No alternatives, always more, willful optimism: New editors of the European Journal of Cultural Studies in conversation

Abstract

The following is a conversation, conducted over email in late 2019 and early 2020, between Yiu Fai Chow and Anamik Saha, the two incoming editors of European Journal of Cultural Studies.

On joining the editorial team of European Journal of Cultural Studies in its 25th year

“…The inclusion of ‘European’ in the journal’s title was not so much a strong affiliation with a particular geo-political territory or identity, so much as a pragmatic signalling of the editorial team’s locatedness in the UK, the Netherlands and Finland. More recently, the desire to explicitly signal the journal’s transnational interests beyond ‘Europe’, as well as the need to bring ‘race’ much more squarely into the critical purview of cultural studies, were articulated by Anamik Saha and Yui Fai Chow upon their appointments as editors (Chow and Saha, 2020). This chimes with broader feminist, anti-racist and decolonial calls for critical cultural studies scholarship – that which moves beyond the politically foreclosing frames of single nation-states, as well as beyond hyper-specialisation within bounded topic areas – and instead which employs ‘transversal categories to connect seemingly unrelated cases’, as Radha S. Hegde (2021) puts it (p.704).…”

Live-archiving the crisis: Instagram, cultural studies and times of collapse

“…What is the point in any of this? Why should we care about cultural studies at all right now (see also Chow and Saha, 2020; Hage, 2020)?…”