Welcome to our 2024 Annual Report!

As the year comes to a close, we're proud to reflect on an exciting period at OBP—filled with new open access titles, awards, and new exciting projects. It’s been a remarkable year, and we invite you to explore the highlights with us!

Announcements

• Proud to be in SE's Top 100
• Book Prizes
• We reevaluated and shifted our social media presence
• Exciting Website Updates!
• Open Book Publishers and the Open Book Collective
• Global Geographical Statistics

Books, libraries and content

• Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series
• Our Most Accessed Titles in 2024
• New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors
• Our 2024 OA Series: Calls for Proposal
• New Library Members

People

• Our Volunteers
• New Team Members
• Support Us!

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Proud to be in SE's Top 100!

We’re thrilled to be included in the 2024 NatWest SE100 Index – marking our sixth consecutive year on the list! This annual index recognises the UK’s top 100 social enterprises for their growth, impact, and resilience, and we’re honoured to be among them once again.

Further details about this achievement can be found here.

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Book Prizes

Three OBP publications have received major accolades in 2024, recognizing their scholarly impact and innovation:

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, edited by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin, was awarded both the 2024 Globalization & Education SIG (CIES) Best Edited Book Award and the 2024 Open Education Awards for Excellence – Open Collaboration, celebrating its forward-thinking approach to transforming higher education.

Aaron D. Hornkohl’s The Historical Depth of the Tiberian Reading Tradition of Biblical Hebrew won the 2024 British and Irish Association of Jewish Studies (BIAJS) Annual Book Prize, praised as “an impressive piece of research” for tracing the Tiberian reading tradition back to the Second Temple period.

Play in a Covid Frame: Everyday Pandemic Creativity in a Time of Isolation, edited by Anna Beresin and Julia Bishop, received the 2024 Iona and Peter Opie Prize, honoring its compelling examination of creativity and play during the global pandemic.

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We reevaluated and shifted our social media presence

We decided to leave Twitter/X at the end of October. Though we will continue to check our account periodically through the end of the year, we will no longer be contributing content to X. We invite you to connect with us on our other socials:

Bluesky: @openbookpublish.bsky.social  
Mastodon: @OpenBookPublish@hcommons.social
LinkedIn: open-book-publishers

Speaking of social media, the Open Access Books Network (OABN) has also joined Bluesky. Follow them here: https://bsky.app/profile/oabooksnetwork.bsky.social

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Exciting Website Updates!

We have recently completed a comprehensive update to our website! This update has made it more informative and visually engaging for our readership.

Here are some of the key updates our team has implemented:

• Content Refresh: Our team has meticulously updated numerous pages that were previously outdated.
• Enhanced Visuals: To improve user experience, our team has incorporated a variety of visuals, including diagrams, graphs, and logos, across various pages (see, for example, Our Vision). These additions not only make the content more visually appealing but also aid in conveying complex information effectively.
• New Page - 'Our Reach': Our team has introduced a new page titled 'Our Reach' (accessible here) which meticulously showcases our readership statistics. This page serves as a testament to our impact and is prominently linked from our home page for easy access.
• Improved Organization: To streamline content presentation, our team has relocated information regarding our readership statistics from the open software section to the newly created 'Our Reach' page. This change not only enhances the coherence of our website but also addresses previous concerns about content alignment.

We invite you all to explore the revamped website and discover the wealth of new information our team has meticulously curated. Take a moment to visit the updated site and delve into the latest content

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Open Book Publishers and the Open Book Collective

It has now been almost two years since we announced that Open Book Publishers had joined the Open Book Collective (OBC). In that time, many of our long-standing library members have chosen to renew their Open Book Publishers membership through the collective, showing their commitment to building a fairer and more sustainable open access book publishing ecosystem. We are also delighted to have welcomed new library members who have kindly decided to support us via the OBC. To both our renewing and new members, we want to extend a heartfelt thank you. Your support makes an enormous difference.

If you are a library member and would like to explore what the OBC offers please get in touch with our Head of Libraries Laura Rodriguez, at laura@openbookpublishers.com.

