FCJManager
Why experiment? A critical analysis of the values behind digital scholarly publishing
This is the introduction to a paper published at the Open Reflections blog published by Janneke Adema who is completing a PhD at Coventry University. Janneke discusses our own Open Humanities Press amongst other examples in an account of digital publishing in the humanities as performing an experimental role rather than simply and instrumental one. Janneke Adema holds an MA in History, an MA in Philosophy (both University of Groningen) and, an MA in Book and Digital Media Studies (Leiden University). She has been conducting research for the OAPEN project from 2008 to 2010. Her research for this project focused on user needs and publishing models concerning Open Access books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Her current research concentrates on the influence of online information transmission on research practices within the Humanities and on the way the monograph, as an important form of scholarly communication in this field, is being produced and…
Mesh – Speculations and Submissions
FCJ Mesh has been launched of a desire to foster a more agile space of speculation, provocation, and mobilisation of the kind of deep transdisciplinary theory and analysis published here in The Fibreculture Journal, in like Journals, and increasingly…well… everywhere online. What we might have once called ‘grey’ or ‘precarious’ literature – the always vital academic work published beyond the veil of institutional gatekeeping and auditing is increasingly moving to the visible foreground of academic knowledge production and research creation. Moreover, the constraints on its dispersal and its precarity of form have been largely overcome. These ‘post-institutional’ modes of publishing and of discussing ideas and their implications tend to be more agile, iterative and reticular, they tend to be shorter and more accessible, speculative and exploratory. Whether traditional and convergent forms of academic publishing will survive or can adapt to this shift is yet to be determined. We still see much value…
FCJMesh-003 : On Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures 3/3
This is the third of three in a series of rejoinders commissioned from the Authors of FCJ Issue 20: Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures ahead of a launch and workshop based on the issue, the forthcoming ‘Trolls CFP’, and the future of publishing and FCJ. This rejoinder is written by Rowen Wilken of Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. Rowen is the author of FCJ-146 Mannheims Paradox – Ideology, Utopia, Media Technologies and the Arab Spring. I want to acknowledge all those involved in the production of the ‘Utopias and Speculative Futures’ special issue of The Fibreculture Journal – the issue editors (Su Ballard, Lizzie Muller, and Zita Joyce), the general editor (Andrew Murphie), the other contributors, and others behinds the scenes – for making it such a strong and rich issue. I also wish to thank the issue editors for organising this event (which, unfortunately, I can’t make), and for…
FCJMesh-002 : On Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures 2/3
This is the second of three in a series of 3 rejoinders commissioned from the Authors of Issue 20 Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures ahead of a launch and workshop based on the issue, the forthcoming ‘Trolls CFP’, and the future of publishing. This rejoinder is written by Andrew White of University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Andrew authored FCJ-145 Temporal Utopianism and Global Information Networks Common Utopias. When I talk to students’ about the influence of new media technologies on our lives, I ask them to think about the motor car. In any of the countries that I have taught, thousands of people per year are killed in accidents and a further unknown number suffer the effects of pollution and the dislocation that the car brings. At the same time, the motor car also gives people the freedom to do things they might otherwise not do or that would take…
FCJMesh-001 : On Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures 1/3
This is the first of three in a series of rejoinders commissioned from the Authors of FC-20 Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures ahead of a launch and workshop based on the issue, the forthcoming ‘Trolls CFP’, and the future of publishing. This rejoinder is written by Heather Davis of Concordia University. Heather co-authored of FCJ-143 Ouvert/Open: Common Utopias with Nathalie Casemajor Loustau. What strikes me when reviewing this collection of articles is the complicated relations of power that reside within software and hardware, in the everyday spaces of our lives that are now permeated by various kinds of technological apparatus, to the way in which this added layer poses new problems and new creative tactics of resistance to contemporary global capitalism. Although some of the articles are hopeful in their outlook, many share the astute comment made by Rachel O’Dwyer and Linda Doyle when they say, “We can therefore understand the idealised peer-to-peer economy…
Speculating on Utopia: A Fibreculture Journal Launch and Workshop.
