PhD in Publishing at Oxford Brookes University
Oxford International Centre for Publishing is a research hub for a range of interdisciplinary areas including contemporary publishing, book consumption and the life cycle of books, media convergence, digital developments, scholarly communications, post-colonial publishing, museum publishing, early twentieth-century publishing history (including publishing in World War One), and late twentieth and early twenty-first century publishing history.
In 2021, I am excited to announce I will begin PhD research. Learn more about the proposed work below.
WORKING TITLE
Blueprints: How principles of architecture and the public sphere inform the construction of publishers’ identities in the digital age
DESCRIPTION
With the pervasiveness of desktop publishing, the increasing availability of (and reliance on) an internet connection, and the rise of print-on-demand services, juxtaposed with the hyper-consolidation and corporatization of publishers, gentrification, and austerity, the art, business, and craft of publishing have come to a crossroads in North America and Great Britain. The Future of the Book in the Digital Age, edited by Bill Cope and Angus Phillips, provides an overview of these exact crossroads: “We are, today, on the cusp of another revolutionary transition, or at least the numbers tell us that we are. [...] [We] find ourselves thrust into a new universe of textual media. In one moment, the commentators supply us with utopian readings; in the next, apocalyptic.”
Publishing platforms like Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing seem to assert the role of the publisher is neither necessary nor welcome, making ebooks readily available through their Kindle store with minimal, if any, oversight. A similar motivation can be found in the approach of the self-publisher and other self-publishing platforms that eschew the role of the publisher: to frame, model, filter, and amplify content as described by Michael Bhaskar in The Content Machine.
Alternatively, the self-publisher may also be read as a critique of a narrow(ing) vision of publishing represented by the reigning value system, participating in a debate amongst others who find the role of publisher to be relevant and important. Such a dialogue attempts to (re)balance exactly where value should be placed.
In assessing the merits of publishing, a wide breadth exists with infinite variations in the ways of balancing priorities and motivations. In Merchants of Culture, John Thompson accounts for one significant trend in how publishers have attempted to strike a balance: "The aim of the [corporate] merger was to achieve certain economies of scale by providing centralized warehousing, distribution and infrastructural services, while maintaining the distinctiveness and editorial autonomy of each house." But putting aside some of these larger structural issues in publishing (which are primarily linked to the scaling of a publishing program), consider two primary motivating forces of publishing: the profit-driven and the mission-driven models. The former envisions their role as a mechanism to create profit through publication and the latter prioritizes the dissemination and preservation of texts deemed relevant to their mission.
The profit-driven publisher may refrain from the development of a clear, distinct identity so as not potentially limit its audience, nor to detract from the focus of individual publications. For such publishers, each publication is independent and published to generate the greatest returns possible. The mission-driven publisher may create an identity to associate themselves with a specific category/community. This publisher, dedicated to the subject of its choosing, will print and attempt to develop a reputation synonymous with texts pertinent to the corresponding community. They will publish books relevant to discussions of said community, regardless of the necessary quality of individual texts or their potential profitability. The general reader, unaware of these dynamics, sees only the end result: what is available on bookshelves at the local shop or online. And while most readers will select a book based on personal preference, need, or trendiness, what is available is dependent on the prevailing value system of publishing.
Considering these approaches to publishing with their potential readers, this research will focus on publishers in North America and Great Britain that lean towards mission-driven models, establishing the role of the publisher as an invoker of publics (with “public” being understood in the tradition of the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas) through the framing, modeling, filtering, and amplification of a recognizable publishing program associated with its mission.
The proposed research begins best with a line from the Ulises Carrión manifesto, The New Art of Making Books: “A book is a sequence of spaces.” If books are spaces that interact with publics, let us analyze them through frameworks for how spaces are typically appraised: architecture, city planning, and community. As such, three texts will be fundamental in the theoretical development of this research: A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.
A Pattern Language explores how spaces are constructed from “pools of light” and “different chairs” through to “agricultural valleys” and “independent regions;” consider how these parallel with the various facets that go into producing a book, from the graphic design to the selection and sequence of texts to be published. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere proposes how public spaces, like coffee houses, bars, and squares, are critical to debates of public importance and had developed out of literary political debate. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a critique of the destructive policies of architects and city planners, who followed traditional planning theory without great regard of the potential impact on communities they purported to want to protect or save. Jacobs’ insight will be critical to understanding how communities function, persevere, and flourish.
While there exists critical and scholarly research on publishing, a majority focuses on the general field of publishing or the histories of single publishers. Instead, through the juxtaposition and correspondence with the principles of architecture and public spheres, I will develop a theoretical framework for how publishers form an identity through the interaction with and channeling of communities for its publications.