Working with EJCS for a decade

Abstract

In this short article Jo Littler reflects on her experience of co-editing European Journal of Cultural Studies over the past decade. It includes discussions of key themes analysed in the journal; the contexts of the wider conjuncture; the ethos and practices of the journal; and the challenges and joys of the work.

It’s been 10 years since I joined the European Journal of Cultural Studies as one of its editors. I was so very happy to be asked to join by Ann Gray (who I had never met before, and who I only met very briefly as she was leaving). This was an exciting new zone of activity to get stuck into. It meant I was being given more responsibility for an area of cultural studies, the anti-discipline with a troubled and troubling history: the naughty child of academia, the creative bridge-builder, the analytical dissector of the politics of the present, which uses theory and analysis to make sense of the power dynamics of the moment, or as we say in cultural studies – and as, thankfully, so many more people are saying again these days – the conjuncture.

I remember that first year involving meetings with the team both in Leicester, in England, in a hotel with a bar with an entire wall featuring men called ‘Will’, and then catching the train to Amsterdam for the first of many annual meetings. Over the years, we often met in Amsterdam in early January; meetings were co-ordinated with great kindness and flair by Joke Hermes, which became a great way of staving off winter gloom and provided a mini crash course in Dutch culture and politics. I was told I was being asked to join in part because they hoped my involvement would help augment the political dimension of the journal, a motif which runs through my work just as it does in the wider project of cultural studies. I joined the same year that I submitted my book manuscript for Against Meritocracy: Culture, Power and Myths of Mobility, and it was a relief that significant parts of the cultural climate and its wider structure of feeling were, at that time, becoming increasingly open (once again) to discussing inequality. 2016 was a moment when the apolitical strain of cultural studies was thankfully diminishing, as the social costs of surfing the neoliberal wave became clearer to many – and brutally clearer later that year when Donald Trump became the US President.

Cultural studies has a wide array of investments and modes of exploration: from primarily theoretical explorations to experimental pieces to the ‘well-theorised empirical work’ which Joke Hermes, Pertti Alasuutari and Ann Gray had been particularly keen to promote when they set up this journal in 1998 after a Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference (Hermes et al., 2017). Running through all these modes and throughout cultural studies’ history has always been a firm commitment to investigating the power dynamics of the present by exploring culture in its widest sense. This involves interrogating everyday practices of meaning-making, cultural artefacts and phenomena, new modes of capitalist exploitation and the relationship between them, while bringing questions of gender, ‘race’, environment, class, nationality, disability and technology fully and firmly into the mix to make sense of our times – or, again, ‘the conjuncture’ (Clarke, 2023).

Editing the journal has had its fair share of work and responsibility: shepherding through articles, deciding on special issues, dealing with rejections, an ever-swelling submissions inbox and the looming spectre of the AI article. And yet, this has above all been a wonderfully supportive team to be part of. Journals can be run very different ways, even while adhering to publishers’ standardised guidelines. From the beginning it was clear that this journal had a particular sensibility of cultural production. Our ethos has been to function as a team: when we are turned down by multiple reviewers and no longer know who to ask, we know we can turn to each other for suggestions. The journal’s ethos has been to be conscious of and to try to help offset our time-squeeze and the material realities that precarious early career researchers in particular experience; to be creative about how we can support new forms of cultural studies work and activities and to make our group meetings fun as well as productive. I’m going to miss our 2-day meetings, talking in the evenings as well as working in the days. Such pleasure has been all the more precious as both academia and the surrounding world have become that much harder, their difficulties, exhaustions and precarities ratcheted up through the relentless march of marketisation, inequality, atomisation and the surge of the right.

There are some contributions to the journal that I am particularly proud of. I have been involved in directly assembling three special issues as the co-editor. The most recent was co-editing, with Nirmal Puwar and Anamik Saha, what became a (justifiably) epic special issue devoted to revisiting Nirmal’s book Space Invaders and considering how its lens of analysing ‘bodies, race and gender out of place’ can be used today (Littler and Saha, 2025; Puwar, 2025). The first special issue was early on, when I was contacted by Marie Moran from University College Dublin to work together on another ‘revisiting’ of a key book, this time of Jim McGuigan’s Cultural Populism (Moran and Littler, 2020). Marie and I had not met before, but I’m very glad she got in touch. This special issue involved considering how the meanings of ‘cultural populism’ had shifted; reassessing the political dynamic of cultural studies and publishing excellent work by key cultural studies figures, including Jim McGuigan, who, like Stuart Hall and Elspbeth Probyn, is no longer with us. All these losses are part of the pain of getting older, although, as Jilly Kay and Raymond Williams remind us, ‘A life lasts longer than the body through which it moves’ (Kay, 2021: 1009). I was also very happy to work with Ros Gill and Hannah Curran-Troop on a project combining areas the journal has long been a ‘magnet’ for – feminism and cultural industries – for the issue on ‘Freelance Feminisms’, which examined the relationship between new forms of feminism and precarity (Curran-Troop et al., 2024). The enthusiasm of EJCS for feminism has long been a cornerstone of its identity, and rightly so (Kay, 2024).

