Undertheorized in the Literature

A workshop for experimental, accessible, and developing scholarship.

How the zine of the month club works:

1. send a message to undertheorized@uchicago.edu to be added to the mailing list.
2. In the penultimate week of the month, an email will go out for submissions. Participants are welcome to circulate works in progress, side projects or examples of experimental scholarship that they would like to discuss with the group. You are welcome to use the meetings to workshop anything, regardless of intended audience: academic journal (an ethnographic comic strip, photo essay), journalistic venue, art venue (art magazines, poetry blog, etc), or general audience (materials for a public workshop, etc.). Alternatively, the workshop encourages discussion of texts that function as part of the process of thinking through scholarly arguments; that is, texts that we produce for ourselves rather than for publication.*
3. On the last friday of the month, we will gather for food and discussion of 3-4 submissions. The workshop will try to provide funds for printing.

* you might be asking: If publishing is valued as the primary means of circulating scholarly ideas, professionalizing and building a career in academia, why would we workshop anything other than texts intended for publication? There are a few reasons:

Not everyone’s thought process takes the form of journal articles, grant proposals and dissertation chapters. Unlike these important modes of academic communication, the goal of this workshop is to provide a low-key space for communicating about how research is going without having to argue for the relevance of our choices and ideas to “the project”. There are plenty of things that happen during fieldwork that don’t make it into an academic argument, but were important for the process of arriving at the argument none-the-less. Some stages of thinking are made more difficult by anxieties over innovativeness, intellectual trends or “the puzzle”. Put simply, research is a challenging and confusing business and some of us work through the messiness in ways that do not involve academic writing.

This workshop is also ultimately about belonging and togetherness: with scholars across disciplines working on very similar topics and questions, we encourage a broad, empirically grounded and unspecialized conversation rather than siloing off into our own personal intellectual brands.