SPONTANEOUS ACTS OF SCHOLARLY COMBUSTION

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Desire/Love (2nd edn.)

Forthcoming

“There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory,” writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories — ...

Alternative Histories of the Digital Humanities

Forthcoming

In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that by examining the process of history we can “discover the differential exercise of power that makes some narratives possible and silences ...

Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art

Forthcoming

What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming ...

Urban Interactions: Communication and Competition in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages

Forthcoming

This volume is dedicated to eliciting the interactions between localities across late antique and early medieval Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Significant research has been done in recent years to explore how late “Roman” and ...

punctum books is an independent open-access publisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intellectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para-humanities assemblage. We specialize in neo-traditional and non-conventional scholarly work that productively twists and/or ignores academic norms. We also take in strays. This is a space for the imp-orphans of your thought and pen, an ale-serving church for little vagabonds.

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Democracy … is not an established reality, nor is it a mere ideal; it is rather a permanent struggle for democratization. Can open access be understood in similar terms: less as a homogeneous project striving to become a dominating model or force, and more as an ongoing critical struggle, or series of struggles? … Certainly, one of the advantages of conceptualizing open access as a process of struggle rather than as a model to be implemented would be that doing so would create more space for radically different, conflicting, even incommensurable positions within the larger movement, including those that are concerned with experimenting critically with the form of the book and the way our system of scholarly communication currently operates. … In fact if, as we have seen, one of the impulses behind open access is to make knowledge and research—and with it society—more open and democratic, it can be argued that the existence of … dissensus will help achieve this ambition.

Janneke Adema and Gary Hall, "The Political Nature of the Book"