Welcome to Volume 6 of Technoculture
I am very pleased to put Volume 6 of Technoculture before you! Though this is the formal debut of Technoculture‘s Volume 6, we’re pleased that we have been publishing articles, creative works and reviews as they were approved by our staff and as we were able to put them online. We hope you enjoy them.
At the last Conference on College Composition and Communication (Portland 2017), I attended the Research Network Forum at which a number of editors (including board member Jonathan Alexander) were present talking about the ways in which graduate students and other untenured folks could enter publishing and get their works into print and onscreen; during that keynote, Jonathan noted that his letters introducing each issue of College Composition and Communication, of which he serves as editor, include a kind of wish list of the articles and subjects that he would like to publish. As he said during his portion of the keynote speech, editors can’t publish articles which are never submitted to them. (I would be remiss here to not acknowledge the great help the RNF has been by supporting an editor’s table each year in which I get to visit with potential TC authors; some of those conversations have led to eventual publication in Technoculture.)
I would like to adopt that practice for myself. It has long been my goal to move beyond print and each year, we get a bit closer to our goal, especially in our creative section, where we no longer even accept print works. I would like to see this movement towards digital only move further yet througout the journal and encourage potential authors to submit critical works in video, audio and other non-print like formats, the kind of things that can’t be printed out (those of you who remember Kairos‘ first editor, Mick Doherty, will remember that that was a call of us, and part of Kairos’ mission from the very beginning of its publication beginning in 1996).
In terms of content, I would like to see more articles yet that engage the world in a time of political and social upheaval, such as our Volume 4 (2014) on Oppression and Liberation; I would also like to see more articles engage the ordinary technologies that are so much a part of our lives that we don’t even recognize them as technologies. As always, we’re hoping to move beyond what we have seen from the start of our publication history as an unfortunate conflation of the idea of computers with the idea of technology.
I would like to see more creative submissions that use or push the use of technology as well and critical essays that engage artists’ use of technology to make art, and I would love to see more such works published on the screens of Technoculture.
If you are thinking of submitting to Technoculture, I encourage you to write us at our Submittable site, and ask us about possibilities, especially if other web-based journals have told you that your submission “doesn’t work.” We look forward to challenges both critical and creative authors can bring us.
As always, we encourage graduate students to publish with us; we especially invite you to write reviews both of books about technologies, technologies themselves, and representations of technologies in the arts, such as on television or in movies. You may make inquiries about reviews by visiting our Submittable site. We believe in mentoring those who are new to the task of writing academic work, though we are also committed to maintaining rigor through fully anonymous peer review of critical articles and internal peer review of creative works. This make our acceptance rate higher than at other journals, but we are glad to use our bandwidth and server size to continue to produce and publish well-written academic texts. (I’d note to potential authors that we do like texts that engage the scholarly conversations in which they ought, we believe, to occur. There’s nothing like a good works cited or references section to help move along an article to publication.)
I wouldn’t be able to publish this journal without the help of the graduate assistant provided by the English department in which I teach, and by Dr. Christine DeVine (one of our graduate coordinators) and my Dean, Dr. Jordan Kellman, all of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. They continue to be generous by providing paid labor (in a field that must necessarily depend on gift labor) and a majority of our expenses. I would also like to thank my current assistant, Marissa Zerangue, who has been a great help in her time with me as our Reviews Editor.
[revised: 16 July, 2023 with Submittable information]