We also invite you to revisit our original announcement, where we outlined our reasons for joining the OBC and explained what this collaboration means for libraries, authors, and readers. By working together, we can continue to build a stronger, more sustainable ecosystem for open access books.

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Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report

Global Geographical Statistics

We collect and display detailed readership statistics (also known as usage data, or metrics) for our books on each book's home page. There you can see how often the book has been downloaded or read online via a number of different platforms, including our own website and external platforms such as the OAPEN Library and Google Books. There are also some geographical data about where the book has been accessed. See further down this page for more information about how we collect this data, and how we aggregate it for each book.

Below are our global readership statistics for 2024, highlighting engagement with our titles from every country, state, and territory worldwide, a clear reflection of the truly global reach of our publications.

In the landscape of our readership, North America, Europe, and Asia emerge as the primary contributors in 2024, solidifying their positions at the top tier. Following closely are Africa, Oceania, and South America, each playing a crucial role in our  community. Looking forward, we are committed to increasing our global influence, fostering a deeper connection with readers worldwide in the coming years.

In the global landscape of our readership, discernible patterns emerge across countries. The United States of America leads with a substantial readership, followed by the United Kingdom, India, Germany, and Canada. Noteworthy engagement can also be seen in Russia, France, the Philippines, and China. Further contributing to the readership spectrum are the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Ireland, and Spain as well as Singapore, Finland, Nigeria, Indonesia, and South Africa.

This year's readership shows the diverse and widespread impact of our books on a global scale!

Annual Readership Report Information

Please note that access to our books in HTML format was tracked until July 2023, but the platform we used for this is no longer available. Our developers at OBP are working on new solutions.

We can still record usage across some platforms, showing how much a book is accessed there (based on the platform’s own measurements), in which formats, over time, from which parts of the world (in some cases), and from specific domains (useful for Library Members who want to see how their students and staff are using the Membership).

This information is only partial. Many sites that host our books do not provide usage data, and geographical data may be limited by platform restrictions or users who block collection. Once a file is downloaded, we cannot track how it is used or shared, much like sales figures for print or ebook editions.

For more on how we collect and process readership statistics, please visit https://www.openbookpublishers.com/about/our-reach.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting our titles. With the help of our readers, member libraries, and authors, we can continue working towards a fairer publishing landscape!

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Introducing the First Publication from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture Series

This year we published first book of the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series, a distinguished collaboration between the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews and Open Book Publishers.

Titled Nouvelles études sur les lieux de spectacle de la première modernité and edited by Pauline Beaucé and Jeffrey M. Leichman, this groundbreaking work delves into the intricacies of performance venues during the early modern period.

The St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series endeavors to enrich scholarly discourse surrounding the historical culture of the French-speaking world. Covering a diverse array of themes—from political and military history to literary culture—the series is committed to publishing concise yet illuminating monographs and studies.

Each title in the series undergoes rigorous peer review by our editorial board and external assessors, ensuring academic integrity and excellence. Available in both digital and hard copy formats, these publications will contribute significantly to our understanding of French history and culture.

Stay tuned for more groundbreaking publications from the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series!

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Our Most Accessed Titles in 2024

Advanced Problems in Mathematics: Preparing for University by Stephen Siklos

The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition by Edward Pettit

Ethics for A-Level by Mark Dimmock and Andrew Fisher  

No Prices No Games! Four Economic Models by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures by Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin (eds)

Writing and Publishing Scientific Papers: A Primer for the Non-English Speaker by Gábor Lövei

Financing Investment in Times of High Public Debt: 2023 European Public Investment Outlook by Floriana Cerniglia, Francesco Saraceno and Andrew Watt

Transforming Conservation: A Practical Guide to Evidence and Decision Making by William J. Sutherland (ed.)

Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe by Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari (eds)

Conservation Biology in Sub-Saharan Africa by John W. Wilson and Richard B. Primack

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New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors

This year we proudly celebrated the publication of 57 books, an outstanding milestone that reflects the dedication, and passion of our community of authors! We are thrilled to have welcomed both first-time authors as well as those returning to publish with us again.

