Imaginaires

Aims & Scope

The online peer-reviewed academic journal Imaginaires (ISSN : 2780-1896) aims to offer scholars in the field of Cultural studies the opportunity to publish their research and promote the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of their scientific approaches. The journal also aims to examine and update the methods and practices of a discipline protean contours of which are still difficult to delineate, nearly sixty years after it emerged in Birmingham. Since its inception in the 1960s, the field of Cultural Studies has been marked by the popular dimension of the very objects it then chose to examine (television for instance) and has challenged traditional cultural hierarchies. The scholarly interest in new cultural objects resonates with emerging social entities that are now the subjects of dedicated (and perhaps fragmented) fields of research: race studies, gender studies, queer studies, childhood studies, intersectional studies, to name but a few. The journal’s ambition is not only to discuss the discourses conveyed on and by these cultural contents but also to question the very materiality of this culture characterised by industrialisation and mass (re)production (Williams). Imaginaires is primarily interested in the decentering of so-called highbrow culture and invites scholars to investigate new, popular, cultural objects and explore their material, social, economic, and societal modes and conditions of production and reception. Imaginaires is particularly interested in counter- and sub-cultures, in how they are captured by dominant culture – a phenomenon that may lead to the demise of class culture. Does popular culture assimilate dominant culture discourses, or does it emancipate itself by producing a resistant and/or counter-hegemonic discourse (Gramsci)? Far from considering the expansion of popular culture as an alienation of the masses or a debasement of highbrow culture (Leavis), Imaginaires embraces popular texts and narratives (genre literature and films, comic books, television, video games, body art) in order to examine their rhetoric and aesthetics. Convinced that popular culture is an object of study worthy of academic engagement, Imaginaires is ultimately defined as the place of all (cultural) transfers, of all forms of (disciplinary) inter-pollination and (scientific) crossbreeding.

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