Disruptions: a new book series

It is great to see a publisher brave enough to venture deliberately into interdisciplinary waters. It is even better to be part of it. When I learned about the orientation of Rowman and Littlefield International, I was excited by the possibilities for publishing really challenging and ground-breaking work, that could be of significance both inside and outside the academy. The result is a new book series called Disruptions.

Disruptions will be concerned with both the study and the precipitation of disruptions. It will publish academic monographs that interrogate and analyse disruptions within and across such fields and disciplines as culture and society, media and technology, literature and philosophy, aesthetics and politics. Its aim is both to explore and to produce disruptions. To this end, Disruptions will publish work that is irreducibly interdisciplinary. This is because one of the animating propositions of the series is that disruptions in one context or field, realm or register, are likely to emanate from or relate to at least one other field, context, or realm.

Accordingly, interdisciplinarity is essential to any adequate exploration and analysis of disruption. Disruptions in culture, society, politics or philosophy might derive from the disturbance caused by forces, events or transformations in media, technology, science, economics, or other areas. There are relays and reciprocities, antagonisms and clashes both within and across 'fields'. Moreover, the very emergence and establishment of fields, contexts, relations and practices might be understood to be the consequence of disruptions.

Books in this series will include: philosophical and theoretical explorations of disruptions in history, culture, media and politics; theoretical, cultural and political studies of activism and agency; studies of the disruptions precipitated by innovations and revolutions in media, communication, and technology; works which seek to disrupt the business as usual of inherited disciplinary formations by way of multi- and cross-disciplinary forays and contaminations; and so on.

The series has an international editorial advisory panel, made up of high-ranking professors from around the world, including Professor Benjamin Arditi (UNAM, Mexico), Professor Rey Chow (Duke University, USA), Professor Simon Critchley (New School, New York), Professor Ben Highmore (Sussex, UK), Dr Jeremy Valentine (Queen Margaret, Edinburgh) and Professor Catherine Driscoll (Sydney). Moreover, Disruptions has already attracted book proposals both from well-established and world leading academics, as well as from younger, newer scholars. The series as a whole will seek to maintain this balance between publishing books by established authors and by publishing books by emergent academics.

The primary readership for books in this series will be multidisciplinary and international. It will primarily be conceptualised as 'cultural studies' – but this is a very vague and amorphous term: all of the books so far envisaged, for instance, could be characterised as 'cultural studies'; but they could equally be categorised as coming from diverse and even distinct disciplinary fields. Accordingly, books in the Disruptions series will attract both disciplinary and interdisciplinary readerships: the books published in the series will engage with problematics and issues that are both specific to disciplines (e.g., the question of agency in political theory) and general (e.g., the question of how to make a difference to the world).

The first book in the Disruptions series will be Bearing Society in Mind: Theories and Politics of the Social Formation, by Professor Samuel Chambers (Johns Hopkins, USA).

For further information or to discuss ideas for publication, contact the series editor, Dr Paul Bowman: BowmanP@cardiff.ac.uk