Welcome to our Post-Publishing Spring 2025 Newsletter! Please find underneath a selection of recent updates from Post-Publishing researchers. You can sign up to receive our newsletter here
Upcoming Post-Publishing Events – Save the Date!
10 & 11 April Radical Open Access Conference III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism (The Milstein Room, Cambridge University Library, and online) https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/radicaloa3/
30 April Seminar ‘Deepfake? True Lies, Real Lives & the ethics of biofictions’ (Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, and online) https://www.eventsforce.net/cugroup/frontend/reg/tSelectPersonCategory.csp?pageID=580843&ef_sel_menu=9514&eventID=2092
8 May Workshop ‘Fan Studies and True Crime in the New Media Environment: A New Academic Network’ (Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, and online) https://www.eventsforce.net/cugroup/frontend/reg/tregistration.csp?pageID=574168&ef_sel_menu=9413&eventID=2066
28 May Event ‘Migrant Poetry and Publishing: Readings and Discussions’ (Coventry University) https://www.eventsforce.net/cugroup/frontend/reg/tSelectPersonCategory.csp?pageID=585903&ef_sel_menu=9571&eventID=2111
Don’t Miss the Chance to Study with us!
Applications for a fully-funded PhD with the Post-Publishing research strand close on 30 April 2025! We are seeking proposals on alternative publishing practices and formats able to foster more supportive, diverse, and equitable publishing futures. Full details here: https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-opportunities/research-students/research-studentships/practicing-post-publishing/
Research Updates
Clare Harvey is organising the hybrid seminar ‘Deepfake? True Lies, Real Lives & the ethics of biofictions’ taking place on 30 April at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) and online. Featuring talks by Dr Bethany Layne (De Montfort University) and Clare Harvey, followed by discussion and Q&A, the seminar aims to introduce the ethics and the methods of how we portray – or perhaps risk misportraying – real lives into fictions. Clare also wrote a series of remixed flash fictions, which are currently published on Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature’s website to commemorate the 145th anniversary of Nottingham author D.H. Lawrence’s birth. Clare samples six or seven words at random from a D.H. Lawrence title (now out of copyright) and remixes them with her own fiction to create 75-word flash fictions, each of which is illustrated by Hannah Sawtell. You can view Clare & Hannah’s collaborations on Instagram @rebelsremixed and find out more about their collaborative remix process on the City of Literature blog. In a related vein, Clare’s co-created remix-writing, arising from a series of socially-engaged writing workshops for Inspire Culture, has also just been published. You can view or listen to the poetry, remix flash-fictions and short fiction here.
Gary Hall’s new book Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence has been published in Open Humanities Press’s MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series. The book asks: if we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this question Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, the Liquid and Living Books book series, and the initiative ‘Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities’. Unsettling received ideas of the author and the book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums are testing the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print, through photography and video, to computers and GenAI. In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after austerity, the coronavirus pandemic and re-election of Trump.
In March, Judith Fathallah attended the Oxford Festival of Open Scholarship to present on the Open Book Collective and her journey to OA book publication as an author. She is also organising a workshop bringing together academics interested in the intersections of true crime, fan studies, and new media. This hybrid event will be held at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures and online on 8 May. It will include a discussion of questions such as what developing forms of engagement do we see around fan studies and true crime? How do these forms of engagement relate to either the digital or the post-digital? What forms of fandom around true crime are considered culturally legitimate, and which pathologised, and why? Can fandom around true crime be economically incorporated by the media and/or heritage and tourism industries, as other forms of fandom have? With what ethical and economic implications? Find more information and register here.
The new print issue of the the other side of hope literary magazine published and co-edited by Alexandros Plasatis was released in March. The issue titled ‘other tongue, mother tongue’ features 20 poems by refugees and immigrants from across the world, in 17 languages, presented along English translations. Alexandros is also organising ‘Migrant Poetry and Publishing: Readings and Discussions’, a public poetry event at Coventry University, which will take place on 28 May. Amir Darwish and Priscilla Okoye, two migrant poets, will be reading from their works, followed by a discussion on publishing writing by refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants. On 23 and 24 June, Alexandros will present, alongside Lina Fadel, a refugee poet and academic at Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, the paper ‘Poetry of Exile as Activism: Immigrant and Refugee Writers Negotiating Borders, Identity and Belonging In Scotland’ at the Displaced Arts: Creative Practices and Geographies of Asylum symposium at the University of Edinburgh.
Simon Bowie has had a paper accepted at the Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2025 to discuss the use of proprietary software as part of open research and how using open source software as part of the research process can be a small change that leads towards divestment from expensive corporate software.
Janneke Adema and Rebekka Kiesewetter, who are – together with Sam Moore and Toby Steiner – co-conveners of the Radical Open Access Collective, are co-hosting the hybrid conference Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism. It will take place on 10 and 11 April 2025 online and at the Milstein Room, Cambridge University Library. It will explore questions such as: How can social justice activism be promoted or unfolded through academic publishing? What is the value of collectivising through publishing projects? What are the dynamics, challenges, and opportunities that arise when communities from diverse backgrounds come together to work on shared radical publishing projects? Please find more information and register here to attend online or in person.
Rebekka Kiesewetter, who is among the editors of the experimental continent. journal, is co-hosting the two-day event Invoking Processional Publishing. A continent. Wayzgoose, which is taking place on 29 and 30 May in Berlin. In collaboration with the Temporal Communities Cluster of Excellence at Freie Universität Berlin and with friends and colleagues from the vast field of ‘publishing’, this gathering seeks to expose editorial processes as a working method for transformation – of texts, of one another, of communities, and perhaps even of society itself.
Janneke Adema gave a talk on ‘Creating Community-Owned Futures for Open Access Books by Scaling Small and Co-designing Governance‘, at the Metagovernance seminar, on the 26th of March. Her monograph, Living Books: Experiments in the Posthumanities was selected as one of 16 case studies used by UKRI to support the transition to open access books. The case studies cover the different reasons why authors considered open access for their work, the difficulties they encountered, and the benefits they found. See more here.
In February, Eva Weinmayr, as part of her Guest Professorship at the Basel Academy of Art and Design, ran a one-week hands-on workshop on critical diversity approaches to editorial practice. From 5 to 12 March, together with BA Fine arts students at Central Saint Martins, she explored critical access questions in ecologies of publishing and dissemination. Questions around collective organising and access to tools was the focus of a visit at Rabbits Road Press followed by a talk by Kaiya Waerea (Sticky Fingers Publishing) on access questions to be considered for self-publishing.