Social Text

*Social Text*
Discipline	Cultural studies
Language	English
Edited by	Jonathan Beller, Jayna Brown, David Sartorius
Publication details
History	1979–present
Publisher	Duke University Press (United States)
Frequency	Quarterly
Standard abbreviations;
ISO 4	Soc. Text
Indexing;
ISSN	0164-2472 (print); 1527-1951 (web);
LCCN	79644624
JSTOR	01642472
OCLC no.	423561805
Links
	Journal homepage; Journal page at publisher's website; Online access; Online archive;

Social Text is a peer-reviewed^[1] academic journal published by Duke University Press. Since its inception by an independent editorial collective in 1979, Social Text has addressed a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, covering questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment. Each issue covers subjects in the debates around feminism, Marxism, neoliberalism, postcolonialism, postmodernism, queer theory, and popular culture. The journal has since been run by different collectives over the years, mostly based at New York City universities. It has maintained an avowedly progressive political orientation and scholarship over these years, if also a less Marxist one. Since 1992, it is published by Duke University Press.^[2]

The journal gained notoriety in 1996 for the Sokal affair, when it published a nonsensical article that physicist Alan Sokal had deliberately written as a hoax. The editorial board, according to Editor Andrew Ross, published the article as a good faith attempt by Sokal, a well-known physicist, to develop a social theory of his field.^[3] The editorial board asked Sokal to revise and resubmit his article, but he refused and the editors decided to publish the paper as a prominent physicist’s best attempt to develop theory.^[4]

The editors of the journal were awarded the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature by "eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist".^[5] The journal did not^[6] practice academic peer review, and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.^[7]^[2] The Sokal article was not retracted by the journal.

References

^ "About the Journal". Social Text. Retrieved August 10, 2024.
^ ^a ^b "Mystery Science Theater". Lingua Franca. Retrieved 2014-12-10.
^ Editorial, Board (1996). "Response to the Sokal Affair" (PDF). Physics.NYU.edu. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
^ "Lingua Franca". linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org. Retrieved 2024-09-25.
^ "The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize Winners". Improbable Research. August 2006. Retrieved 15 April 2016.
^ "Peer Review". Social Text. 27 (3): 169–170. 2009. doi:10.1215/01642472-2009-031. Retrieved 28 April 2023.
^ Sokal, Alan D. (November 28, 1994). "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Social Text #46/47 (spring/summer 1996). Duke University Press. pp. 217–252. Retrieved April 3, 2007.