What Is a Journal for?

In ‘What Is a Journal for?’, Sean Cubitt argues that to survive, a journal needs, more than anything, a reason to exist. For him, this should be a transdisciplinary project to actively refuse disciplinary closures, and to critically interrogate the scope and limits of specialisms and disciplines, in contrast to those who would defend them for their own sakes. Because specialisms are not intrinsic ally valuable or collective enterprises, he insists, the journal’s transdisciplinary project should be to collectively enable (not determine) media theory, and to foster dialogue between specialist objects and schools of thought so as to “unleash the potential each of them has locked up inside its disciplinary firewalls”.