What I find very interesting about Social Text is that you can go to an academic Journal’s site and read a blog post by Tavia Nyong’o on Kony 2012. Can you imagine when the first in print journal article on Kony 2012 will come out? I’m sure it will be a while.
To respond to Sonia’s provocations, this is a way that online publications can be different than in print ones. We can keep the peer review process, but add in a blogging aspect for shorter more current blog posts. What I would like to see more of on the social text website is commenting on the blog posts. I think that this would bridge an important gap that needs to be addressed in Academia.
Next week I won’t be in class because I’ll be at the Cultural Studies Association Conference. I organized this seminar called Interdisciplinarity Beyond Discipline. What we are going to try to get at during this session is how practices outside academia come into academic work. I’m not sure how to address Sonia’s last provocation of how to get the academy to recognize this as legitimate, but I wonder if maybe we shouldn’t be concerning ourselves with that last question. The online model for journals, with accompanying blogs seems to me to be something we need. It is almost intuitive. Sometimes the academy is the exact opposite of intuitive (I mean sitting by yourself all day writing a dissertation… come on). Blogging and easy access to a wide group of people who can discuss the material and make it relevant and a part of our daily life is something we should push in the academy. Our academic lives should become a practice in themselves.
I agree with a lot of what you said, Chrissy. I’ve seen a similar format on Public Culture, which I check out from time to time. With something like OWS, they offered a timely reaction by prominent academics that would likely have taken months/years under the traditional peer review model. I don’t see peer review and more spontaneous discussion as necessarily dichotomous. I think there’s an important place for peer review but I do feel as though there aren’t enough fora for academics to discuss the issues of the day in a way that is — at least in our discipline — drawing upon our shared knowledge/background and allows for someone to think about contemporary issues without doing an exhaustive lit review etc.