AGITATE! As Creative Commons: AGITATE! Editorial Collective Speaks to Nancy Sims Editorial Collective Contributors include: Emina Bužinkić, Keavy McFadden, Nithya Rajan, Richa Nagar, Samira Musleh, Sara Musaifer, and Sima Shakhsari Compiled By Nancy Sims (Copyright Program Librarian, University of Minnesota Libraries) <nasims@umn.edu>
Introducing AGITATE! An online, open access journal, AGITATE! is a platform for knowledges that seek to unsettle the dominant politics and practices of experts. AGITATE! explores the possibilities and challenges of interweaving scholarship, creative writing, art, journalism, and activism. We invite contributors from diverse locations to engage the anti-disciplinary space of AGITATE! to catalyze new conversations, visions, and narrative practices in multiple genres and languages, in order to advance struggles for sociopolitical and epistemic justice. We encourage work that is cognizant of and intentional about the simultaneous ethics, aesthetics, poetics, and politics of transformative knowledge-making and pedagogies. We welcome the submission of essays, creative non/fiction, artwork, poetry, translations, musings, and meditations on political struggles in named and unnamed forms. By evolving an open process of co-creation, AGITATE! challenges the traditional divides between process and product, and between author, artist, reviewer, and editor. As an anti-hierarchical collective, AGITATE! strives for equity, transparency, and plurality in our creative, editorial, and publishing processes. Launched in 2019, we have now published three volumes, one annually since our founding. In addition to our volumes, we also host a more dynamic space called AGITATE Now! which compliments and extends AGITATE!’s annual volumes by offering a home for ongoing conversations, emerging meditations, and creative agitations. Because volumes are imagined around particular themes and are published annually or biennially, AGITATE Now! provides a space for fostering ongoing discussions that fall outside of volume themes but reflect our political commitments and communities. The editorial collective, the collective of seven that is co-writing this interview, is the group most directly involved in the recruitment, review, and development of the publications; in the daily life of the platform; and with the unfolding relationships with our contributors and editorial board members. The work of publishing includes: conceptualizing the thematic focus of each volume, recruitment of contributions, reviews in multiple languages and genres, determining the layout, undertaking all the work of formatting and revising, and translating the labor into forms that both reflect and share with our audiences what the work of unsettling dominant knowledges looks like for us, and what are the lessons learned in the process. Our editorial collective evolves with each volume. Nancy: Why did your collective choose to use a Creative Commons license for AGITATE!, broadly speaking? How did your collective make that choice? When we embarked on the process of dreaming up and later founding AGITATE!, our emphasis was on building a platform that would work against the dominant norms of publishing and knowledge production, especially as conceptualized within universities. While there are many dominant norms that one
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can name here, there are at least two that we were concerned with from the get go: First, how to encourage, nourish, and recognize knowledges that are necessarily created through collective praxes, including creative partnerships between authors and artists, on the one hand, and editors and reviewers, on the other. Second, how could we better represent knowledges that are partial, tentative, everflowing, and ever-evolving and that refuse clean genres, frameworks, and languages. The work of creating a space that agitates against these norms has been an ongoing, labor-intensive, and highly rewarding process of co-evolving a vision, of naming AGITATE! intentionally, and of developing a language about who we are and what our own evolving priorities and ways of co-traveling have been. For us, this has always been done collectively and the editorial collective is central to advancing the visions of AGITATE!. The early conversations about AGITATE! started in the context of our individual and collective involvement in other collectives and long-term collaborative relationships. Our vision for the journal, in part, came out of a dissatisfaction with (a) how graduate students in the collective (Keavy McFadden, Sara Musaifer, Beaudelaine Pierre, Julie Santella in the initial group) were being pushed to produce work in certain kinds of formats by other publishing venues and (b) the types of feedback we received when we tried to publish our work, particularly politically-engaged, collectively-created work that blurred and challenged the imposed compartmentalization of academia, activism, and the arts. We felt that some of the tensions we were trying to hold — particularly around the genres and forms in which our intellectual and political engagements were taking place — were not empowered or were purposefully erased and hidden by reviewers. When we thought about where we could turn to with our emerging pieces and commitments, we realized we did not know of a home for our writing that would honor the particular ways in which we were engaging with storytelling, scholarship, and politics in our work. Incidentally, one member of our collective, a faculty member (Richa Nagar) who had been working closely with us, had already been in a long-standing conversation with the University of Minnesota Libraries about the necessity for creating a publication that agitated against these dominant norms, values, and practices and she had heard great enthusiasm from the publishing team at the UMN Libraries to help advance such work. So the group that would later become the founding editorial collective began to ask: what would it mean for us to work with the UMN Libraries to start a platform that intentionally pushed back against some of the limitations that intellectuals from marginalized locations repeatedly face? What would it mean to share and articulate knowledge(s) in ways that are foreclosed in the dominant disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and anti-disciplinary academic spaces available to us? The emphasis from the beginning was on how to push back against traditions of exclusion — how to create a platform for knowledges that are suppressed both within and outside the academy, and how to struggle for and center just and ethical
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