Welcome to our Post-Publishing summer 2025 Newsletter! Please find underneath a selection of recent updates from Post-Publishing researchers. You can sign up to receive our newsletter here.
Along with Julien McHardy and author James Louis Smith, Simon Bowie organised a one-day workshop ‘Markdown, Dive Deep‘, at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in Den Haag on 23 May 2025. The workshop was run as part of the Open Book Futures Experimental Publishing Group pilot project, Deep Maps: Blue Humanities, and brought together a group of writers, makers, and publishers to explore using Markdown writing and publishing workflows for experimental digital monographs. The event also included a 90 minute hybrid session (recording available here) sharing the results of our research and discussions with interested writers & publishers joining online. Simon will also be presenting a paper on 4 June at the Edinburgh Open Research Conference 2025 called ‘small changes: taking back control of research through open software’ 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 larger divestment from expensive corporate software. Following the conference, the full text of Simon’s paper will be available at https://opensauce.simonxix.com/eor2025
Judith Fathallah hosted ‘Fan Studies and True Crime in the New Media Environment’ at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures on 8 May. This hybrid afternoon workshop brought together a range of scholars from fan studies, new media, journalism and related fields. After several presentations and group discussion a network was established called ‘Making Meaning of True Crime: Fans, Audiences, Producers’. The attendees have established a listserv and are now exploring the possibility of a conference. Judith will also be presenting at the Edinburgh Open Research Conference on 4 June, along with colleague Kevin Sanders from the Open Book Collective, on the topic of author agency in Open Book Publishing. She will further be presenting at the British Educational Research Association ECR conference in Leeds on 11 June on the same topic.
In April, Janneke Adema and Rebekka Kiesewetter – together with their co-conveners of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC), Samuel A. Moore and Toby Steiner – co-hosted the hybrid conference Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism engaging with questions such as how social justice activism can be performed through academic publishing. During the conference, they also launched the booklet Publishing Activism within/without a Toxic University. Designed by Coventry University design students Alex Trencianska, Mia Dawson, and Lisha Wang and co-published by Post Office Press (POP) and Open Humanities Press, this experimental booklet brings together reflections from Radical Open Access Collective members on publishing activism and its relationship to the neoliberal university.
The final programme for Invoking Processional Publishing: A continent. Wayzgoose – co-hosted by Rebekka Kiesewetter which took place on 29 and 30 May in Berlin – is available here: https://continentcontinent.cc/content/2-archives/1-events-and-collaborations/1-invoking-processional-publishing/2025_05_15_programme_a5.pdf. The event explored editorial processes as a means of transforming texts, relationships, collective practices, and labour conditions. Together with Samuel A. Moore, Rebekka was also invited to present the Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MORPHSS) research project to the UNESCO Chair of Open Science at the University of Montréal in May. On 21 June, she will present the paper ‘Editing Otherwise: On Scholarship, Suffering, and the Possibility of a “Perhaps”’ at the London Conference of Critical Thought at Birkbeck, University of London.
Clare Harvey co-presented with De Montfort University’s (DMU) Dr Bethany Layne at two events this spring, both entitled ‘Deepfake? True Lies, Real Lives and the Ethics of Biofictions’. These took place in-person on 22 March at DMU’s States of Independence festival, and hybrid in-person/online at Coventry University on 30 April. On 13 May, Clare gave a Pecha Kucha presentation on her research as part of the New Media Writing Prize’s Unconference, discussing remix as a writing methodology in the creation of biofiction, focussing on remix-writing envisioned as a posthumous co-authorship. You can find the recording on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFqsj_PgHaA . Clare also recently guested on the I Am A Creator podcast about using remix-writing in a socially-engaged context for Inspire Culture. This podcast is now available on Spotify. In June, Clare will give a paper at this year’s Contemporary Women’s Writing Association (CWWA) Conference at Falmouth University (18-20 June). Her paper is titled ‘Co-authoring with forgotten voices: remix-writing as an artistic practice to authentically represent transgender women in historical fiction and biofiction’.
As part of the ongoing decentralised launch of his latest book Masked Media, Gary Hall will join Gareth Williams (University of Michigan), Gabriela Méndez Cota, and her colleagues from the Department of Philosophy at Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México for a discussion on 12 September 2025.
The latest title from Open Humanities Press, which Gary co-directs, is now out: Thinking with AI, edited by Hannes Bajohr and published in the Technographies series, assembles works from leading scholars including Peli Grietzer, Leif Weatherby, Mercedes Bunz, Fabian Offert, Lev Manovich, Babette Babich, Markus Krajewski, Orit Halpern, Christina Vagt, and Audrey Borowski. The book explores how artificial intelligence can serve not only as a subject of critique but also as a conceptual tool for rethinking foundational questions in the humanities: Read more here.
Eva Weinmayr co-published – through a collective editing process with 20 practitioners, scholars and activists – the experimental licence Collective Commitment to Reuse (CC2r, 2025), which follows Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r, 2020) marking a shift in reuse ethos from licence to condition to commitment. On 10 April, Eva, together with Claudia Hummel, was invited to Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) for a conversation on ‘Reuse as Critical Political Practice’.
Janneke Adema has been invited to give a talk, ‘Experiments with Radical and Alternative Publication Futures: Rethinking Distinctions between Research and Publishing,’ at the conference The Futures of Doing Publishing, 9-11 July 2025, at Silent Green Berlin, part of the annual conference of the research cluster ‘Temporal Communities: Doing Literature in a Global Perspective’ (Freie Universität Berlin). She will present on the panel ‘The Futures of Doing Publishing / Publishing as Doing Literature‘ with Johanna Maierski, Niki Rhyner, and Olga Schubert.