I have also overseen or ‘shepherded’ many more special issues that have been guest edited by other people and was proud to go out in this respect on a high note this year by seeing through the publication of the issue Culture is Foundational, edited by Justin O’Connor, Kate Oakley and Tully Barnett. This special issue explores the potential relationship between culture and the foundation economy, re-evaluating the relationship between culture and the economy and the possibilities of creating an explicitly redistributive programme for culture rather than one centred around capitalist ‘growth’ (O’Connor et al., 2026). Stuart Hall famously once said that popular culture matters as a site where socialism may be constituted; otherwise, he said, ‘I don’t give a damn about it’ (Hall, 1981). In these times, when the choice between moving towards socialism or moving towards barbarism is becoming ever starker, I can think of no better special issue to leave this journal with.

I have enjoyed talking about the journal at conferences, working with my co-editors on our dossiers, talking through our new possible directions and areas to encourage and thinking what is needed. Our rapid-response/interview area Cultural Commons, established by Jilly Kay and now ably overseen by Siao Yuong Fong and Jian Lin, has been a boon for the journal: publishing of-the-moment, rapid-response pieces such as Helen Wood and Bev Skeggs’ paper on the appearance of ‘care gratitude’ rather than ‘care justice’ during Covid-19 (Wood and Skeggs, 2020). I contributed interviews with feminists for Cultural Commons which later appeared in the book Left Feminisms (Littler, 2023). These included an interview with Angela McRobbie reflecting on gender and welfare via anecdotes of her experience of hospitalisation with Covid, and Carol Tulloch’s powerful recollections of growing up Black working-class in Doncaster, UK, in a convivial multicultural community (a theme relating to the recent work by Singh et al., 2025) (Littler and McRobbie, 2022; Littler and Tulloch, 2022). These are stories that stay with me through their blend of the personal, theoretical and political. This journal makes possible such experimental contributions.

I had actually not written a full-length article for the journal until this year when the article I co-wrote with Bev Skeggs, ‘Social Mobility is a Joke!’, was published for a forthcoming issue on ‘autosociobiography’, edited by Sam Friedman, Mike Savage and Carlos Spoerhase (Littler and Skeggs, 2026). The close historical and contemporary interconnections between sociology and cultural studies were key reference points for our article (on working-class women’s rejection of both respectability and of middle-class narratives of meritocratic individualism in British TV comedy), as well as the wider issue on memoir as social commentary. These links between sociology and cultural studies – so key for Stuart Hall’s work among others and for understanding the conjuncture – are crucial to keep maintaining and continue re-inventing, particularly in this moment when disciplinary silos are being reconstituted, often savagely, by some (if thankfully not all) academic institutions.

While I cannot take any credit whatsoever for their work, I am also very proud of encouraging the multitalented Anamik Saha, Jilly Kay, Jayson Harsin and Francesca Sobande to take up their editor roles. Francesca’s first prize-winning journal article on Black women in Britain on YouTube was one I edited with Joke Hermes many years ago (Sobande, 2017). I have been extremely happy to work with Helen Wood, Jaap Koojiman and Yiu Fai Chow who have been such supportive and fun co-editors. I have been extremely grateful for the spectacularly good organisational skills and friendliness of Erin Bell, Jess Martin and Linda Kopitz. Siao Yuong Fong, Jian Lin and Annelot Prins have been wonderful and energising to work with. In short, these are all fantastic cultural studies practitioners and colleagues who have been a joy to be around. And as I am not very good at dealing with significant times and dates relating to myself (although I’m good at helping other people with theirs), I’m glad that my wonderful collaborators have helped me commemorate and celebrate. Thanks, team.

I am glad the European Journal of Cultural Studies continues to find inventive ways to keep open space for cultural studies and to enable it to flourish in new ways. The ‘European’ in the title was originally a way to demarcate where this journal was being produced from – as opposed to what were then the ‘other’ cultural studies journals, which were primarily US-based. We have been a journal to which a lot of articles about culture in Europe has been sent; although we have, however, always published work written from, and examining culture in, places throughout the world. Over the years, we have struggled with the term, taking ‘European’ in its widest sense, looking at it inside out, working to try to decolonise it (Chow and Saha, 2020). For our twentieth anniversary, we drew together open-access ‘dossiers’ of articles in areas we have been particularly strong in, including creative industries, television and postfeminism. In 2 years, in 2028, it will be the 30-year anniversary of the journal. I am really looking forward to seeing what the team do next.