Lateral, an e-publishing platform of the Cultural Studies Association, is a digital journal and production site designed to foster experimentation and collaboration across academic disciplines and other sectors of cultural production. We invite critical studies of culture and creativity that advance and extend the reach of cultural studies as a field and method of inquiry.We also encourage inventiveness in the forms we use to produce, publish, and distribute our work across emergent and established fields and practices.

For the past two decades, concepts such as the “cultural industries,” the “creative economy,” the “creative class,” and “cultural competence” have been coined and deployed as a means of restructuring what counts as work and play – and who gets to do the accounting – in fields ranging from philosophy and literary criticism to media studies and urban planning to legal studies and the health sciences. The result has been an expansion of the influence of culture and the possibility of realizing the political potential of creativity in new ways, both in and beyond the academy.

This potential can be realized conservatively, as concepts of culture and creativity become means to the ends of social assimilation and managerial efficiency. But the same concepts can also enable a rethinking of the ends themselves, as crafted acts of strategic invention, remix, and reuse catalyze creative resistances and political mobilizations. These actions and tactics index latent networks of professional and political affiliation. They point toward a need for new engagements with constituencies otherwise sequestered by disciplinary arrangements and uneven divisions of labor, resources, and legitimation across the globe.

Lateral aims to trace and enable these engagements by reorganizing the work we do together under the auspices of cultural studies. The open and distributed model of scholarly production and publication that Lateral offers sets into play a revaluation of what cultural studies is and can do. It is designed to allow us to respond in supple ways to contemporary events, changing technologies, and emerging collaborations and collectivities. Our aim is to foster research and publication that is attuned to the pace and practices of the overlapping spheres of art, politics, and economic and cultural production.

For these reasons, Lateral uses digital and participatory media as a means of enriching and transforming research and scholarship in cultural studies. While Lateral will have the front-stage look and feel of most academic and professional journals, its back-stage production platform will enable participants to work together in ways that allow for open and collaborative forms of commentary on research and scholarship-in-process. Our hope is that our work together will begin to realize the expansive potential of culture as we shape futures that create new political values and, with them, new means of evaluation.

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