About

world picture is an online, open-access journal that publishes a heterodox selection of invited essays and artworks on a roughly biannual basis. Each issue revolves around a single term that resonates across a range of aesthetic, political, and cultural contexts. Contributors are invited to respond in whatever way they find most illuminating or necessary at the time, and they can address the term directly or obliquely. The format of pieces that we publish is extremely open-ended by design; we accommodate short pieces as well as long ones, from scholars both emerging and established. We are interested in publishing experimental pieces of writing, philosophy, poetry, as well as original works of visual media and interviews. Much of the work that we publish reflects a preoccupation with the relations among moving image media, theory, and continental philosophy from which the journal began, but we remain open to a variety of subjects, methods, and approaches.

Since founding the journal together in 2008, Brian Price, John David Rhodes, and Meghan Sutherland, in consultation with the Advisory Board they assembled at the outset, have formed the unnamed “we” to which this brief account of the life of world picture implicitly refers. Then, and still, the endeavor of world picture can be understood as a sustained effort to enact and encourage a more porous, more joyous, more collective relation between the terms “intellectual” and “life.” With the launch of our Summer 2023 issue “spell,” we also launch a second life of world picture, with a new and renovated website. All of the journal’s past and future issues will be both accessible and searchable on a much more user-friendly interface, with mobile and desktop versions.

We are delighted to announce the expansion of our Editorial Collective to include Veronica Fitzpatrick (Brown University), Jules O’Dwyer (University of Cambridge), and Elizabeth Wijaya (University of Toronto), and a new Advisory Board drawn from the large community of interlocutors and contributors who have inspired and sustained what we do over the years.

Editorial Committee

Editors

Brian Price

University of Toronto

John David Rhodes

University of Cambridge

Meghan Sutherland

University of Toronto

Jules O'Dwyer

University of Cambridge

Veronica Fitzpatrick

Brown University

Elizabeth Wijaya

University of Toronto

Assistant Editors

Mynt Marsellus

University of Toronto

Jillian Vasko

University of Toronto

Advisory Board

Sara Ahmed

Independent Scholar

Sara Jane Bailes

University of Sussex

Eugenie Brinkema

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Martin Crowley

University of Cambridge

Kay Dickinson

University of Glasgow

Scott Durham

Northwestern University

Jane Elliot

King’s College, London)

Seb Franklin

King's College London

Rosalind Galt

King’s College, London)

Bishnupriya Ghosh

University of California, Santa Barbara

Elena Gorfinkel

King’s College, London

Cassandra X. Guan

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Scott Krzych

Colorado College

Michael Lawrence

University of Sussex

Sam Lipsyte

Columbia University

Karen Pinkus

Cornell University

Chairat Polmuk

Chulalongkorn University

Laura Mulvey

Birkbeck College, University of London

Pooja Rangan

Amherst College

Alessandra Raengo

Georgia State University

Angelo Restivo

Georgia State University

Stephen G. Rhodes

Jessica Ruffin

University of Michigan

Bhaskar Sarkar

University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeffrey Sconce

Northwestern University

Ma Shaoling

Cornell University

Keston Sutherland

University of Sussex

Amy Villarejo

University of California, Los Angeles

Damon Young

University of California, Berkeley

FAQs

Although every piece we publish goes through a process of internal review by the Editorial Collective in consultation with the Advisory Board, we also offer a formal process of external peer-review to contributors who request it upon invitation, and we are happy to confirm the status of these pieces as needed for processes of hiring, tenure, and promotion.

We do not accept blind submissions, but people who are seriously interested in writing for the journal, contributing a work of art, or proposing a guest-edited special issue are also welcome to contact us by email.

We do not believe that publishing a work entitles us to claim it as our rightful possession. Accordingly, the rights to all of the work that appears in journal revert to the authors and artists who produced them—though we do ask contributors who wish to republish their work elsewhere to acknowledge and cite its initial publication in world picture.