IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE UCU STRIKE ACTION, THIS EVENT IS POSTPONED. Join us for our upcoming research event on Wednesday 1st February 2023 at 15.00 at Borough Road Gallery (LSBU, 103 Borough Road) for a talk by Janneke Adema. All welcome.
Further related talks follow, exploring political and experimental interventions in publishing, with Stevphen Shukaitis (1st March) ALSO POSTPONED, and Cristina Cochior & Danny van der Kleij (26 April). MORE INFO TO FOLLOW
Feb 1st 2023 – Janneke Adema
Promoting Bibliodiversity in Academic Publishing: Scaling Small and Experimental Post-Publishing
Drawing from her monograph, Living Books. Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021), and her research conducted as part of the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, Janneke Adema examines in this talk the potential futures of the scholarly monograph in an increasingly digital environment. With the demise of traditional gatekeepers and the introduction of new modes of publishing and distribution, conventional distinctions between publishing (as the activity of making information available to the public) and research are blurring, which has contributed to a raised awareness of when and why we publish (and for what reasons). In this context, this talk argues for the importance of experimenting with alternative ways of thinking and performing the academic monograph and the way it is disseminated. As such, it will discuss both conceptual experimentation with the ways in which publishing is organised and governed, by ways of the principle of ‘scaling small’—as applied in various publishing projects and collectives that Adema supports—as well as material experimentation, especially in relation to the general trend towards living books and the iterative and dynamic publishing of open, distributed, differential, and versioned research, all experiments in knowledge production and dissemination that have the potential to critique our increasingly object-based and commodified scholarship. Adema argues how thinking about publishing as post-publishing highlights how publishing itself, and in particular the platforms on which we publish, should be conceived as an integral part of the research process, and as inherently shaping it.
Dr Janneke Adema (she/her) is a cultural and media theorist working in the fields of (book) publishing and digital culture. She is an Associate Professor in Digital Media at The Centre for Postdigital Cultures (Coventry University). In her research she explores the future of scholarly communications and experimental forms of knowledge production, where her work incorporates processual and performative publishing, radical open access, post-publishing, scholarly poethics, media studies, book history, cultural studies, and critical theory. She explores these issues in depth in her various publications, but also by supporting a variety of scholar-led, not-for-profit publishing projects, including the Radical Open Access Collective, Open Humanities Press, ScholarLed, and Post Office Press (POP), and the Research England and Arcadia funded Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project, on which she is Co-PI. Her monograph Living Books. Experiments in the Posthumanities (MIT Press, 2021) is openly available. You can follow her research on openreflections.wordpress.com.
All speakers are delivering a PhD methodology workshop earlier in the day for LSBU researchers but if you’d like to join, please contact us.