Publishables

This article discusses academic (Open Access) publishing as a tool. On the one hand, with regards to a commercial publishing industry that ties in its inequalities in the institutional legitimation of knowledges with a neo-liberal, competitive, and individualizing world view; as well as with regards to current models of policy and funding driv-en initiatives considering Open Access (OA) publishing as a business capitalizing on inequalities based on gender, class, and race embedded in systems of schol-arly knowledge production. On the other hand, this article reviews current strands of scholar-led OA publish-ing initiatives that use publishing as a base for an interventionist prac-tice geared at unsettling institutional and neoliberal frameworks of scholarly knowledge production and communication — conceptionally, formal-ly, and organizationally. These initiatives are discussed within more speculative text sections unfolding around feminist and intersectional epistemologies, high-lighting the performative, material, and relational character of publishing and publications. Thereby, this text aims to performatively point out possible differ-ent publishing formats, activities, and institutions, as well as different perspec-tives for and on publishing that might be instrumental for instantiating more horizontal and inclusive scholarly forms of knowledge production.