Our Editorial Collective seeks to publish research - and occasionally other materials such as interviews, documents, literary creations - focused on the structured inequalities of the contemporary world, and the myriad ways people negotiate these conditions. Our approach is adamantly plural, following the basic "intersectional" insight pioneered by third world feminists, whereby multiple axes of inequalities are irreducible to one another and mutually constitutive. Our interest in how people live, work and struggle is broad and inclusive: from the individual to the collective, from the militant and overtly political, to the poetic and quixotic. Cultural dynamics is the epitomizing phrase for this scholarship because it keeps the multiple cultural meanings of these processes - both the creation of inequalities and on-the-ground politics of struggle - front and center. The journal is thoroughly interdisciplinary, encompassing anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, and any other areas that can shed light on culture, power, and politics.
We call for insurgent scholarship because we believe intellectual work is more ethically honest and analytically compelling when it is politically positioned, explicitly and reflexively, from the outset. Our focus is the global south, understood as a structural-racial location, which includes not only majority populations of the south, but also, people of color in places like New Orleans and Paris. This invitation to south-south dialogue highlights our own political affinities and affirms that those who suffer marginalization in the current global social order have the greatest potential to envision and enact transformative social change. We encourage appraisals of activist, collaborative, or engaged research methods--both achievements and contradictions. We seek politically engaged theoretical reflection and scholarly rigor as a means to enliven academic discourse, and because the peoples we work with and write about generally refuse to settle for anything less.
"Cultural Dynamics has come to occupy a unique place as a transdisciplinary forum for studies in the processes of culture" - Michael A. K. Halliday
"One of the most important movements in contemporary anthropology is from thinking in terms of models and structures to a focus on relations and processes. More than any other journal, Cultural Dynamics has spearheaded this new, more dynamic perspective." - Tim Ingold
"Cultural Dynamics, in my estimation, is a pathbreaking, interdisciplinary endeavor in the study of culture. It is rare treat and I have not really seen anything else like it." - Joshua A Fishman
Electronic Access:
Cultural Dynamics is available electronically on SAGE Journals Online at http://cdy.sagepub.com
