Crossover Publishing and Essays in the Critical Humanities (EtCH)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable is organized around the project of public-facing publishing, with a focus on both the process and content of several forthcoming monographs being published by np’s EtCH (Essays in the Critical Humanities) series. This panel is specifically not organized toward the ends of soliciting manuscripts or advertising for the press, but rather to showcase works of more public facing political and activist writing and to discuss futures models for publishing beyond the traditional academic / trade divide. Showcasing EtCh authors Liza Minno (Rule of Innocents: White Settler Affect and the Supreme Court), Radhika Subramaniam (Footprint: Four Itineraries), Eujin Park (Social-Movement Led Methodologies, with Nadine Naber) and Joey Weiss (Settler Psychology)— alongside np Director Tim Roberts and EtCH Editorial Board members Cynthia Franklin, Greta LaFleur, and Neferti Tadiar— this roundtable invites a discussion of what non-academic and nontraditional projects might offer to political movements and the communities who drive them. In the context of both local and national attacks on universities in particular and higher education as a whole, this roundtable will ask what strategic benefits might accrue to considering forms of publishing—toward the goal of ensuring the thriving of political thought and the circulation of radical and insurrectionary questions—that sit outside of the immediate political economy surrounding universities.

About EtCH: Essays in the Critical Humanities (EtCH) is committed to publishing work by activists and intellectuals that will form incisive and collective radical futures in which humans and non-humans not only survive but thrive. Learning from critiques of sexual and gender violence, colonialism and capitalism, caste and race, and more, the series provides ways to think the history of the present with an intentionality that includes the global. EtCH publications bring the power of scholarly research and theoretical reasoning to social justice goals, and they ignite challenging study in and beyond the classrooms of the neoliberal university, wherever it may be. EtCH therefore functions outside the university press publishing ecosystem and maintains editorial independence as it facilitates work that is sometimes at cross purposes with institutional structures. At the same time, it recognizes the value and preserves features of academic scholarship, such as peer review and an orientation to the pedagogical power of the classroom in amplifying important ideas.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Cynthia Franklin, University of Hawai'i

Panelists

• Liza Minno, New York University

• Greta LaFleur, Yale University

• Tim Roberts

• Eujin Park

• Neferti Tadiar, Barnard College

• Radhika Subramaniam, The New School

Biographical Information

Cindy Franklin:

Cynthia Franklin is professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i, Acting Director of the Center for Biographical Research, and coeditor of Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (2008), and Writing Women's Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Multi-Genre Women's Anthologies (1997). Her essays appear in venues including American Quarterly, Biography, Cultural Critique, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Life Writing, and The Contemporary Pacific. Her co-edited collections include a special issue of Biography on “Life in Occupied Palestine.” Her involvement in the ASA dates back 25 years, and includes being a member of the 2016 and 2025 program committees and the 2019 site committee; participating in the Academic and Community Activism Caucus, where she worked on the academic boycott resolution and, most recently, the Zionism resolution; and, for the Hawai‘i ASA (HASA) chapter, co-organizing two symposia on “The Place of Hawai‘i in American Studies,” and a visit by Remi Kanazi. She has also served as an AQ Board member, and is a member of the Editorial Collective for EtCH. Cynthia is cofounder of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at the University of Hawai‘i (SFJP@UH).

Greta LaFleur
Greta LaFleur is Associate Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. They are the author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Johns Hopkins, 2018); the co-editor of two volumes, Trans Historical: Gender Plurality Before the Modern (Cornell UP, 2021) and American Literature in Transition, 1770-1828 (Cambridge UP, 2022); and the co-editor of three journal special issues, including "Origins of Biopolitics in the Americas" (American Quarterly, 2019), "Trans Exclusionary Feminisms and the Global New Right" (Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2023), and "The Science of Sex Itself" (GLQ, 2023). They are currently finishing up a book of essays on birding, co-written with anthropologist Cal Biruk, for the Duke UP Practices, as well as their second monograph, How Sex Became Good: The Feminist Movements and Racial Politics that Made Modern Sexuality (under contract, U of Chicago Press).

