Saying they want to remake cultural studies and reach a broad, educated public, the new editors of a major interdisciplinary journal are doing something that often provokes anxiety in academe.
They are making changes.
The journal, Public Culture, has since its advent in 1988 played a prominent role in interdisciplinary social sciences, emphasizing such topics as the globalization of culture, cosmopolitanism, and transnational politics. In 1992, the peer-reviewed publication won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for best new journal, and its prestige has increased since.
Nevertheless, the members of the new editorial group, composed of emerging figures in the social sciences and led by New York University’s Eric Klinenberg, say their task is to produce copy that demonstrates that academics can do more than indulge in prolix, self-indulgent, and jargon-ridden prose that does little for readers’ edification, let alone pleasure. The group began transitioning into place in 2010, when NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge took the journal over from Columbia University, and has just released its first issue.
In introductions to that issue and the previous one, Mr. Klinenberg, a professor of sociology, public policy, and media, culture, and communications, states that the remade Public Culture will place greater emphasis on “imaginative social theory” and “vivid ethnographic writing.” It will also emphasize contemporary issues such as climate change, military interventions, the power of markets, and links between social media and social movements.
The new issue reflects that spirit. In one essay, Craig Calhoun, who is about to become director of the London School of Economics and Political Science, writes about the perils that scholars at some elite universities have recently courted by consulting and lobbying for nations like Libya. In another essay, Fred Turner, a media historian at Stanford University, revisits a hugely popular 1955 photography exhibition in New York, The Family of Man, to suggest how it challenged its own embrace of narrow-view national identity.
The journal will also include “visual investigations"—images that invite readers to ponder and analyze. Some of those will run online only, alongside videos and podcasts.
A priority, Mr. Klinenberg says in an interview, will be to grapple with questions about “what it means to do publicly engaged scholarship today.” To that end, Public Culture has also added long interviews with prominent intellectuals. In the new issue, those featured are the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, renowned for his work across many disciplines, and Mary Poovey, an NYU English professor and expert on the history of finance. In such interviews, “you can read about the craft of scholarship,” says Mr. Klinenberg.
Also in development is Public Books, a Web-only review of “big-idea books” that suggest trends in media, the arts, and the digital arts. Several postings are already on the Public Culture site. Mr. Klinenberg says it will “pick up some of the slack that stems from the disappearance of essay-length book reviews in many American publications.”
In adding Web-only components, Public Culture resembles some kindred journals—Social Text and Raritan, for instance. Public Culture will also add such features as field notes from ethnographic projects and literary scenes around the world, and brief book reviews.
Former Editors Concerned
Mr. Klinenberg’s call for better writing appears to implicitly criticize the journal he inherited—or perhaps just all journals like it. Not so, he says. “I inherited a journal with a long history of producing something beautiful and surprising, and I didn’t want to let go of that.” Still, “I brought in editors who share my view that writing should be an act of communication and not simply showing off one’s intelligence,” he says. “I don’t want our authors to presume that the readers of Public Culture share their disciplinary training or theoretical proclivities.”
“I want the writing to be persuasive and argumentative; I want the claims to be backed up by good evidence; and I want the language to be engaging, so that you want to start and finish every article,” he says.
Some former Public Culture editors worry privately that the changes at the journal are too great, too abrupt, and more Americanist than cosmopolitan in outlook.
In response, Mr. Klinenberg cites the diversity of disciplines represented on his editorial board—anthropologists, historians, sociologists, and urban-planning and literature experts. “We’re trying to cast a very wide net,” he says. As for global reach, he points to a forum on “poverty markets"—the politics of humanitarianism and development.
His immediate predecessor, Dilip P. Gaonkar, points out in an e-mail message that changes are to be expected from any new editorial collective. “It is too early for anyone to decide whether those changes are for the good or not,” writes Mr. Gaonkar, an associate professor in rhetoric and public culture and the director of the Center for Global Culture and Communication at Northwestern University.
One new senior editor, John L. Jackson Jr., sees continuity that should reassure existing readers. Still, says Mr. Jackson, a professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, “I think the academy has changed and the nature of the conversation has changed.
“The language and registers people use to articulate some of the changing dynamics of the contemporary social order also are different,” he continues. The younger scholars whom Mr. Klinenberg’s team is recruiting are frustrated by academic “hyper-professionalization.”
Mr. Klinenberg says he has no intention of abandoning Public Culture’s mission of high-level scholarly work, “but we want it to be on topics that will interest a large number of people from different communities inside and outside the university.” Potential readers, he believes, are to be found among “people who miss the kinds of publicly engaged, serious writing done by scholars in outlets that no longer exist.”
Can they be won over? Perhaps, say editors at other journals.
Nikil Saval, a lead editor at n+1, says Public Culture is just the most recent of several journals, his own among them, to try harder to bridge academic and “so-called general-public” audiences. Others are The New Inquiry, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Jacobin.
Locating a reading public—"always a phantom, in some sense"—is difficult, he says, but not impossible. Having capable writers helps—though there are only so many Edward Saids to go around. But a potential trap for any scholarly journal with one eye on the world beyond academe is that “at times you just need to write for your fellow scholars on a particular problem. That’s where interdisciplinarity can be a false god.”
Still, he believes Public Culture can be multi-idolatrous as adeptly as any journal: “They have an almost 25-year history of success, in their current guise. They’re justified in imagining that they could make an adjustment and keep their audience and make another one.”
Roland Greene, a professor of English at Stanford University who directs the Arcade group of journals, blogs, and forums, is a longtime admirer of Public Culture, but he says such journals must change if they are to survive the market rigors: “They clearly are right to know they have to do something to change the reach and accessibility of the product.”
But Mr. Greene and other editors know how hard it is to bridge the academic-public divide. “Most of us are simply not trained to write that way, and universities don’t typically reward us for engaging in public debate,” says Nikki Jones, the social-sciences editor of The Public Intellectual and an associate professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, by e-mail.
It’s time for retraining, says Ms. Jones: “Expectations for academics are in the midst of a change. I don’t know if the divide will ever be bridged, but I think there is great value in trying.”