Knowledge production beyond the book? : performing the scholarly monograph in contemporary digital culture

This thesis explores the potential futures of the scholarly monograph in an increasingly digital environment. By positioning the medium of the book as a major site of struggle over the future of scholarly knowledge production within the humanities, this thesis argues for the importance of experimenting with alternative ways of thinking and performing the academic monograph. In particular, it argues for the importance of experiments that go beyond simply iteratively reproducing established print practices of knowledge production, dissemination and consumption. This is especially important when the present print-based arrangements tend to sustain the interest of established stakeholders, inhibiting wider access to scholarly research and experimentation with new forms of scholarship and scholarly communication. This thesis will examine some of the forms a politics of the book based on openness, remix and liquidity might take. It will draw on some recent experiments in scholarly book publishing—from liquid and living books to anonymous authorship and radical open access—that try to challenge and rethink the book as a fixed and stable commercial object, as well as the political economy and scholarly practices surrounding it. These experiments do so by cutting the book together and apart differently and by exploring experimentation as a specific discourse and practice of critique.