I was a board member and editor of Soapbox, a graduate-led journal for cultural analysis, for nearly two years. This involved working closely with the board to identify and research themes for upcoming issues, writing calls for papers, selecting and rejecting work, editing and drafting, finding peer-reviewers, as well as final proofreading, design input, marketing and distribution.
I was also responsible for the journal’s communications and public relations, designing visual content and writing copy to promote new issues, events and related activities, as well as building Soapbox's digital presence and reputation in an emerging field of practice. My communications work involved creating and sharing calls for papers and event updates on social media and with similar organisations, including Simulacrum and Vooys, and affiliated research groups such as the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).
I also worked closely with the Events and Collaborations team to organise and publicise issue launches at Framer Framed and OT301, and other activities such as the journal's collaboration with the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA).
Is the interface simply an object or threshold that offers a seamless transition from one state to another? Or, is it a type of activity; mediation as an event?
For the fifth issue of Soapbox, we invited researchers to critically engage with the concept of the ‘interface’, and specifically the ways interfaces are entangled with local, national, global, and planetary formations today. Responding to this theme, the texts gathered become a diverse set of theoretical, poetic and visual interfaces for thinking about mediation at large.
Working in close collaboration with a co-editor, I edited Jason Wallin’s paper titled “ANTi-Bodies: Reconfiguring the Body in Marvel’s Ant-Man” which considers how the speculative imagination of Marvel’s Ant-Man is influenced in part by an interface between modern cinema and the emerging realisms of quantum thinking.
You can buy a copy of At the Interface here or download and read it for free here.
(IDFA) for screening at the filmhouse Kriterion, Amsterdam.