Aporias, a special section of Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association
Cultural studies has never been a stranger to controversy, disagreement, or drama. But these debates emerge precisely because there are stakes to the minutiae, because something as seemingly trivial as a term can make the most profound of differences in how we see and understand the world. Other times, analysis yields to sites where memory, justice, or even life itself may be on the line, and so our debates take on an even greater tenor of urgency. Yet, in the desire to publish and/or perish, or to introduce some grand intervention, rarely are there the opportunities to merely limn contemporary disagreements or specific contradictions within cultural studies. What would happen if instead of meditating on a potential fix, we stayed with the trouble just a bit longer?
Enter Aporias, a new special section of Lateral, where we embrace the debate. For this section, we invite emerging scholars to write about the contemporary or historic controversies or lacunae within cultural studies or related fields that have yet to be properly synthesized, countenanced, or come to resolution. Rather than asking our writers to resolve conceptual dilemmas, Aporias instead asks them to explore disagreements or distinctions. Aporias is not oriented toward a resolution, but explicitly is devoted to the problem itself, leaving them unresolved to provoke future research. And so, this section asks about the theoretical lapses, overlaps, and contentions between and within competing theories.
“Care and Cure,” a special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies
Based on the 2023 Strategies of Critique conference, I am editing this special issue with Bahar Banaei, Marcelle-Anne Fletcher, Tapji Garba, Patrick Teed, and Anisha Sankar. This special issue reflects on the relationship between care and cure, and the collective violence ordained in the name of both. Who is cared for, and by whom? What political purpose does care serve? What alternatives to care are possible? How is care deployed as a cure for violence – and in what ways does care reproduce it? These questions retain an even greater urgency within these now precedented times, wherein the politics of care and the standards for cure have been thrown into further crisis by a pandemic, epidemics, and racial and gendered reckonings worldwide.
In a variety of fields, care and cure are posed as the salves for paradigmatic violence, a kind of intramural politics discrete from domination. These positions take for granted a shared idea that care and cure are positive in orientation, thus divorced from the psychic forces of destruction and desire. More broadly, these assumptions neglect the question of libidinal economy and its centrality to the mechanisms of social reproduction. And so, rather than assuming all care is the antidote for violence, we offer this call and conference as a site to think critically about both care and cure in the hope that we might begin to unsettle the taken-for-granted ways these concepts circulate.