To all our authors, we extend our heartfelt thanks. By choosing to publish with us, you not only enrich our catalogue but also strengthen our mission to make knowledge open and accessible to all.

Looking ahead, we are excited to continue supporting authors who are shaping the future of open access publishing. Each book we publish has the power to reach readers around the world, and together we are building a global community of scholarship and creativity. Here’s to the achievements of this year and to the many new works and opportunities the coming year will bring!

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Our 2024 OA Series: Call for Proposals


As you may know, we have various Open Access series all of which are open for proposals, so feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is interested in submitting a proposal!

Global Communications
Global Communications is a new book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.

St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.

Studies on Mathematics Education and Society
This book series publishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.

The Global Qur'an
The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.

The Medieval Text Consortium Series
The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here.

Applied Theatre Praxis
This series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.

Digital Humanities
Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series. Please do not hesitate to contact us (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.

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New Library Members

Since January 2024, 17 new libraries have joined as members, supporting our Open Access mission to make academic research freely available to everyone worldwide.

You can view the full list of current members here and membership benefits here. Membership is free for libraries in Economically Developing Countries. If you are a librarian at an eligible institution and would like more information, please contact us at libraries@openbookpublishers.com.

We are deeply grateful for the support of our member libraries, both new and renewing. Your contributions are vital to sustaining our work. We also welcome suggestions on how we can better support you—please do get in touch at libraries@openbookpublishers.com.

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Our Volunteers

We offer training placements in all aspects of Open Access publishing, free of charge. In the past we have provided placements as part of university courses (such as the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, the Master in Publishing at City University of London), work placements (School of Arts, Birbeck, University of London) and to other Open Access publishers, such as UGA Editions and Firenze University Press. Placements usually cover editorial skills, marketing, or technical aspects. For more information or to discuss a possible placement, please contact Alessandra Tosi.

We also welcome volunteers of all experience levels. In 2024 we’ve been fortunate to work with some fantastic volunteers, and we warmly thank them for their dedication and support.

Anja Pritchard

Rose Cook

Sasha PG-Kirkham

Hannah Shakespeare

Cecilia M. Thon

If you or someone you know would like to have the opportunity to try a range of key publishing aspects, including marketing, editorial and text-formatting tasks in a non-corporate environment, please contact Alessandra Tosi.

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New Team Members
This year we welcomed one new team member:

Marketing Lead

Raegan Allen is a poet from Missouri. She holds a Master of Publishing from City, University of London, where she researched the use of brand in small, independent presses. Before moving to the UK, Raegan studied English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Her poems have appeared in Zenaida and Alloy literary magazines. She directs marketing and publicity for OBP. Email: raegan@openbookpublishers.com.

We are delighted to have Raegan onboard - welcome!

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Support Us!

If you believe that knowledge should be freely available to everyone, you can support Open Book Publishers with a donation! Any level of support will go towards the publication of Open Access books with no charges for authors or readers.  

Donate here: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/support-us

Helmer Osslund, Autumn. Public Domain. Welcome to our November Newsletter!    We hope this email finds you well and that you've had a wonderful month so far. We write with exciting publication announcements, news about our social media presence, and reflections on the use of AI in our publishing practice.  What happened this month: We published five new books and have two more on the way The Struggle You Can’t See: Experiences of Neurodivergent and Invisibly Disabled Students in Higher Education by Ash Lierman Digital Humanities in the India Rim: Contemporary Scholarship in Australia and India edited by Hart Cohen, Ujjwal Jana, and Myra Gurney Diachronic Diversity in Classical Biblical Hebrew by Aaron D. Hornkohl No Prices No Games! Four Economic Models, 2nd Edition by Michael Richter and Ariel Rubinstein  Knowledge: A Human Interest Story by Brian Weatherson FORTHCOMING: The Samaritan Pentateuch: An English Translation with a Parallel Annotated Hebrew Text by Moshe Florentin and Abraham Tal Feeling Colour: Chromatic Embodiment in Film Culture, 1950s–1960s by Bregt Lameris All of our titles are free to read and download. Explore our complete catalogue here.

