Mark Hayward

"Publishing Cultural Studies: Rethinking Academic Journals"

My paper develops two themes in tandem: one historical, the other conceptual. An active member of the editorial collective for the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies, John Fiske was central in its move to the United States in 1987 and its transformation into Cultural Studies. While a considerable amount has been written about the institutionalization of cultural studies in the university in different national contexts, less attention has been paid to the traditions and practices of publication associated with its emergence. When it is discussed, this move is read as marking the professionalization (which often also is described as the ‘Americanization’) of cultural studies. The collectively-run AJCS becomes the peer-reviewed CS; the fiery birth of cultural studies in the 1970s gives way to academic orthodoxy. Even though it overlooks the international character of the journal, it is a story that echoes many others in the histories of cultural studies.


In 2009, Social Text celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its founding. Cultural Studies/AJCS will reach the same age in 2013. These journal come to middle age in the midst of a period of radical changes in academic publishing: a dramatic concentration of ownership of publishing houses, tightening intellectual property regimes, and the globalization of pressures to publish under increasingly precarious labor conditions. In my paper I return to this earlier moment of transformations in the modes of publication for cultural studies as a launching point for thinking about the present moment.

As scholars working in cultural studies (along with colleagues in many other disciplines) seek new models for producing and sharing knowledge, it is worth revisiting how one aspect of the current institutional landscape of cultural studies came into being. While some of the issues faced in the late-1980s are the same (particularly problems around the financing and distribution for publication), many things have changed over the past three decades as new technologies have developed and the political economy of the academy has been transformed by two decades of neo-liberal policy. This is a project already underway in many places as academic publishing embraces the open access movement.

In the second part of my paper, I move from the historical to the conceptual and ask how might we revisit and rework the scholarly journal today. I argue that it is not enough to merely keep the form, while changing the medium (online) and contributor’s contracts (open access). New kinds of knowledge production are emerging, forms that must be acknowledged in the academy. In this light, it is worth examining the history of experimentations within ACJC/CS (Kites, Spinners, Radar Love) that attempted to break with the form of the standard academic journal, their successes and their limitations. In thinking about these transformations in the textuality of scholarly production, I turn to the work of John Fiske and his analysis of the ‘producerly’ nature of the televisual text. I argue that the models of textual openness and engagement outlined by Fiske in his work on television offer promising models and tools for conceptualizing scholarly publishing in the contemporary moment.