Lateral and LateralLab together comprise the publishing platform for the Cultural Studies Association. Our aim is to support, leverage and organize the capacities of those affiliated with CSA to develop critical alternatives to publishing that are commensurate with the innovative approaches to knowledge making, political intervention and material forms of cultural expression. This is a digitally-based site facilitated by a curatorial board that seeks to repurpose the peer review process so that it operates more effectively at the intersection between supportive development of new work and professional legitimation of emergent knowledges and perspectives. LateralLab focuses on providing a place of experimentation in the range of material forms that the knowing, feeling, sensibility we ascribe to the cultural can find an elastic and sustainable outlet for expression. In short, Lateral is interesting in recasting both the form and content of what cultural studies can be.

The means for gathering, evaluating and publishing work is called a research thread. Each thread is tended to or curated by people who solicit, commission, and guide the evaluation of submissions. Because we publish under the auspices of CSA itself, we are not subject to the time and space parameters that attend to most sponsored or proprietary journal endeavors. Work can take months to reach a point where it is ready for publication, or it can be published quickly in response to readiness or timeliness. Our publishing process affords both internal spaces where work can be developed and public domains that are freely accessible. The platform can also support a whole range of peer processes, from double blind to open access, that is where authors and reviewers engage is full disclosure of identity and thought.

Initially, Lateral and LateralLab will start with a cluster of research threads, but new threads can be proposed to the curatorial board (see procedures on this site). The initial threads converge around a consideration of knowledge formations, institutional and material location, and political intervention and implication. Rather than being organized topically or thematically, the threads provide various temperaments, tones, or dispositions toward developing work. The threads are in effect portals in which interests in identity, pedagogy, theory, violence, embodiment or other concerns that flow through cultural studies can be joined and engaged.

The threads now include: Theory, Becoming Methods, which uses LateralLab to explore visual and graphical mappings; Creative Industries which invites composite methodological approaches to the intersectoral flows inside and outside the university; Universities in Question, which decenters established claims for disciplinary, labor and political economic legitimations; and Mobilizing interventions, which pursues current transformational activisms to rethink values of polity, policy and participation.

Please take a look at the individual thread descriptions, reach out to the curatorial board with your ideas and suggestions, share work, propose initiatives. This is a site under construction where we will try to make the most of what we can render together.