Friendship, and other ways of producing knowledge

Written By Sarah Begovac
Season 1 Episode 4: Friendship, and other ways of producing knowledge
with Sigi Jöttkandt, Joanna Zylinska, and Gary Hall from the Open Humanities Press

This week, we are joined with Sigi Jöttkandt, Joanna Zylinska, and Gary Hall, the Directors of the Open Humanities Press,  an international community of scholars, editors and readers with a focus on critical and cultural theory and a mission to make leading works of contemporary critical thought available worldwide. OHP has operated as an independent initiative since 2006, promoting open access scholarship in journals, books and exploring new forms of scholarly communication. OHP’s organization is a community-interest company headquartered in London.The OHP Editorial Board is at the heart of all their activities: participating in journal assessments, reviewing and approving book series proposals, performing and managing peer review, and editing the OHP book series. They act on the principles of access, scholarship, diversity and transparency. They have also partnered with a number of groups and institutions to explore grass-roots solutions to the crisis in Humanities publishing. 

Sigi Jöttkandt is an Associate Professor in English at UNSW. She is the author of The Nabokov Effect: Reading in the Endgame (Open Humanities Press, 2025), First Love: A Phenomenology of the One (2010) and Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (SUNY Press, 2005). With Prue Gibson, she edits the SeedBooks series at Open Humanities Press. She is also Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal S: Journal of the Circle for Lacanian Ideology Critique.

Joanna Zylinska is a writer, lecturer, artist, curator, and – according to the ImageNet Roulette’s algorithm – a ‘mediatrix’. She is Professor of Media Philosophy + Critical Digital Practice at King’s College London. The author of a number of books on art, philosophy and technology – including The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), AI Art (Open Humanities Press, 2020) and The Perception Machine (MIT Press, 2023) – she is also involved in more experimental and collaborative publishing projects, such as Photomediations (Open Humanities Press, 2016). Her own art practice engages with different kinds of image-based media.

Gary Hall is a critical theorist and media philosopher working in the areas of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, and was founding co-director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) from  2017 to  2025. He is the author of a number of books, including Defund Culture (mediastudies.press, 2016), Masked Media (Open Humanities Press 2025), A Stubborn Fury (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Let’s get it started here with Open Humanities Press.

Time Stamps:

 (0:00) Intro

(4:41) What is the Open Humanities Press?

(10:01) OHP as an Independent, Open-Access Publishing Collective

(13:16) Balancing Tradition with Innovation: There’s other ways of producing knowledge

(21:57) Philosophy of Care and Responsibility: It’s about people becoming connected through different forms of belonging and participation

(33:04) Alternative Academic Spaces

(37:03) Future of Scholarly Publishing

(44:06) Funding Structures and Academic Freedom: Pursuing thought wherever thought wants to go

(53:35) Critical Scholarship Amid Pressures: It isn’t easy

(1:12:52) Friendship is at the heart of OHP

(1:26:05) Outro

Show Notes and Credits:

In this episode, we reference the following thinkers, organizations, and resources:

Support Open Humanities Press:

Learn more and support Open Humanities Press here: https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/

Music:

Huge thank you to Devon Church for making music available from his album All That’s Solid Melts Into Air. Check out more of his music here.

Sarah Begovac
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