Provocations is a Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) series focused on peer-reviewed, open-access projects that have the same specific gravity as a short monograph, but take the form of experimental genres, fruitful and unusual collaborations, and/or mediated, born-digital formats.
Provocations projects offer new scholarly perspectives, challenge current understandings of our field, and suggest new approaches to the work we do. Our goal, in Patti Lather’s words, is to provide a place where “things begin to shift via practices that exceed the warrants of our present sense of the possible” (200).
Our first project in the Provocations series is Reconstructing the Archive, which does just that. Jody Shipka, Alexandra Hidalgo, Erin Anderson, and Trisha Campbell ask us to rethink not only what counts as an archive but also how we represent archives across a range of media. Their work, following Lather, moves “within and against disciplinary conventions...to produce different knowledge and to produce knowledge differently” (201). The project also benefits from the voices and perspectives of leading scholars in the field. Be sure to read Jonathan Alexander’s foreword, Paul Prior’s introduction, and Gesa Kirsch’s reflections.
Provocations projects like this one are designed to push against existing boundaries, to envision new dimensions in both form and content, to deploy new tools and approaches, and to advance new understandings. In sum, they are designed to offer us convincing intellectual arguments against business as usual.
We could not be more pleased to share this inaugural issue with you.
Works Cited
Lather, Patti. “Postbook: Working the Ruins of Feminist Ethnography.” Signs 27.1 (2001): 199-227.