Vicennium: looking back before moving forward

ABSTRACT

In this outgoing editorial for the 20th Anniversary volume of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Robin M. Boylorn reflects on her editorship using the lens and metaphor of an archivist and an architect.

KEYWORDS:

• 20th anniversary
• historicity
• retroactive storytelling
• culture
• critical studies

Vicennium: (rare) a period of twenty years

Intro/editor as archivist

As an editor, I see my role as one of an archivist, assessing and organizing an academic account of communication and culture and cultural studies scholarship that I, alongside my editorial board, believe will have ongoing relevance and permanence. If the curation of culture involves telling a story about what happened, when, to whom, and why, then it is also an opportunity to leave evidence of the in-the-moment impact and lived experience of everything from global crises to local economies, from artificial intelligence to politics of representation. Truth is, right-now relevance fades quickly because our 24/7/365 access to and consumption of culture creates a continuum where only viral media remains culturally significant for longer than a news cycle. Culture is hard to capture but archivists are culture-bearers and record keepers.

I believe that part of my responsibility, as editor/archivist of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, has been to tell a compelling, consistent, and credible story. I have taken seriously the responsibility to account for unanswerable questions from the past and unknowable answers in the future. Stuart Hall famously described the objective of cultural criticism saying, “the aim of the contemporary cultural studies investigator is not to generate another good theory, but to give a better theorized account of concrete historical reality.”¹ My intention, then, has not been to publish generalizations or redundant theorizations about power. My goal, as editor, and in the spirit of Hall's directive, has been to bear witness and serve as a placeholder for both an evolution of time and a particular moment in time honoring the common and collective alongside the complex and cerebral. I have worked to anchor scholarship that is critical, historical, theoretical and self-reflexive. What was it like to live through a global pandemic and public health crisis? What are the pressing issues that dominate the public imagination? How have people, at different times and for different reasons, across the world, responded to hypocrisies, resisted supremacies and navigated disinformation and technologies? What does justice look like? How do we negotiate the relationship between critique and care, since both are vitally necessary for survival?

Because both time and culture are in a constant state of change, it is difficult to capture a cultural cause that will be collectively remembered without trauma or trigger. My editorship began with the ubiquity of COVID-19 and the unprecedented death left in its wake. Black Lives Matter protests erupted in response to unarmed Black civilians being murdered by police officers while the world was sitting still long enough to pay attention. In the US, the aftermath of a controversial presidency was followed by a delayed and then challenged election result, and an insurrection attempt at the US Capitol building. In 2022, following the third deadliest school shooting in the nation's history, progressives celebrated the swearing in of Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court the same month we mourned the reversal of Roe v. Wade. In 2024, there are ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, global climate change continues to yield unpredictable and dangerous weather patterns, and US voters prepare for what is likely the most critical and crucial presidential election of our lifetime. We are witnessing regression in politics and a rise in racial antagonisms across the globe. I write this outgoing editorial not just to reflect on the past three years, but to think ahead to the next three years, and to punctuate how quickly things change and how much is at stake. We need a reliable record.

In the spirit of archiving the moment, this first installment of the anniversary issues includes a reprint of the Editors’ Collective Statement that I signed, alongside collaborating editors, to mark a moment of silencing that took place during the 2023 National Communication Association Convention, wherein our colleague, Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb, was denied the opportunity to give a speech about freedom. My colleagues and I print our statement and the speech, in its entirety, in solidarity, and I include it here as a record of wrong and an attempt toward correction.

This issue also includes a special Anniversary Spotlight article by Henry Giroux, whose article “Cultural Studies, Public Pedagogy, and the Responsibility of Intellectuals,” which was published in the first issue of the journal in 2004, remains, to date, the most cited publication in CC/CS history. In his new offering “Cultural Politics and Public Intellectualism in the Age of Emerging Fascism,” Dr. Giroux reflects on the weaponization of culture and the changing landscape of cultural studies and politics.

The 20th anniversary issues will feature two forums that reflect a spirit of reminiscence and revelation only possible after two decades of consideration. In his brilliant but reluctant visionary statement about the then-new journal, founding editor Robert L. Ivie stated:

Without trying to speak definitively, I would say that the spirit of this journal is one of experimentation, exploration, invention, and innovation, that our project is in a perpetual state of becoming, and that we aim to address our readers as a scholarly journal with attitude. We engage communication in its many forms and venues of cultural production. We ask how it functions as an articulation of power and how we might reflect upon it as a source of democratic culture.²

I asked Dr. Ivie to revisit the project he helped start 20 years ago, and he accepted my invitation to guest edit our opening anniversary forum, framing it with a first-person account of the journal’s early aims and reflecting on the state of the field over the last 20 years. Ivie reacts and responds, both through his introduction and his curation of contributors, to the myriad ways the spirit of the journal has both succeeded and failed – leaving readers to reckon with their complicity alongside the possibility of a more democratized culture (of communication).

In the second anniversary forum, which will be published in the second issue, Eric King Watts guest edits a collection of essays from established and emerging scholars who muse and speculate about the futuristic possibilities of communication and critical/cultural studies. Their essays will welcome readers to dream and imagine the field and the work of the journal over the next 20 years.

Outro/editor as architect

In 2004, the year this journal started, Facebook, a social networking service with restricted users, also launched. That same year, the first legal same sex marriage in the United States happened, resulting in a series of legal battles that resulted, in 2015, over ten years later, with the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.³ Now, 20 years later, Meta, formerly Facebook, Inc., is a multinational technology conglomerate that owns 91 other companies and, with more than 3 billion global users, is the largest social media platform in the world.⁴ In 2024, Americans, particularly those who are most marginalized, have seen a revision of history and a reversal of progress, including a rejection of DEI initiatives, a demonization of critical race theory, the restriction of reproductive rights for birthing people, and vulnerability for the legality of same sex marriage.⁵

Twenty years is a long time. Twenty years is not enough time.

