We are very pleased to announce that Megan Wood has taken over the sterling work by Zenia Kish (now one of our Associate Editors) as the Journal of Cultural Economy Reviews and Commentaries Editor.
Megan is an assistant professor of Communication and Culture at Ohio Northern University. She holds a Ph.D. in communication and cultural studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Megan teaches courses on cultural studies, media representation and criticism, gendered communication, and feminist history and theory. Her research examines transformations in political economy through the lens of popular culture. Her current book project probes the implications of corporate empowerment for political identity and the domain of civic practice in the United States. Megan also writes regularly about the project of cultural studies, serves on the board of the Cultural Studies Association, and is a co-founder of Off-Centre—a digital working group for emergent cultural studies practitioners.
Megan writes:
JCE is devoted to grappling with questions that centrally guide my own research: how do we think carefully about the economy through and with culture, and to what ends? In what ways does culture matter in shaping how political and economic events unfold?
These questions are foundational to the project and practice of cultural studies more broadly, which—with its commitment to radical contextualism—has warned us against overly simplistic or settled answers to these questions. I take it as the responsibility of this journal to be one of asking these questions over and over, hunting for the best possible answers that can be offered in the specificity of the present.
As the incoming reviews and commentaries editor, I intend to assist in this task by facilitating a venue for thoughtful and rigorous comment on new directions in theory and research, notes on works-in-progress that forward news ways of thinking, reviews that highlight new voices or puncture debates in the field, and reflections on ways to bridge the concerns of academics and activists working on questions of culture and economy and the empirical issues that manifest them. I am excited to serve on the editorial team in this capacity, and I can’t wait to see what the JCE community will create together. Onward!
