We live in an increasingly übercapitalist society. It’s übercapitalist in that a specific version of neoliberalism, characterised by low pay, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, is growing ever more aggressive; and that the disruptive technology firm Uber offers one of the most high-profile examples of this intensified form of deregulated cap…[Read more]

The first section of David Mitchell’s genre-bending novel, Cloud Atlas (2004), purports to be set in 1850. Narrative clues approximately date the intra-diegetic diary object of this chapter to the period 1851–1910. This article argues for the construction of a stylistic historical imaginary of this period’s language that is not based on mimet…[Read more]

Media research is a vexing enterprise. Trapped in the borderlands between social science and the humanities, the study of media and communication bears the liabilities of both. We have to contend with all the challenges that sociologists and literary scholars face: the subjective baggage of the analyst, her struggle to interpret unstable meanings,…[Read more]

The ‘predatory publishing’ label is often linked to open access in order to discredit it, evoking as this concept does both vanity and self-publishing. Today, however, more and more critical attention is being paid to how this label has been and is still being constructed. On the one hand, the rise of unscrupulous OA publishers who charge aut…[Read more]

In the 1990s, the Internet offered a horizon from which to imagine what society could become, promising autonomy and self-organization next to redistribution of wealth and collectivized means of production. While the former was in line with the dominant ideology of freedom, the latter ran contrary to the expanding enclosures in capitalist…[Read more]

That Elsevier/RELX group has now rebranded itself as a “global provider of information and analytics,” seems indicative of the way academic publishing is increasingly moving into the highly pro table data analytics market. Here the linking of journals and scholarly social networks to the data underlying them through article level metrics, cit…[Read more]

The “transfer of the responsibility of paying for publication to the individual author (or the author’s funding agency or institution)” that is brought about by gold author-pays open access is, as Gary Hall notes in Pirate Philosophy, a “typical neoliberal move.” By placing researchers in a position where they have to compete for the inevitabl…[Read more]

The Geopolitics of Open addresses issues of difference, ideology and infrastructure across the stratified geographies of open access publishing. It examines the construction of power and inequality in our scholarly practices and discourses around the open. How can we contextualise open access, as a contingent and politically-laden concept, within…[Read more]

Several projects within the Radical Open Access Collective (including Mattering Press, Goldsmiths Press, the PPJ, and Capacious) frame the work they do around open access publishing as a form of care. Here publishing is understood as a complex, multi-agential, relational practice. In various ways, these projects are concerned with considering how…[Read more]

This pamphlet explores ways in which to engage scholars to further elaborate the poethics of their scholarship. Following Joan Retallack, who has written extensively about the responsibility that comes with formulating and performing a poetics, which she has captured in her concept of poethics (with an added h), this pamphlet examines what…[Read more]

The block that I am teaching on Birkbeck, University of London’s MA in Critical and Cultural Studies in 2018-2019.

This wide-ranging block focuses on a series of important topics examining the convergence of technology, subjectivity and cultural theory. By examining technological, political, and cultural change, we will consider how 20th and…[Read more]