Co-led by UI Fellow Dr Tanzil Shafique from the School of Architecture and Landscape, STingG is a transdisciplinary network of more than 1,000 scholars, students, practitioners, artists, activists and thinkers working across countries, languages and intellectual traditions. The group creates space for conversations about what it means to theorise from, with and across the many locations often described as the South, Global South, Global East and Majority Worlds.
After four years of collective conversations, workshops and collaborations, STingG is now exploring the possibility of establishing its own journal.
Imagining an alternative infrastructure of knowledge.
The starting question for JoST is:
Can Southern theorising flourish without alternative infrastructures of knowledge?
Much of the knowledge produced from Southern, Eastern, Indigenous and other marginalised intellectual locations continues to circulate through publishing systems centred in the Global North. Editorial structures, citation economies, linguistic conventions, rankings and measures of academic legitimacy influence what is recognised as theory, who is authorised to produce it, and the forms through which it must be expressed.
JoST is being imagined as more than a conventional academic journal. It could also become a knowledge commons, a space of hospitality and a home for conversations, translations, visual and multimedia work, experimental writing, collective reflection and unfinished thought.
Its working provocation is “A Quiet Rebellion”: an invitation to move beside existing publishing systems, gently unsettling inherited assumptions about authorship, language, peer review, rigour and academic legitimacy.
Beginning by listening
Rather than designing the journal first and inviting contributors afterwards, the JoST team is beginning with an open process of listening and co-production.
The consultation asks participants to reflect on:
- what would make JoST genuinely necessary;
- what existing academic practices it should refuse to reproduce;
- which voices, languages and forms of knowledge it should support;
- how peer review and editorial relationships could become more generous and less extractive;
- and what kind of publishing, governance and funding model the journal should explore.
The consultation is being coordinated by UI Fellow Dr Tanzil Shafique, Dr Jakleen Al-Dalal’a (UCL) and Andrew Hughes (University of Sheffield) working with an emerging international editorial collective and supported by the University of Sheffield Urban Institute.
Dr Tanzil Shafique said:
“The best journeys begin with listening. Before committing JoST to a particular format or institutional model, we want to understand the collective imagination around it. We hope to build an infrastructure of knowledge that does not simply publish work about plurality, but is itself produced plurally.”
The consultation is open to STingG members and to the wider community, including scholars, students, practitioners, artists, activists, independent researchers and others interested in Southern and pluriversal approaches to knowledge.
Take part
The consultation takes approximately six to ten minutes to complete.
Contribute to the JoST community consultation:
https://tinyurl.com/imagineJoST
Participants are also encouraged to share the consultation with colleagues, collaborators, students and networks whose perspectives could contribute to the development of the journal.
The responses will be synthesised and shared with the STingG community, informing the next stage of JoST’s purpose, languages, formats, editorial practices, governance and publishing model.
JoST is not yet a destination. It is an opening, a jostle, and a quiet rebellion.