24th September 2012. 12.30 launch with workshop following from 1-4pm. Speculating on Utopia: A Fibreculture Journal and Workshop – Invite PDF To celebrate the launch of Issue 20 of The Fibreculture Journal “Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures” we invite you to a workshop gathering to explore the themes raised by the Issue (twenty.fibreculturejournal.org) and to engage those themes in open speculation and provocation regarding the possible futures and future directions for FCJ after 10 Years and 20 Issues of open access publishing and networked research creation. Between the recently published Networked Utopias and Speculative Futures (2012) issue and the forthcoming Trolls issue (Submissions Open) there is a rich uniquely fibrecultural vein concerned with the politics, desires and dynamics of network culture, creation, and community. Join us in a get together of fibrecultural thinkers, past, present and future to work through these dynamics and the creative/disruptive potential they describe. Location:…
CFP- Special Issue for the Fibreculture Journal: The Politics of Trolling and the Negative Space of the Internet
Edited By Jason Wilson, Christian McCrea and Glen Fuller A great deal of thinking about the Internet and politics is still structured by a desire for deliberative democracy. From 1993 – when Howard Rheingold enunciated one of the Internet’s key founding myths – the virtual community – scholars have sought and found communities characterised by a mutuality of interests, a common purpose, a collaborative striving to renovate the democratic ideal, a tendency towards the “regulative idea” of the ideal speaking position, and an acknowledgement of the obligations of citizenship within the political association. For so long the Internet has continued to function, in Barbrook’s formulation, as a “redemptive technology”. Social media is just the latest in a long line of technologies which may, on a certain vision, rescue liberal democracy, with its decaying civic life and corrupt media, from itself. There is, proportionally, too little attention to the everyday conflicts…
Where to Next?
We’re very happy to be publishing FCJ 20, the Network Utopias issue. It’s a fine issue. With a great deal of subtlety and force, it pulls apart the notion of network utopia, while leaving a great deal of room for what it is that networks truly give us. There’s been an enormous amount of work done by guest editors Su Ballard, Zita Joyce and Lizzie Muller—careful and demanding work. The CFP received a huge response, and Su, Zita and Lizzie have done a wonderful job crafting the issue that we now publish. FCJ wants to warmly thank everyone who submitted abstracts and articles during this process. Of course, we could not publish all the articles we received, and this has often been a cause for genuine sadness at times, but hope the ideas that didn’t make it through the long and complex process of editing this issue find a home…
FCJ-147 Liberation Technology and the Arab Spring: From Utopia to Atopia and Beyond
Ulises A. Mejias SUNY Oswego After some initial fascination with the concept, there now appears to be more skepticism than support for the idea that tools like Twitter and Facebook are single-handedly responsible for igniting the Arab Spring movements. As we witness the immense effort and human cost that has gone into uprisings in Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Western Sahara and Yemen, we recognise that it takes much more than a social media platform to organise and sustain a grassroots protest movement. And yet, the neoliberal discourse behind the trope of a “Twitter Revolution” (a revolution enabled by “liberation technologies” which empower oppressed groups) continues to function—especially in Western media and academia—as a utopian discourse that conceals the role of communicative capitalism in undermining democracy. The meme of the Twitter Revolution may have come and gone, but the…
FCJ-146 Mannheim’s Paradox: Ideology, Utopia, Media Technologies, and the Arab Spring
Rowan Wilken Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne Introduction This article explores the complicated historical relationship between ideology and utopia in European thought, and what this relationship can teach us when faced with the exuberant promises that characterise much new media discourse. Discussion is divided into two parts. The first develops a detailed account of how this pairing of ideology and utopia has been theorised in the influential (if contentious) earlier work of Karl Mannheim, and how the work and ideas of Mannheim have been taken up (and critiqued) by more recent critics, including Paul Ricoeur, among others. The second then uses the example of the use of social and other media technologies during the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ of 2010-2011 as a basis from which to consider how applicable these twin ideas of ideology and utopia are to an examination of media technologies and the discourses that attend and structure our…
Future Issues and Archives
Connections
- ARCDigital
- C-Theory
- Cntr History & New Media
- CoDE
- Computational Culture
- Cosmos and History
- Ctrl-Z
- Culture Machine
- Digital Culture and Ed…
- Digital Humanities Alliance
- Digital Studies
- Eludamos
- Film-Philosophy
- First Monday
- Future of the Book
- Hyperrhiz
- Inflexions
- Institute of Net Cultures
- Jrnal Digital Information
- Junctures
- nmediac
- Noema
- Open Humanities Alliance
- Open Humanities Press
- Parrhesia
- Public Library of Science
- Sarai
- Transformations
- Vague Terrain