We reevaluated and shifted our social media presence We decided to leave Twitter/X at the end of October. Though we will continue to check our account periodically through the end of the year, we will no longer be contributing content to X. We invite you to connect with us on our other socials: Bluesky: @openbookpublish.bsky.social   Mastodon: @OpenBookPublish@hcommons.social LinkedIn: open-book-publishers Speaking of social media, the Open Access Books Network (OABN) has also joined Bluesky. Follow them here: https://bsky.app/profile/oabooksnetwork.bsky.social Our books received some stellar reviews 'Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures (Czerniewicz and Cronin 2023) (hereafter HE4G) has been more than a book. It has been a public event, a gathering, a diversely peopled conversation within and beyond its pages: the desperate throw of a lifeline or the hopeful throw of a dream, beyond the really existing universities of the present towards better alternatives. If, somehow, readers of Postdigital Science and Education have managed to avoid this conversation, I urge you to join it now, wherever your scholarly social media and reading habits find it.' - Helen Beetham for Postdigital Science and Education 'Transparent Minds is a very good book…it possesses the power to draw the inexperienced reader into sf and make her want to read and find out more. It is sufficiently replete with informed discussion and illustrative quotation to spur further interest. Matthews convinces us that the study of consciousness is the perfect window from which to observe sf if your aim is to encourage more people to read it. This may be a small book, but it offers a seat at a big window and there is a lot of light shining through it.' - Stephen Dougherty for Science Fiction Studies We welcomed three new editorial board members for our Applied Theatre Praxis series We are thrilled to announce that Dr Rebecca Hillman, Dr. Clara de Andra, and Dr Jazmin Llana will be joining the Applied Theatre Praxis Board! Rebecca is a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exteter whose research centres the relationship between activism and performance. Clara is a Brazilian actor, singer, teacher and researcher in Theatre Arts, whose main field of research is the transnational networks of the Theatre of the Oppressed and Theatre for Development. Jazmin is an actor, director, and poet who currently serves as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at De La Salle University-Manilla, Chair of the Research TWG of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and Vice President of Performance Studies International. We are confident that these accomplished scholars will be excellent additions to the Board, enriching the content we publish in our Theatre Praxis series. Welcome Rebecca, Clara, and Jazmin!  Applied Theatre Praxis (ATP) is an OBP series that focuses on theatre practice, where plays and performances provide the basis from which theories are generated and histories are vivified. The series also explores theatre and performance as sites where ethical ideas or political beliefs are expressed, and systems are challenged and reimagined, such as in political and agitprop theatre. In this vein, ATP invites writing that draws from the author/s’ praxis to reflect on diverse manifestations of Applied Theatre. Browse our Theatre Praxis titles here. What's coming up: November 29: Evanghelia Stead will be presenting on Grotesque and Performance in the Art of Aubrey Beardsley over coffee at Oxford's Weston Library. Find more information here. December 3: Beyond PALOMERA: Shaping the Future of Open Access Book Policymaking. PALOMERA is a two-year project funded by Horizon Europe that has sought to understand why so few OA funder policies include books, and to provide actionable recommendations to change this. As the project draws to a close, this webinar will explore the varied outputs created by PALOMERA. Secure your place here. New on the Blog Navigating AI in Academic Publishing: Balancing Efficiency, Expertise and Ethics by Adèle Kreager Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming many sectors, from its role in breakthrough research on protein structure prediction, which recently earned a Nobel Prize, to more controversial uses in film and entertainment. As AI infiltrates our digital world, internet users are increasingly exposed to what has been evocatively termed ‘AI slop’—from seemingly innocuous AI-generated meme trends, such as ‘Shrimp Jesus’, to more demonstrably dangerous outputs, such as AI-generated mushroom-foraging books that contain bogus advice. In turn, AI now powers everyday tools like Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checks, or Gmail’s email filters, often without us even noticing. Amid this surge in AI capabilities and applications, many industries, including academic publishing, are recognising the opportunities and challenges posed by these tools. AI offers a way to enhance efficiency, streamlining the more time-consuming, repetitive and mundane tasks. Yet these advancements come with ethical and practical considerations that demand careful thought. As a small, scholar-led, non-profit publisher, we are experimenting with how AI can support, rather than replace, the human expertise and creativity that underpin high-quality academic research and its dissemination. Read the full post here.  That's all for this month! See you in December!

