Unruly gestures presents a hybrid performative intervention by means of video, text, and still images. With this experimental essay we aspire to break down various preconceptions about ...reading/writing gestures. Breaking away from a narrative that sees these gestures foremost as passive entities – as either embodiments of pure subjective intentionality, or as bodily movements shaped and controlled by media technologies (enabling specific sensory engagements with texts) – we aim to reappraise them. Indeed, in this essay we identify numerous dominant narratives that relate to gestural agency, to the media-specificity of gestures, and to their (linear) historicity, naturalness and humanism. This essay disrupts these preconceptions, and by doing so, it unfolds an alternative genealogy of ‘unruly gestures.’ These are gestures that challenge gestural conditioning through particular media technologies, cultural power structures, hegemonic discourses, and the biopolitical self. We focus on reading/writing gestures that have disrupted gestural hegemonies and material-discursive forms of gestural control through time and across media. Informed by Tristan Tzara’s cut-up techniques, where through the gesture of cutting the Dadaists subverted established traditions of authorship, intentionality, and linearity, this essay has been cut-up into seven semi-autonomous cine-paragraphs (accessible in video and print). Each of these cine-paragraphs confronts specific gestural preconceptions while simultaneously showcasing various unruly gestures.
In What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe insists "the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist." Our argument, made manifest by this special issue of the Journal of Electronic ...Publishing, is that it is not only our ways of thinking about the world that must change if they are to be posthumanist, or at least not simply humanist; our ways of being and doing in the world must change too. In particular, we view the challenge to humanism and the human brought about by the emergence of artificial intelligence, augmented reality, bioscience, robotics, preemptive, cognitive, and contextual computing, as providing us with an opportunity to reinvent, radically, the ways in which we work, act, and think as theorists.
Living Books Adema, Janneke
2021, 2021-08-31
eBook
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Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative—not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the ...scholarly book as a living and collaborative project—not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, reaching instead for a dynamic and emergent materiality. Adema suggests ways to unbind the book, describing experiments in scholarly book publishing with new forms of anonymous collaborative authorship, radical open access publishing, and processual, living, and remixed publications, among other practices. She doesn't cast digital as the solution and print as the problem; the problem in scholarly publishing, she argues, is not print itself, but the way print has been commodified and essentialized. Adema explores alternative, more ethical models of authorship; constructs an alternative genealogy of openness; and examines opportunities for intervention in current cultures of knowledge production. Finally, asking why it is that we cut and bind our research together at all, she examines two book publishing projects that experiment with remix and reuse and try to rethink and reperform the book-apparatus by taking responsibility for the cuts they make.
This talk will provide an overview of the research on experimental publishing and reuse currently being conducted by the COPIM (Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs) project, ...where we are exploring ways to more closely align existing software, tools and technologies, workflows and infrastructures for experimental publishing with the workflows of open access book publishers. Our research looks at experiments with the book that reimagine the relationalities that constitute academic writing, research, and publishing, and that speculate on what the future of the book and the humanities could look like beyond the printed codex-format as the standard publication choice. This talk will introduce the experimental book Pilot Projects we have co-initiated, and it will discuss our research on situating, and mapping experimental books and open source publishing tools and platforms for experimental book publishing. Finally, this talk will provide recommendations and guidelines to promote interaction around open access books.
Universities have traditionally supported the distribution of critical and cultural theory through departmental and centre publishing (e.g. Working Papers in Cultural Studies) and the establishment ...of university presses. However, over recent decades publishing has been increasingly
outsourced to commercial providers, buttressed by volunteer academic labour extracted for profit by the publishing industry. At the same time, faced with ongoing casualisation and ever-increasing workloads, the labour required for academic publishing is severely undervalued by the university
and in a permanent state of crisis. In this article we put forward a radical proposal for universities to provide scholars dedicated time to support publishing as part of their academic service work. We intervene strongly into discourses that approach the publishing labour crisis by arguing
for calculative solutions in the form of payment or credit. Instead, this article explores reorienting the labour underpinning academic publishing within the university itself by positioning it as an integral part of scholarly research and what it means to be a researcher. We make this argument
through an in-depth engagement with debates on academic citizenship on the value of service work and discourses on academic labour derived from within critical university studies. We further support our argument by drawing on discussions on labour and open access (OA) publishing, referencing
various alternative models currently being developed that, based on scholar-led, library-led and 'new' university press publishing, are experimenting with innovative ways to value and perform labour relations as part of community-controlled collective organisations. As universities
are increasingly financially and infrastructurally supporting such initiatives, particularly with recourse to library budgets, we explore how this in many ways has left labour issues for publishing as a service performed as part of an academic's workload unaltered. We therefore argue
for the urgent need to reconfigure how universities view the labour behind academic publishing, to support more ethical engagements and relations with publishing, bring knowledge production back under the control of academic communities, and to support greater academic autonomy within universities.
Performative Publications Adema, Janneke
Media practice and education,
20/1/2/, Letnik:
19, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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This article is a print rendition of a web-based publication which reflects upon and at the same time is itself an example of performative publishing. A performative publication wants to explore how ...we can bring together and align more closely the material form of a publication with its content. Making use of hypothes.is software, the web-version of this article has been written 'in the margins' of the performative publication it reflects upon, entangling itself with this project at various points. The reflections written in hypothes.is extend the performative publication both theoretically and practically by examining the correlation between performative publishing and technotexts (Hayles), performative materiality (Drucker), liberature (Fajfer), and feminist design (McPherson), and the ethical and political challenges towards academic publishing these kinds of concepts and practices pose. The web-version of this article stresses the collaborative and processual nature of scholarship, where, through hypothes.is both annotators and reviewers have become active participants in this evolving publication, which is both open-ended in time and collaborative in authorship.
This article explores how a cultural studies perspective can be used to critically analyse practices of conducting research within the (digital) humanities. It uses, among others, the example of the ...author’s PhD dissertation currently in process, which is set up as a theoretical and practical intervention into existing discourses surrounding the dominant form of formal communication within the humanities: the scholarly monograph. A methodology of critical praxis is seen as an integral part of the research project as well as an important step in developing academic or research literacy through actively engaging in the production of communicative norms and practices. Envisioning the book as a site of struggle over new forms and systems of communication within academia, the dissertation argues for alternative ways of thinking of and performing the monograph in an experimental manner. By making use of digital platforms, tools and media to share, remix and update the research as it evolves, the aim is to develop a digital, open and collaborative research practice. This will offer a practical critique of the dominant structures, politics and practices of producing and distributing research results. This article thus argues for the empowering potential of critically analysing and actively engaging with the dominant norms underlying communication in the humanities as well as with the structures that determine academic literacy and the established and accepted practices herein. By arguing for a potential new future for the book within scholarly communication as an emergent and evolving form, based on accessibility, sharing, process and change, this article makes a case for new ways of engaging a critical praxis that is more speculatory, open-ended and experimental.
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