About the Journal

In recent years, cities have been increasingly at the forefront of debate in both humanities and social science disciplines, but there has been relatively little real dialogue across these disciplinary boundaries. On the one hand, journals in social science fields that use urban studies methods to look at life in cities rarely explore the cultural aspects of urban life in any depth or delve into close-readings of the representation of cities in individual novels, music albums/songs, graphic novels, films, videogames, online ‘virtual’ spaces, or other artistic and cultural products. On the other hand, while there is increasing discussion of urban topics and themes in the humanities, broadly considered, there are very few journal publications that are open to these new interdisciplinary directions of scholarship. This means that scholars in Language and Literature fields are forced to submit their innovative work to journals that, in general, do not yet admit the link between humanities studies of the representations of cities and more social-science focused urban studies approaches.

 The double-blind, peer-reviewed Journal of Urban Cultural Studies is thus open to scholarship from any and all linguistic, cultural and geographical traditions—provided that English translations are provided for all primary and secondary sources citations. Articles published in the journal cross the humanities and the social sciences while giving priority to the urban phenomenon, in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities. Although the journal is open to many specific methodologies that blend humanities research with social-science perspectives on the city, the central methodological premise of the journal is perhaps best summed up by cultural studies-pioneer Raymond Williams—who emphasized giving equal weight to the “project (art)” and the “formation (society).” We are particularly interested in essays that achieve some balance between discussing an individual (or multiple) cultural/artistic product(s) in depth and also using one of many social-science (geographical, anthropological, sociological…) urban approaches to investigate a given city. Essays will ideally address both an individual city itself and also its cultural representation.