Liza Minno:
Liza Minno is a doctoral student in American Studies at New York University. She is a Dean's Doctoral Fellow and a Dean's Humanities Scholar. She is an educator, nonfiction writer, and community organizer who works as a programmer for the Pat Parker and Vito Russo Library at the LGBT Center in Manhattan. She holds a BA in Journalism from Eugene Lang and an MA in American Studies from the University of New Mexico. Rule of Innocents is her first book and she is now researching and writing about the post-WWII role of U.S intelligence agencies, in extending settler colonial empire.

Eujin Park
Dr. Park is an Assistant Professor at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford University. Dr. Park draws upon critical theories of racialization, Asian American Studies, and community engaged research to examine how Asian American families negotiate with race in and through educational institutions. She recently conducted an ethnographic investigation of community-based educational spaces in the Chicago-area Asian American community, which highlighted the role of community spaces in youths’ educational experiences and understandings of racializing discourses. In addition to publishing and presenting her work in multiple academic venues, Dr. Park draws upon her research in her work with Asian American and other youth of color in community-based organizations. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Policy Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a concentration in Social Sciences and a Minor in Qualitative Methods. She also holds an M.A. from UW-Madison and a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Tim Roberts
Tim Roberts is Director of Counterpath Press and Principal of the nonprofit _np_. Dedicated to the formation of the “social and economic combinations” of new presses, the nonprofit np: addresses the question: What does innovation look like in the publishing context? Its answer—as it assists in the formation of new institutionally-based publishing units—paradoxically involves a certain refusal to answer that question at all, since it is only when np: discovers new projects that it facilitates the collective formation of a business plan and in fact a new press. np: then deliberately moves on to another institution, to the building of yet another new press, since internal to np: is the idea that innovation arrives only in the starting anew, with different people, with different projects, within different institutions, in different locations.

Radhika Subramaniam
Radhika Subramaniam is Associate Professor of Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design/The New School in New York City. With an interdisciplinary practice as curator and writer, she explores crises and surprises as they emerge in urban life, walking, art and human-nonhuman relationships.

Neferti Tadiar
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is a feminist scholar of Philippine cultures and global political economy and Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Professor Tadiar writes on the role of cultural practice and social imagination in the production of wealth, power, marginality, and liberatory movements in the context of global relations of imperialism. She is the author of Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), which was award the Philippine National Book Award in Cultural Criticism in 2005; Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009); and Life-Times of Becoming Human (2022), which was awarded the Philippine National Book Award in Philosophy in 2023. Her most recent book, Remaindered Life (2022), is an extended meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire. It received the John Hope Franklin for Best Book in American Studies in 2023. She founded and currently directs the Alfredo F. Tadiar Library, an independent community library and cultural space in San Fernando, La Union, which holds artist-led creative workshops, art and community exhibitions, and cultural events, and publishes books that bring into view critical and creative perspectives on Philippine social and political life, culture, art, and history.

Joseph Weiss
Joseph Weiss is a settler scholar who works between sociocultural anthropology and Indigenous studies. His research explores the intersections between settler colonialism, time, ecology, and Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Dr. Weiss has been conducting fieldwork with the Haida community of Old Massett since 2010, where has also worked as a full-time volunteer teaching assistant and occasional school play director. His first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) is based on this fieldwork, exploring how the Indigenous Haida Nation in Western Canada addresses political and social change through a series of different future-oriented cultural strategies. Dr. Weiss is currently finishing his second book, tentatively titled Irreconcilable: Indigeneity and the Violence of Colonial Erasure in Canada, which analyses the ways in which the agents, structures, and ideologies of settler colonial erase their own constitutive and ongoing violence, and, in turn, how Indigenous Peoples refuse to become reconciled to these continuing modes of domination. He is also at work on a third book, tentatively entitled How Settlers Think: Colonial Psychology and the Representation of Indigeneity, which explores the intersections of Indigenous Studies and Psychoanalysis, and has recently begun a new ethnographic project, examining settler colonial networks of extraction between Canada, Mexico and the United States. Dr. Weiss also maintains abiding interests in commissions of inquiry, the production of political legitimacy, and research ethics in the social sciences.