Culture Unbound

Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research is an academic journal for border-crossing cultural research, including cultural studies as well as other interdisciplinary and transnational currents. It serves as a forum with a wider scope than existing journals for cultural studies or other, more specific, subfields of cultural research and it is globally open to articles from all areas in this large field.

Culture Unbound was launched in June 2009 and since then it has published a large number of articles on a wide range of topics, including eleven thematic sections edited by specially invited guest editors who contribute with a unique insight into the latest developments within their fields of research. The first three volumes contain the following thematic sections: “What’s the Use of Cultural Research?”;“City of Signs/Signs of the City”; “Surveillance”; “Rural Media Spaces”; “Culture, Work and Emotion”; “Literary Public Spheres”; “Uses of the Past: Nordic Historic Cultures in a Comparative Perspective”; “Fashion, Market, Materiality”; “Creativity Unbound – Policies, Government and the Creative Industries” and “Exhibiting Europe: The Development of European Narratives in Museums, Collections and Exhibitions”. They can all be found under Back Volumes.

We have just published our first thematic section for2012, entitled “Shanghai Modern: The Future in Microcosm?”. It is edited by Justin O’Connor and Xin Gu and contains ten articles that give a range of different reflections on Shanghai’s past and present. The global city of Shanghai is taken as a starting point to explore issues of urban space, modernity and the Chinese transition in the 20th and 21st century. Featured authors are Justin O’Connor, Owen Hatherley, Anna Greenspan,Hongwei Bao, Lü Pan, Ma Ran, Sheng Zhong, Xin Gu, Haili Ma and Ian Ho-yin Fong. You can read and download all new articles under Current Volume.

Over the coming year Culture Unbound will raise many interesting subjects.The next section scheduled for this spring deals with the concept of “Culturalisation” and is edited by Johan Fornäs and Martin Fredriksson. In the autumn of 2012 Kristofer Hansson and Åsa Alftberg will edit a thematic section about “Self-Care Translated into Practice” that discusses how the concept of self-care management has changed the way healthcare is conceptualized and organized. The fourth thematic section of 2012 is called “Current Issues in European Cultural Studies”. It is edited by Ferda Keskin and captures some of the discussions from the conference with the same name that ACSIS arranged in June 2011. A number of other possible themes we have in the pipeline for a more distant future deal with issues, such as ‘Piracy’, ‘Feminist Cultural Studies’; ‘Critical Race and Whiteness Studies’; ‘Theming, Branding and Urbanity’ and ‘Protests and Social Movements’.

Culture Unbound is based at three vigorous Linköping University units that provide a unique Swedish profile, building new bridges between regional and global research traditions:

• The Advanced Cultural Studies Institute of Sweden (ACSIS), with interdisciplinary transnational exchange.
• The Department of Culture Studies (Tema Q), with interdisciplinary research and PhD education.
• The Swedish Cultural Policy Research Observatory (SweCult), interface for cultural research and the cultural sector.

Culture Unbound is an open access, peer-reviewed academic journal, hosted by Linköping University Electronic Press. Initial support has been granted by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Stiftelsen Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and by Linköping University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The editors welcome proposals for articles, reviews and thematic topics.

If you want to edit a thematic section of Culture Unbound you are welcome to contact our executive editor, Martin Fredriksson: martin.fredriksson@liu.se. Read more in Culture Unbound’s Guidelines for Guest Editors.