This series listens to the political, gendered, queer(ed), racial engagements and class entanglements involved in proclaiming out loud: La-TIN-x. ChI-ca-NA. La-TI-ne. ChI-ca-n-@.  Xi-can-x. Funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative, the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies Working Group critically considers the role of sound and listening in our formation as political subjects. Through both a comparative and cross-regional lens, we invite Latinx Sound Scholars to join us as we dialogue about our place within the larger fields of Chicanx/Latinx Studies and Sound Studies. We are delighted to publish our initial musings with Sounding Out!, a forum that has long prioritized sound from a queered, racial, working-class and  “always-from-below” epistemological standpoint. —Ed. Dolores Inés Casillas

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Busco la colaboración universal donde todos los Benitos puedan llegar a ser Bad Bunny. –FlowGPT, TikTok

In November of 2023, the reggaetón song “DEMO #5: NostalgIA” went viral on various digital platforms, particularly TikTok. The track, posted by user FlowGPT, makes use of artificial intelligence (Inteligencia Artificial) to imitate the voices of Justin Bieber, Bad Bunny, and Daddy Yankee. The song begins with a melody reminiscent of Justin Bieber’s 2015 pop hit “Sorry.” Soon, reggaetón’s characteristic boom-ch-boom-chick drumbeat drops, and the voices of the three artists come together to form a carefully crafted, unprecedented crossover.

Bad Bunny’s catchy verse “sal que te paso a buscar” quickly inundated TikTok feeds as users began to post videos of themselves dancing or lip-syncing to the song.  The song was not only very good but it also successfully replicated these artists– their voices, their style, their vibe. Soon, the song exited the bounds of the digital and began to be played in clubs across Latin America, marking a thought-provoking novelty in the usual repertoire of reggaetón hits.  In line with the current anxieties around generative AI, the song quickly generated public controversy. Only a few weeks after its release, ‘nostalgIA’ was taken down from most digital platforms.

The mind behind FlowGPT is Chilean producer Maury Senpai, who in a series of TikTok responses explained his mission of creative democratization in a genre that has been historically exclusive of certain creators. In one video, FlowGPT encourages listeners to contemplate the potential of this “algorithm” to allow songs by lesser-known artists and producers to reach the ears of many listeners, by replicating the voices of well-known singers. Maury Senpai’s production process involved lyric writing, extensive study of the singers’ vocals, and the Kits.ai tool.

Therefore, contrary to FlowGPT’s robotic brand, ‘nostalgIA’ was the product of careful collaboration between human and machine– or, what Ross Cole calls “cyborg creativity.”  This hybridization enmeshes the artist and the listener, allowing diverse creators their creative desires. Cyborg creativity, of course, is not an inherent result of GenAI’s advent. Instead, I argue that reggaetón has long been embedded in a tradition of musical imitation and a deep reliance on technological tools, which in turn challenges popular concerns about machine-human artistic collaboration.

Many creators worry that GenAI will co-opt a practice that for a long time has been regarded as strictly human. GenAI’s reliance on pre-existing data threatens to hide the labor of artists who contributed to the model’s output. We may also add the inherent biases present in training data. Pasquinelli and Joler propose that the question “Can AI be creative?” be reformulated as “Is machine learning able to create works that are not imitations of the past?” Machine learning models detect patterns and styles in training data and then generate “random improvisation” within this data. Therefore, GenAI tools are not autonomous creative actors but often operate with generous human intervention that trains, monitors, and disseminates the products of these models.

The inability to define GenAI tools as inherently creative on their own does not mean they can’t be valuable for artists seeking to experiment in their work. Hearkening back to Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg, Ross Cole argues that

Such [AI] music is in fact a species of hybrid creativity predicated on the enmeshing of people and computers (…) We might, then, begin to see AI not as a threat to subjective expression, but another facet of music’s inherent sociality.

