PRODUCTION ARCHIVES:
A new open-access special collection from the Open Library of Humanities!
We are proud to announce the launch of Production Archives, an exciting, cutting-edge special collection published by a world-leading open-access publisher, the Open Library of Humanities. Production Archives breaks new ground through its innovative transdisciplinary approach to cultural productions and their archives.
Through first-rate scholarship by leading cultural critics, practitioners and archivists, the collection refocuses the critical lens to consider not only the audience-facing ‘auteurs’ and ‘on-stage’ end-products of cultural practice, but also the material processes, collaborative labours and economic contexts of culture’s production and archiving.
To further sharpen the debates that the collection initiates between Cultural Production Studies and Archive Studies, Production Archives provides 3 separate but theoretically interrelated forums:
The distinct focus of each forum empowers contributors to explore the archived knowledges, testimonies and material objects of cultural production across fields, media, genres, receptions, historical contexts and sites of intercultural encounter and exchange.
- Puppets for Action draws new scholarly attention to the mechanics, materials, histories and contexts of puppet or marionette productions and their archives across high/middle/lowbrow genres and formats. By taking a fresh approach to this critically neglected but culturally rich and historically significant performance art, this forum will demonstrate the vitality of puppetry to pressing 21st-century theoretical, philosophical and political debates. Read the full call for papers here.
- Production Contexts sifts through the variously archived and exhibited material traces of creative labour to trace new histories and create new knowledges about the formations and transformations of cultural practices and industries beyond the page, stage, or screen. By extending its purview to material production, manual labour, waste disposal and other market activities that are contingent upon a given cultural production (although rarely conceptualised as part of that event itself), this forum will reframe and re-energise critical approaches to the significance of the economic, technological, socio-political, institutional and organizational contexts of cultural production. Read the full call for papers here.
- Archival Practices interrogates the institutions and practices of curation and conservation in archives, museums, exhibitions, performances and the digital humanities to demonstrate how the detritus of cultural production reaches into multiple, interconnected areas of life and society in ways that carry profound ethical, ecological, economic, technological and political implications for the 21st century. Read the full call for papers here.
This Open Library of Humanities special collection is edited by Prof. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (editor-in-chief), Prof. Vicky Angelaki, Dr. Paul Fagan, and Prof. Roger Luckhurst. Submissions should be made online here. In the collection’s spirit of open-access collaboration, we look forward to reading your submissions and to sharing the published articles with you.