Editors, like architects, are dreamers, planners and builders. The architecture of this journal, like the architecture of culture, includes intentionality and vision. CC/CS maintains its original aims and scope while encouraging the reinterpretation and innovation of each author and editor who has contributed, over the years, to its design. Editors have three-year terms and are tasked with continuing the norms of the journal, creating a personalized call that reflects their intentions of focus, and then relinquishing the reins to the incoming editor. As I transition to the last phase of my editorship, I do so reflecting on my contributions and surveying what I have helped build and sustain. The anniversary call invited articles that center the past, present, and future of communication and cultural studies as a field of study. I have welcomed and reviewed manuscripts that engaged intersectionality, reflexivity, and critical analysis; attended to the role of communication as a way to help explain and understand the world we live in and how it can help create a more just world we can thrive in; and work that attempted to understand and dismantle power and engage questions about its resilience. As editor, I have been particularly interested in academic research that engages a historical lens of citation, that centers politically and socially relevant topics and present-day contexts, and that leads with an intention of advancing social justice outcomes. I was particularly interested in papers that engaged themes of globality, indigeneity, indigenous rhetorics, indigenous social movements (e.g., Land Back campaigns), coloniality in/and communication studies, settler colonialism in/and contemporary politics, political agendas in/and higher education, connections between white supremacy, and anti-LGBTQ+ agendas, reproductive politics at the nexus of other oppressive ideologies, new modes of organizing or resistance in the current socio-political moment, and social media movements and trends. Some of these topics are reflected in the next four issues, and others are potential building blocks for future submissions to the journal.

I had five goals for my editorship: (1) to demystify the publication process for graduate students and early career scholars through third reviewer opportunities; (2) to expand the editorial board to make it as representative and reflective of the full range of CC/CS as possible; (3) to initiate conversations through special forums that will advance the field while grounding us in the current moment and historical context of communication and critical/cultural studies; (4) to publish quality scholarship that advances the field and challenges the status quo, and (5) to use the process of peer review, copyediting and publication to mentor authors and improve manuscripts, even and especially when publication was not possible.⁶

I believe I accomplished my goals, and l hope I am leaving my architectural signature style on the journal.

It would be remiss of me to not acknowledge that, as I end my editorship, a colleague, Dr. Armond Towns, begins his. Dr. Towns is the founding editor of Communication and Race, a new journal that will publish its inaugural issue in 2024. According to Towns, who unironically situates the timeliness and necessity of the journal within a historical legacy and trajectory of communication studies, Black studies, and cultural studies, Communication and Race will offer "a more critical trajectory on the study of race in the discipline" .⁷ In this moment of anti-intellectualism and colorblind racism, we have never needed the intervention of an academic project more. I offer my unequivocal support and endorsement of this new journal and believe that it, alongside our sister NCA journals, will continue to foster important conversations with attention to inclusion, positionality and accountability.

Anniversaries mark milestones – the beginning, the middle, and sometimes the end. As my editorship comes to a close, my final four issues mark this milestone moment in history, offer educated context and clarity, build momentum from existing arguments – and, like the symbolic Sankofa bird, urge us to look back before moving forward.

Twenty years is a long time. Twenty years is not enough time.

Cheers to the next vicennium!

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my editorial assistants, LaTonya J. Taylor (volumes 19 and 20) and Cassidy Ellis (volumes 20 and 21), whose work ethic and reliability made them amazing collaborators. Thank you, both, for lending your organizational skills, copyediting eyes, and intellectual curiosities to this project. I also want to express extreme gratitude to Henry Giroux for contributing his brilliant and concise cultural commentary and analysis for the anniversary spotlight article (Henry, it was an honor to celebrate and work with you!). To the guest editors for this volume, Bob Ivie (“looking back”) and Eric King Watts (“moving forward”), thank you for moderating important conversations and for modeling ethical scholarship. Bob, it is an honor to continue what you started as the journal's first editor. Watts, to say I admire and appreciate you would be an understatement. I also want express appreciation to the Editors' Collective who cross-published our statement of solidarity and support for Ahlam Muhtaseb, and to every editor of CC/CS who preceded me, and all of those who will follow me, most especially Marina Levina, the next editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Finally, I thank all of the authors who published in my issues, the T&F Journal Editorial Office team (especially Melissa and Rema), and last but not least I extend immense gratitude to my editorial board members, third reviewers, and ad hoc reviewers whose generous and generative feedback was instrumental to my editorship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Stuart Hall, "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 69-70.

2 Robert L. Ivie, “What Are We About?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 125–26.

3 Bill Chappell, “Supreme Court Declares Same-Sex Marriage Legal in All 50 States,” NPR, June 26, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/26/417717613/supreme-court-rules-all-states-must-allow-same-sex-marriages.

4 Chris Stokel-Walker, “Why has Facebook Changed Its Name to Meta and What is the Metaverse?,” New Scientist, October 29, 2021, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2295438-why-has-facebook-changed-its-name-to-meta-andwhat-is-the-metaverse/#:∼:text=The%20name%20was%20chosen%20to,%E2%80%9CIn%20this%E2%80%A6.

5 Philip Elliott, “The Supreme Court Just Made Same-Sex Marriage More Vulnerable to a Challenge,” Time, June 30, 2023, https://time.com/6291641/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-vulnerable/.

6 Robin M. Boylorn, “How to be a (Black Woman) Journal Editor during a Pandemic: An Introduction to an Inaugural Issue,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2022): 1–4.

7 Armond R. Towns, “'Communication Hesitant': An Introduction,” Communication and Race 1, no 1 (2024): 1–11.