Many authors agree that unoriginal content—works that are essentially reshufflings of existing material—cannot be considered legitimate art. However, an examination of the history of the reggaetón genre invites us to question this idea. In “From Música Negra to Reggaetón Latino,” Wayne Marshall explains how the genre emerged from simultaneous and mutually-reinforcing processes in Panamá, Puerto Rico, and New York, where artists brought together elements of dancehall, reggae, and American hip hop. Towards the turn of the millennium, the genre’s incorporation of diverse musical elements and the availability of digital tools for production favored its commercialization across Latin America and the United States. 

The imitation of previous artists has been embedded in the fabric of reggaetón from a very early stage. Some of the earliest examples of reggaetón were in fact Spanish lyrics placed over Jamaican dancehall riddims— instrumental tracks with characteristic melodies. When Spanish-speaking artists began to draw from dancehall, they used these same riddims in their songs, and continue to do so today. A notable example of this pattern is the Bam Bam riddim, which is famously used in the song “Murder She Wrote” by Chaka Demus & Pliers (1992).

This riddim made its way into several reggaetón hits, such as “El Taxi” by Osmani García, Pitbull, and Sensato (2015).

We may also observe reggaetón’s tradition of imitation in frequent references to “old school” artists by the “new school,” through beat sampling, remixes, and features. We see this in Karol G’s recent hit “GATÚBELA,” where she collaborates with Maldy, former member of the iconic Plan B duo.

Reggaetón’s deeply rooted tradition of “tribute-paying” also ties into its differentiation from other genres. As the genre grew in commercial value, perhaps to avoid copyright issues, producers cut down on their direct references to dancehall and instead favored synthesized backings. Marshall quotes DJ El Niño in saying that around the mid-90s, people began to use the term reggaetón to refer to “original beats” that did not solely rely on riddims but also employed synthesizer and sequencer software. In particular, the program Fruity Loops, initially launched in 1997, with “preset” sounds and effects provided producers with a wider set of possibilities for sonic innovation in the genre.

The influence of technology on music does not stop at its production but also seeps into its socialization. Today, listeners increasingly engage with music through AI-generated content. Ironically, following the release of Bad Bunny’s latest album, listeners expressed their discontent through AI-generated memes of his voice. One of the most viral ones consisted of Bad Bunny’s voice singing “en el McDonald’s no venden donas.”

The clip, originally sung by user Don Pollo, was modified using AI to sound like Bad Bunny, and then combined with reggaetón beats and the Bam Bam riddim. Many users referred to this sound as a representation of the light-heartedness they saw lacking in the artist’s new album. While Un Verano Sin Ti (2022) stood out as an upbeat summer album that addressed social issues such as U.S. imperialism and machismo, Nadie Sabe lo que va a Pasar Mañana (2023) consisted mostly of tiraderas or disses against other artists and left some listeners disappointed. In a 2018 post for SO!, Michael S. O’Brien speaks of this sonic meme phenomenon, where a sound and its repetition come to encapsulate collective discontent.

Another notorious case of AI-generated covers targets recent phenomenon Young Miko. As one of the first openly queer artists to break into the urban Latin mainstream, Young Miko filled a long-standing gap in the genre—the need for lyrics sung by a woman to another woman. Her distinctive voice has also been used in viral AI covers of songs such as “La Jeepeta,” and “LALA,” originally sung by male artists. To map Young Miko’s voice over reggaetón songs that advance hypermasculinity– through either a love for Jeeps or not-so-subtle oral sex– represents a creative reclamation of desire where the agent is no longer a man, but a woman. Jay Jolles writes of TikTok’s modifications to music production, namely the prioritization of viral success. The case of AI-generated reggaetón covers demonstrates how catchy reinterpretations of an artist’s work can offer listeners a chance to influence the music they enjoy, allowing them to shape it to their own tastes.

Examining the history of musical imitation and digital innovation in reggaetón expands the bounds of artistry as defined by GenAI theorists. In the conventions of the TikTok platform, listeners have found a way to participate in the artistry of imitation that has long defined the genre. The case of FlowGPT, along with the overwhelmingly positive reception of “nostalgIA,” point towards a future where the boundaries between the listener and the artist are blurred, and where technology and digital spaces are the platforms that allow for an enhanced cyborg creativity to take place.

