Abstract: Der Beitrag ordnet den aktuellen Niedergang der traditionellen gedruckten Fachzeitschriften und die Vermehrung von online-Journals mit Hilfe von John Guillory, Judith Butler und Merve Emre in größere fachgeschichtliche Transformationen ein.

Abstract: Der Beitrag untersucht die gegenwärtige Krise wissenschaftlicher Fachzeitschriften als Kernmedium akademischer Wissensproduktion. Ausgehend von einer wissenschaftssoziologischen und kultursoziologischen Perspektive werden vier zentrale Problemfelder markiert: die historische Funktion und kommunikative Eigenlogik des wissenschaftlichen Zeitschriftenaufsatzes, die Spannung zwischen wissenschaftlicher und außerwissenschaftlicher Öffentlichkeit in den Kontaktzonen der Wissensproduktion, die Spannung von Themenokkurrenzen und Themenkonkurrenzen in verschiedenen sozialen Feldern sowie die Temporalität wissenschaftlicher Wissensproduktion. Der Beitrag plädiert für die selbstbewusste Berücksichtigung der Eigenlogik wissenschaftlichen Publizierens, etwa im Gegensatz zu anderen Textgattungen. Die Kulturwissenschaften sowie im Besonderen die Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift werden dabei als geeignet herausgestellt, das spannungsvolle Verhältnis von Wissenschaft, Medien und Wissensproduktion selbst zum Gegenstand kritischer Analyse zu machen.

Abstract: This article examines the impact of artificial intelligence on debates on cultural studies and scholarly publishing in the digital age. Starting with the concept of »AI Want to Break Free«, the text reflects on how generative AI is transforming concepts of authorship, originality, transparency, and responsibility, and how it poses new ethical and institutional challenges to existing publication practices in academic journals and peer review processes. Using the teaching project »AI Across Borders« as an example, the article illustrates how a critical, reflective, and responsible approach to AI can look like in an academic context. Finally, the text advocates for a culturally informed practice in which AI is understood as a supportive tool, while human judgment, responsibility, and critical reflection remain central.

Abstract: Academic publishing has become one of the most profitable businesses in the global digital knowledge economies, increasingly consolidating the production and distribution of Cultural Studies scholarship in English. This consolidation has narrowed access to Cultural Studies scholarship to geographically, economically, socially and linguistically privileged users in the Global North. While the ongoing shift to disseminating scholarship digitally was initially hailed as a potential for greater publication diversity and diminished gatekeeping by entrenched presses, groups and editors, the digital turn in academic publishing has been marred by paywalls, database subscription models, systematized metrics that normalize scholarship, and standardized regimes of funding, reviewing and assessment. This contribution identifies alternatives to those hegemonic forces and discusses why and how Cultural Studies scholars need to re-appropriate the means of academic knowledge curation, production and distribution in a digital environment in order to redefine academic knowledge production and communication under the auspices of care, social justice, and solidarity in the context of specific cultural communities, languages, and histories.

Abstract: The concept of the attention economy has enjoyed a remarkable career since Georg Franck (1989), Michael Goldhaber (1997), and Thomas Davenport and John Beck (2000, 2001) first advanced the thesis that, in the age of the internet, money was being supplanted by a new currency governed by different rules. In recent decades, the term has been widely invoked to explain a broad range of social phenomena—from the rise of right-wing populism to increasing societal polarization—by appealing to an alleged natural law that determines how attention circulates in digital and social media. Yet the notion of an attention economy has rarely been subjected to sustained critical or methodological scrutiny. This paper seeks to reconstruct and interrogate the theoretical foundations of the attention-economy paradigm and to propose an alternative approach to conceptualizing the social problem of the unequal distribution of attention.

Abstract: Kulturzeitschriften im weitesten Sinne (z.B. Constanze oder BRAVO) leisten einen Beitrag zur kulturellen Poiesis ihrer Zeit. Analysieren lässt sich das im Zusammenspiel metonymischer und paradigmatischer Strukturen zwischen Einzelheft und Serie. Das kulturwissenschaftliche Potenzial von Zeitschriften als ›kleinen Archiven‹ ihrer Kultur ist noch längst nicht ausgeschöpft.

Abstract: Over the past decade, cultural studies have been successful in establishing their own society, a dedicated journal, numerous degree programs, a range of institutes, faculties, and professorships. This could be celebrated as a remarkable institutional success, turning cultural studies into a proper academic discipline. Drawing on the examples of the Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (ifk) in Vienna, this paper advocates, on the contrary, for a non-disciplinary model of cultural studies which acts by intervening into humanities and society. Based on experiences with the Center for Cultural Research Lübeck (ZKFL), we argue that cultural studies need to embrace openness, collaboration, and situated practices today more than ever for maintaining the power of their radical origins and continuing critical engagement.

Abstract: This experimental text intertwines autobiographical notes, institutional observations, and theoretical reflections to examine the role of the first-person perspective (Ich) in contemporary cultural studies writing. Conceived as a formal experiment, it intentionally brings form and content into tension: the mode of writing itself becomes an enactment of the phenomena it seeks to analyse. The dated fragments move between the private and the institutional sphere, thereby performing the entanglements of academic labour, time economies, and personal narrative. Situating the current prominence of the »I« in relation to the rise of autofiction, self-branding logics, research evaluation regimes, and discourses on artificial intelligence, the text explores its ambivalent position between emancipatory tool and currency of visibility. It thus attempts to make perceptible, through its own literary and documentary strategies, the theoretical, practical and historical questions it addresses.

Abstract: Focussing on three key concepts highlighted in the title, the essay pursues three main aims: First, it attempts to demonstrate that any conceptual breakthrough and institutional innovation in an interdisciplinary field like the study of culture requires imagination first. Secondly, this essay offers modest reflections on why it would be desirable to acknowledge both the perspectivity and positionality from which we conduct research in the humanities, and the fact that European ways of doing research are anything but ›normal‹ or universal, but rather highly culture-specific and shaped by the factors that the acronym WEIRD stands for, i.e. »Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic« (Henrich 2020, p. 21). Thirdly, the essay argues that in the face of aggressive assaults on science and truth, and the humanities and fields like cultural studies in particular, it is more necessary than ever before to foster the internationalisation of Kulturwissenschaften. The essay also provides some concrete proposals for enriching and transforming the forms of publication in the study of culture through a spirit of experimentation and imagination.