for a wide spectrum of perspectives on a topical question or concern. parallax will be of interest to those working in cultural studies, critical theory, cultural history, philosophy, gender studies, queer theory, post-colonial theory, English and comparative literature, aesthetics, art history and visual cultures.”

Public Culture

“In the twenty years of its existence, Public Culture has established itself as a prize-winning, field-defining cultural studies journal. Public Culture seeks a critical understanding of the global cultural flows and the cultural forms of the public sphere which define the late twentieth century. As such, the journal provides a forum for the discussion of the places and occasions where cultural, social, and political differences emerge as public phenomena, manifested in everything from highly particular and localized events in popular or folk culture to global advertising, consumption, and information networks.”

Quarterly Review of Film and Video

Quarterly Review of Film and Video “publishes critical, historical, and theoretical essays, book reviews, and interviews in the area of moving image studies including film, video, and digital imagery studies.Our scope is international and interdisciplinary. Contributions from diverse critical, theoretical, and historical perspectives are welcomed.”

Resources for Feminist Research/ Documentation sur la recherche féministe

“Resources for Feminist Research / Documentation sur la recherche féministe is a bilingual (English/French) Canadian scholarly journal published since 1972 in the Centre for Women's Studies in Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education / University of Toronto. RFR/DRF addresses Canadian and international feminist research issues and debates. The journal's objectives are to publish critical work addressing a broad range of issues relevant to feminist theory and activism, provide an educational resource and a forum for the communication of ideas, news, and other information of interest to the community of feminist scholars, and to encourage research on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality and class, and how they inform and affect the conditions of women's lives.”

Review of Education, Pedagogy and Cultural Studies

The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies “is the only journal which publishes critical essays that explore pedagogy and its relation to a wide variety of political, social, cultural and economic issues. It is particularly concerned with issues focusing on how pedagogy works within and across a variety of sites (not limited to formal spaces of education, but including popular culture, museums, film, and other cultural spaces) and how pedagogical practices emerge out of specific historical struggles, concrete projects, and particular relations of power. The journal is interdisciplinary, and addresses the relationship of race, class, age and gender to particular projects, struggles, and issues.”

Social Text

Social Text “covers a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena, applying the latest interpretive methods to the world at large. A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies, the journal consistently focuses attention on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment, publishing key works by the most influential social and cultural theorists. As a journal at the forefront of cultural theory, Social Text invites provocative interviews and challenging articles from emerging critical voices. Each issue breaks new ground in the debates about postcolonialism, postmodernism, and popular culture.”

Social Identities

“Recent years have witnessed considerable worldwide changes concerning social identities such as race, nation and ethnicity, as well as the emergence of new forms of racism and nationalism as discriminatory exclusions. Social Identities aims to furnish an interdisciplinary and international focal point for theorizing issues at the interface of social identities.The journal is especially concerned to address these issues in the context of the transforming political economies and cultures of postmodern and postcolonial conditions. Social Identities is intended as a forum for contesting ideas and debates concerning the formations of, and transformations in, socially significant identities, their attendant forms of material exclusion and power, as well as the political and cultural possibilities opened up by these identifications.

South Atlantic Quarterly

“Founded amid controversy in 1901, the South Atlantic Quarterly continues to cover the beat, center and fringe, with bold analyses of the current scene—national, cultural, intellectual—worldwide. Now published exclusively in special issues, this vanguard centenarian journal is tackling embattled states, evaluating postmodernity's influential writers and intellectuals, and examining a wide range of cultural phenomena.”

Space and Culture

Space and Culture brings together dynamic, critical interdisciplinary research at the interface of cultural geography, sociology, cultural studies, architectural theory, ethnography, communications, urban studies, environmental studies and discourse analysis. Space and Culture's unique focus is on social spaces, such as the home, laboratory, leisure spaces, the city, and virtual spaces. In every issue, Space and Culture explores and critiques everyday life in contemporary cities, environment, and new media.”

Substance

Substance “is a major interdisciplinary journal with a long-standing reputation for publishing innovative work on literature and culture. While its main focus has been on French literature and continental theory, the journal is known for its openness to original thinking in all the discourses that interact with literature, including philosophy, natural and social sciences, and the arts. Join the discerning readers of Substance who enjoy crossing borders and challenging limits.”

Television and New Media

Television & New Media “is a new international journal devoted to the most recent trends in television and new media studies. TVNM addresses questions of how issues of economics and power are enacted in television. The journal focuses on textual analysis, political economy, cultural history, policy advocacy, audience ethnography, and economic and power issues that have an impact on the media.”

Theory, Culture & Society

Theory, Culture & Society “is a highly ranked, high impact factor, rigorously peer reviewed journal that publishes original research and review articles in the social and cultural sciences. Launched in 1982 to cater for the resurgence of interest in culture within contemporary social science, Theory, Culture & Society provides a forum for articles which theorize the relationship between culture and society. Theory, Culture & Society is at the cutting edge of recent developments in social and cultural theory. The journal has helped to break down some of the disciplinary barriers between the humanities and the social sciences by opening up a wide range of new questions in cultural theory.”

Theory and Society

“The journal Theory and Society publishes theoretically-informed analyses of social processes, providing a forum for an international community of scholars. It opens its pages to authors working at the frontiers of social analysis, regardless of discipline. The coverage ranges across a broad landscape, from prehistory to contemporary affairs, from treatments of individuals to nations to world culture, from discussions of theory to methodological critique, from First World to Third World. The effort is always to bring together theory, criticism and concrete observation.”

Third Text

Third Text “is an international scholarly journal dedicated to providing critical perspectives on art and visual culture. The journal examines the theoretical and historical ground by which the West legitimises its position as the ultimate arbiter of what is significant within this field. Established in 1987, the journal provides a forum for the discussion and (re)appraisal of theory and practice of art, art history and criticism, and the work of artists hitherto marginalised through racial, gender, religious and cultural differences. Dealing with diversity of art practices - visual arts, sculpture, installation, performance, photography, video and film - Third Text addresses the complex cultural realities that emerge when different worldviews meet, and the challenge this poses to Eurocentrism and ethnocentric aesthetic criteria.”

First Meeting, Fall 2010

The first meeting of the CSRG will be on Wed. Sept. 22 at 4:30 in CNH 207. We're asking those interested in participating to listen to an episode of a new podcast called culturalstudies, which you can find at: http://culturalstudies.podbean.com/ The episode we'll be discussing is the inaugural post, called "tobymiller's culturalstudies #1" posted on July 30, 2010 (find it in the archives).Hope to see you there!