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Featured Image: Screenshot from ““en el McDonald’s no venden donas.” Taken by SO!

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Laurisa Sastoque is a Colombian scholar of digital humanities, history, and storytelling. She works as a Digital Preservation Training Officer at the University of Southampton, where she collaborates with the Digital Humanities Team to promote best practices in digital preservation across Galleries/Gardens, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM), and other sectors. She completed an MPhil in Digital Humanities from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge scholar. She holds a B.A. in History, Creative Writing, and Data Science (Minor) from Northwestern University.

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REWIND!…If you liked this post, you may also dig: 

Boom! Boom! Boom!: Banda, Dissident Vibrations, and Sonic Gentrification in Mazatlán—Kristie Valdez-Guillen

Listening to MAGA Politics within US/Mexico’s Lucha Libre –Esther Díaz Martín and Rebeca Rivas

Ronca Realness: Voices that Sound the Sucia Body—Cloe Gentile Reyes 

Echoes in Transit: Loudly Waiting at the Paso del Norte Border Region—José Manuel Flores & Dolores Inés Casillas

Experiments in Agent-based Sonic Composition—Andreas Pape

From the 4th to the 9th of October, 2024, ISSA (Island School of Social Autonomy) facilitated a collective building action and series of lectures, workshops, and discussions in Vis, guided by the central theme of To Live Together. The aim was to build new ways of “being, living, and learning together beyond the ruins of capitalism” and provide an embodied “platform for contemplating a different world.”

The essay was originally published in Makery.info on November 13, 2024, as part of the Rewilding Cultures series – a cooperation program co-funded by the European Union.

A community has been brewing on the island of Vis, one of the most distant islands in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of southern Croatia. The Island School of Social Autonomy or ISSA, located above the village of Komiža on the western part of the island, is a recently formed organism. Spearheaded by the Croatian philosopher Srećko Horvat, it is a sprawling community of mostly Balkan artists and activists who collectively bought and are working on restoring three hectares of desolate land and previously uninhabited mountainous green terrain. ISSA is an old stone house, a small construction site, a group of friends, an extended community, and a network.

Before I attended the ISSA To Live Together conference, I was talking with a few friends about going. Some of them knew about it because of the involvement of the Italian philosopher, Franco Bifo Berardi. Some knew about it through the grapevine, and some knew about it because Pamela Anderson is listed as a donor on the website. One acquaintance laughed and said; “The School of Social Autonomy? Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron?” Later on the ferry ride, as I watched the sun dip into the sea and felt the mainland retreating behind my back, his question stuck in my head.

Credit: Matteo Principi

The school in the name of Island School of Social Autotnomy is not glided over, nor is it a stand-in word to represent the conference-type structure of the program. It is an integral part of ISSA’s ideological positioning inspired by Ivan Illich’s book Deschooling Society (1971) and his claim that the contemporary educational system has turned into an “advertising agency that makes you believe that you need the society as it is”. The notion of social autonomy is not divorced from the notion of pedagogy, and learning with and from each other. According to Paulo Freires Pedagogy of the Oppressed, one of the inspirations of ISSA, the learner is to be treated as a co-creator of knowledge. Many of the lecturers at the ‘conference’ are members of the ISSA organism, or have started their own similar, perhaps more private initiatives such as James Bridle, a British artist and writer who is based on an island in the Aegean Sea. The search for autonomy as a political strategy and a model for social organization is a recurring idea at ISSA. It is closely linked with the nature of islands as isolated and hermetic spaces, spaces where people inscribe their desires and grow them patiently, in the process integrating with the existing topology. ISSA’s location is thus both a geographic and metaphorical stance: “We believe that the future lies in archipelagos of autonomy.”

