Foundry: A Co-Operation
Strike the molten metal. Hollow the cavity. Reset the mold. Push and pour. Recast the humanities. Defy their apparent downturn. This is our labor.
Foundry is an open-access, peer-curated platform. Here the humanities are forged anew through interdisciplinary research and critical conversation. We are devoted to high-quality, innovative work across multiple modalities: podcast to essay; thought-bit to think piece; review article to method paper; rhetoric to visualization. Foundry takes on new emerging trends and possibilities in the humanities through experimental scholarship in form and substance. We are looking to express the vitality of dialogue, debate, disagreement, discord, and accord.
Labor of this kind always bears the risk of failure. Foundry assumes this risk, embraces it, extolls it. We seek to bring experimentation in the humanities within reach; to give scholarship creative license to pursue the uncategorizable; to be the locus amoenus for pioneering ideas with no clear and definite home.
Foundry joins a rich community of open-access publishing forums. It is distinct for its free-form approach to scholarship and its ability to shapeshift in sync with the needs of its community. An idea may best be expressed as a chimera of poetry and academic prose, photography and sketch, personal and formal registers, ephemera and social theory, humanist and scientific lexicons. We want to give life to those intersections and intellectual fantasies. This is an invitation to bring us your research essays and review articles, as well as your marginalia, close readings, and textual rhapsodies. Foundry is a place not just for product, but also for process. Not just for conclusive ideas, but also for ideas set in motion.
The advancement of the humanities is often obstructed because we tend to promote work that meets certain standards and protocols, obeying the boundaries within which a discipline was conceived. This deference has created bias toward particular processes and endpoints. At Foundry, disciplinary praxis is our point of departure but not our terminus, and teleology is one of many supported orientations. Investigating an idea that did not work, for instance, or testing the strength of an experimental procedure is not without significance. We deserve an expansive and audacious conversation that includes these erroneous pathways and arrested developments, that fosters curiosity for what lies on the other side of any discipline’s border wall.
When pursuing a research project, you may discover novel aspects that are exciting, but which were not part of your original thesis. Foundry is also a space for these tangents. To reflect on such unforeseen and exciting developments and to give voice to pathways that had not been anticipated. To these pathways Foundry offers a new submission type—thought-bit. Either in a 200-word fleshed out abstract or in a 50-word mini-thesis, each thought-bit will be catalogued among ideas of its size. If you have always suspected a connection between strange bedfellows but lack the time to connect the dots, submit this for consideration. If, while teaching, your mind wanders towards unexplored possibilities, submit this for consideration. Here is an opportunity to take stock of the light-bulb moments that punctuate your everyday. Here we carve out breathing room for the life of thinking aloud.
Let us legitimize the misfit, make ideas tactile and, inversely, material imaginable. Let the gambit of open-access be revealed as open-approach. The humanities encompass the possibility of thinking probingly, critically about the meaning, value, and significance of everything, everywhere. Foundry is pointing to its ever-vanishing horizon.
Please send your submissions to foundry@hri.uci.edu.
