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In the sciences, the merits and ramifications of open access-the electronic publishing model that gives readers free, irrevocable, worldwide, and perpetual access to research-has been vigorously debated and is now increasingly proposed as a valid means of both disseminating knowledge and career advancement. In Digitize This Book! Gary Hall presents a timely and ambitious polemic on the potential that open access publishing has to transform both "papercentric" humanities scholarship and the institution of the university itself. Hall, a pioneer in open access publishing in the humanities, explor

Preface -- 1. Some Frequently Asked Questions -- 2. "It's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate" Why Cultural Studies is So "Naff" -- 3. "Something Else Besides" The Third Way of Angela McRobbie -- 4. The Monstrous Future of Cultural Studies -- 5. Beyond Marxism and Psychoanalysis -- 6. www.culturalstudies.ac.uk

This is an extended 'author's cut' of a chapter that was first published as Gary Hall 'Postdigital Politics', in Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder, eds, Aesthetics of the Commons (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2021) https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/postdigital-politics-6925 --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- In 'Postdigital Politics' I examine our contemporary postdigital political conjuncture. This conjuncture, I argue, springs from the crisis of representative democracy we are currently experiencing and involves a shift to more direct forms of democracy via postdigital communications. The latter is evident in the decentralised manner in which movements such as the Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter operate. I analyse how the traditional political opposition between 'left' and 'right' has been overlaid in many places around the world by that between populist nativism and elitist internationalism. I also discuss the way in which populist right-wing politicians (e.g., Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro) have used the possibilities created by postdigital media technologies to create a new model of political communications, one that is capable of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional politicians and 'the people'. By way of response, I offer some suggestions as to how those of us who position ourselves on the left of the political spectrum can resist this political takeover by the populist authoritarian right. In other words, I show how the new postdigital communications can be used for more progressive purposes that are attuned to today's changed political landscape. Among the illustrative examples provided will be some of the grassroots, bottom-up projects for the production of free resources, technical infrastructures and the commons that myself and some of those I collaborate with have developed over the last twenty years. Those projects include, but are not limited to: the open access journal Culture Machine ...

This is an extended 'author's cut' of a chapter that was first published as Gary Hall 'Postdigital Politics', in Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder, eds, Aesthetics of the Commons (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes, 2021) https://www.diaphanes.net/titel/postdigital-politics-6925 --- In 'Postdigital Politics' I examine our contemporary postdigital political conjuncture. This conjuncture, I argue, springs from the crisis of representative democracy we are currently experiencing and involves a shift to more direct forms of democracy via postdigital communications. The latter is evident in the decentralised manner in which movements such as the Extinction Rebellion and Black Lives Matter operate. I analyse how the traditional political opposition between 'left' and 'right' has been overlaid in many places around the world by that between populist nativism and elitist internationalism. I also discuss the way in which populist right-wing politicians (e.g., Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro) have used the possibilities created by postdigital media technologies to create a new model of political communications, one that is capable of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional politicians and 'the people'. By way of response, I offer some suggestions as to how those of us who position ourselves on the left of the political spectrum can resist this political takeover by the populist authoritarian right. In other words, I show how the new postdigital communications can be used for more progressive purposes that are attuned to today's changed political landscape. Among the illustrative examples provided will be some of the grassroots, bottom-up projects for the production of free resources, technical infrastructures and the commons that myself and some of those I collaborate with have developed over the last twenty years. Those projects include, but are not limited to: the open access journal Culture Machine (http://culturemachine.net); the publishing house Open Humanities Press ...

International audience ; In his celebrated 2009 memoir Returning to Reims, the Parisian intellectual and theorist Didier Eribon travels home for the first time in thirty years following the death of his father. There he tries to account for the change in politics of his working class family over the period he has been away: from supporting the Communist Party to voting for the National Front. But Eribon also discusses the transition he himself has undergone as a result of having escaped his working class culture and environment through education, and how this has left him unsure whom it is he is actually writing for. He may be addressing the question of what it means to grow up poor and gay, however he is aware few working class people are ever likely to read his book.At the same time, Eribon emphasizes that his non-conforming identity has left him with a sense of just how important it is to display a 'lack of respect for the rules' of bourgeois liberal humanist 'decorum that reign in university circles', and that insist 'people follow established norms regarding "intellectual debate" when what is at stake clearly has to do with political struggle'. Together with his friend Édouard Louis and partner Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Eribon wants to 'rethink' the antihumanist theoretical tradition of Foucault, Derrida, Cixous et al. to produce a theory 'in which something is at stake': a theory that speaks about 'class, exploitation, violence, repression, domination, intersectionality', and yet has the potential to generate the same kind of power and excitement as 'a Kendrick Lamar concert'.With 'Anti-Bourgeois Theory', I likewise want to reinvent what it means to theorise by showing a certain lack of respect for the rules of bourgeois decorum the university hardly ever questions. I want do so, however, by also breaking with those bourgeois liberal humanist conventions of intellectual debate that – for all his emphasis on rebelling 'in and through' the technologies of knowledge production – continue to govern the ...

This article begins by analyzing critically the usefulness of the recent political philosophy of Chantal Mouffe for reconceptualizing ideas of peace and conflict. It takes as its focus for doing so the situation of the Middle East. It proceeds to show how Mouffe's radical democratic politics is actually just another form of the liberalism of Habermas and Rawls that she positions her theory against. The article then explores the potential digital media hold for making affirmative, affective, hyperpolitical interventions in specific contents and singular situations. In particular it advocates using the wiki medium – hence the piece's Wikipedia-like form – to experiment with new ways of organizing institutions, cultures, communities, and countries which do not uncritically repeat the reductive adherence to democracy, hegemony, and Western, bourgeois, liberal humanism identified in Mouffe, but which can also be located in the institution of academic criticism more widely. "WikiNation" is part of a series of "performative media" projects. Performative media here stands for media that do not endeavor to represent the world so much as have an effect in or on it. They are media which produce the things of which they speak, in other words, and which are engaged primarily in their actual performance.

What should or could cultural studies look like in the 21st Century? New Cultural Studies is both an introductory reference work and an original study which explores some of the most exciting new directions currently being opened up in cultural studies. A new generation has begun to emerge from the shadow of the Birmingham School: a generation who have turned to theory as a means to think through some of the crucial problems and issues in contemporary culture. New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory collects for the first time the ideas of this generation and explains just why theory continues to be crucial for cultural studies.