College of Charleston Professor Benjamin Fraser has just launched the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies (JUCS), which is housed in the College’s School of Languages, Cultures and World Affairs. The journal is the first print and online publication to address the culture(s) of cities from an interdisciplinary perspective.
“This journal has been a long time coming,” Fraser says. “There just aren’t any journals out there that truly put the humanities and the social sciences on equal footing. Culture itself tends to be undertheorized in urban studies and urban geography broadly speaking, and yet researchers in language and literature departments are doing great work that looks at the representation of cities in novels, poetry, short stories, popular music, comic art, films, digital art, and more. We’re going to fill that need for a rigorous, interdisciplinary publication venue on urban culture.”
As a precursor to the journal, Fraser began the urbanculturalstudies blog in March of 2012, and has seen the site register almost 20,000 clicks in a matter of months. “The blog is a multi-authored site, and we’re looking for it to cover the cultures of cities the world over. Initially it was a project to gauge potential interest in the journal, but once we publish the first issue in the fall of 2013 it will become a companion site where we can hold interdisciplinary discussions—an online forum of sorts whether discussion relates to journal content or more topical items.”
The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies is a new peer-reviewed publication cutting across both the humanities and the social sciences in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities. The journal is open to studies that deal with culture, urban spaces and forms of urbanized consciousness the world over.
