''Social Text'' is an
academic journal
An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and d ...
published by
Duke University Press
Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 Du ...
. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, ''Social Text'' has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment. Each issue covers subjects in the debates around
feminism
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
,
Marxism
Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...
,
neoliberalism
Neoliberalism (also neo-liberalism) is a term used to signify the late 20th century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism after it fell into decline following the Second World War. A prominent fa ...
,
postcolonialism
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is a ...
,
postmodernism
Postmodernism is an intellectual stance or Rhetorical modes, mode of discourseNuyen, A.T., 1992. The Role of Rhetorical Devices in Postmodernist Discourse. Philosophy & Rhetoric, pp.183–194. characterized by philosophical skepticism, skepticis ...
,
queer theory, and
popular culture
Popular culture (also called mass culture or pop culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as, popular art or mass art) and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a ...
. The journal has since been run by different collectives over the years, mostly based at New York City universities. It has maintained an avowedly progressive political orientation and scholarship over these years, if also a less Marxist one. Since 1992, it is published by Duke University Press.
The journal gained notoriety in 1996 for the
Sokal affair
The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a demonstrative scholarly publishing sting, scholarly hoax performed by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article t ...
, when it published a
nonsensical
Nonsense is a communication, via speech, writing, or any other symbolic system, that lacks any coherent meaning. Sometimes in ordinary usage, nonsense is synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous. Many poets, novelists and songwriters have ...
article that physicist
Alan Sokal
Alan David Sokal (; born January 24, 1955) is an American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor emeritus of physics at New York University. He works in statistical mechanics and combinatorics. He is a critic of postmo ...
had deliberately written as a hoax. The editors of the journal were awarded the 1996
Ig Nobel Prize
The Ig Nobel Prize ( ) is a satiric prize awarded annually since 1991 to celebrate ten unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research. Its aim is to "honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The name o ...
for literature by "eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist". The journal did not practice academic
peer review
Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
, and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.
See also
*
Science wars
The science wars were a series of scholarly and public discussions in the 1990s over the social place of science in making authoritative claims about the world.
HighBeam Encyclopedia defines the science wars as the discussions about the "way the sc ...
References
External links
*
Cultural journals
Critical theory
Duke University Press academic journals
Publications established in 1979
Quarterly journals
English-language journals
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