Re/Forming Academic Publication Through Collective Magazine Production

• In Event: Futuring through Form: Multimodal Scholarship and Public Engagement

Abstract

This paper examines the creation and implications of an experimental magazine in a university setting that challenges traditional academic publishing through form, content, and circulation—translating research for broader audiences across disciplines. Positioned at the intersection of multimodal theory and practice (Dicks et. al, 2011), the magazine encourages experimentation: disrupting traditional genres, embracing collective authorship, playing with visuals, interviewing diverse voices, exploring unconventional questions, and creating provocative, playful content. That is, content where thinking unfolds through gesture, texture, and spatial arrangement and treating form not as neutral but as method (Hull & Nelson, 2005; Ingold, 2011). Central to [BLINDED]’s philosophy is that our roles as educators, artists, and collaborators are not outside of scholarship but part of what makes it impactful. This adapts a tradition of scholars who turned to other platforms of expression not just to share but to think differently.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote through The Crisis, weaving scholarship into journalism; Brian Sutton-Smith explored chaos and play through fiction; and Stuart Hall lived his theory through broadcast. Designers, artists, performers, and theorists often turn to everyday culture and its forms to witness how ideas take shape, shift, and circulate. Together, they reveal that popular culture and media act as critical and generative sites for "intervention, challenge, and change" (hooks, 2006, p. 5). Consequently, knowledge is constructed at the margins of scholarship—in spaces where academics are absent from conversations valuing different ways of knowing.

We assess the affordances of form itself, particularly how specific formats can shape affective dimensions of attention and open space for reflection, return, and resonance. Created by 15 scholars across diverse disciplines, the magazine demonstrates how scholars can engage broader publics through playful, provocative experimentation. Grounded in arts-based and design research (Leavy, 2020; Manning & Massumi, 2014), we approach the magazine as both artifact and method of inquiry. Its contents, including essays, card decks, visual art, photography, and interviews, are unified by the idea that play enables new modes of public scholarship. While digital tools have expanded the range of publication formats, their speed and ephemerality wear grooves in how we engage, narrowing space for sustained reflection. In contrast, our magazine invites deliberative reading and rereading—offering an alternative to the immediacy of time-limited videos or social media posts, and proposing a slower, more resonant form of scholarly encounter.

For many of us, magazines are a form that evoke fond memories — Highlights for kids at the dentist’s office, flipping through People magazine in waiting rooms, anticipating the cover of Vogue’s September issue, and absorbing in-depth interviews from Rolling Stone. Reflecting a capacious repertoire of genres and voices, magazines appealed to a wide spectrum of audiences. We aim to examine how such a format can expand scholarly communication, disrupt academic conventions, and foster a dialogue through playing with form. Rather than asking whether magazines are appropriate for academic publishing, this paper invites a shift in our creative and critical gaze: What possibilities for academic expressions emerge when we take the magazine seriously as a scholarly form?

Authors

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Lucius Von Joo, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Lalitha Vasudevan, Teachers College, Columbia University