The idea of self-management as a framework has been consistently present in the history of island schools nurturing subversive discourse and activity. ISSA in its current form gives a nod of respect to the summer school of Korčula, founded in the 1960s on a nearby island in the former federal state of Yugoslavia. The historic summer school and the journal it birthed, Praxis, a Marxist-humanist journal, was commemorated in the panel talk entitled The 60th Anniversary of Praxis, and included Nadežda Čačinovič, Boris Buden, Ankica Čakardić, and Mira Oklobdžija all of whom were directly involved in the Korčula summer school. The Korčula summer school encounters that took place during the 1960s were crucial meeting

The 60th Anniversary of Praxis. CC 4.0 by ISSA School / BONK productions

As Boris Buden put it: “Dealing with the past makes sense only in the ability of us to take the past in our hands and affect the present.” The cultural heritage of Praxis proposed that these particular isolated spaces dedicated to critical thought towards existing infrastructures of property and social relations as well as simple collective leisure, took shape in ‘Dyonisian Socialism.’ Praxis and the Korčula summer school were informed by the idea that thinking must transcend the scope of academic institutions and nurture the singularity of multitudes rather than promoting a single monolithic school of thought: not a global revolution but many small local utopias. The ritual of meeting on the beaches in the late afternoon and drinking and talking was an important part of the Korčula summer school and was continued at ISSA, where initiatives such as Memory of the World, Chto Delat, Forest University, and Aventura presented their practices during the school on the beach sessions. Most of the two hundred participants that attended the current and second iteration of ISSA were activists, journalists, artists, and researchers working on parallel and often interlinked initiatives spanning multiple continents. Casual conversation merged with political critique and speculation ebbed and flowed with the waves.

Although it was not specifically mentioned, I couldn’t help but return to the concept of the archipelago and Edouard Glissant’s theory of archipelagic thinking. The theory of archipelagic thinking originates from the violently colonized scattering of islands in the Carribean, and the dissident philosophical thinking produced there, an arguably different context than the briefly colonized island of Vis that retained its language. Nevertheless, there are similarities in archipelagic thinking, marked by unpredictability, multiplicity-in-oneness, and ambiguity. It calls for an “insurrection of the imaginary faculties” aspiring towards innovative ways of conceiving the world, and resonates in many of the conversations echoing across ISSA and the Praxis journal before it.

Mira Oklobdžija, a panelist in the Praxis discussion, referred to a philosopher who had also reflected from the shores of an island: Aristotle and his definition of three forms of knowledge — theoria, poiesis, and praxis. She outlined some interesting digressions in the two generations of the Croatian summer schools, pointing out that ISSA is more activistic and anchored in praxis than the journal Praxis ever aspired to be. An audience member quipped that perhaps in ISSA, the poetry is precisely in the praxis, and this rings true to the guiding motto of ISSA; “We build the school, and the school builds us.”

Two days of ISSA were dedicated to restoring and expanding the old stone building or school nestled in the Vis hills, which will constitute the main hub of ISSA activities. During the days of To Live Together, the regular working force (usually just a few people) at the construction site swelled to a hundred or more, and work that normally took months was accomplished in two days. We carried wooden planks up the mountain and sanded them to construct the large terrace, and participated in a workshop on how to build traditional, terraced stone walls, a practice called dry stonewalling. This technique is so essential on the islands of the Adriatic that it has been included as an UNESCO intangible heritage of mankind. The workshop was led by Igor Mataić, a doctor of science specializing in geotechnics and environmental engineering who is also part of the Pomalo association, a cultural and action-based initiatives NGO on Vis dedicated to protecting the natural environment and sustainable life on the island. We learned where to place the larger anchoring boulders and how to fill in the gaps with smaller stones, making a type of wedge in the sloped side of the hill. The technique doesn’t need any adhesive or cement but relies on viney vegetation to slowly grow in the gaps of the larger stones, through the earth and pebbles, and hold the wall in place over time.

The incline of the mountain is consistently incorporated into the sustainable design of the school. The circular water system (as a convivial tool) demonstrated various ways of water circulation and collection. We were introduced to the construction of a large sloped surface of layered flat stones behind the house, dedicated to collecting and filtering accumulated rainwater. There is an adjacent fog collector project that catches mist and helps it to liquefy, dripping down into basins at the bottom of the fence-like structure.

CC 4.0 by ISSA School / BONK productions

At some point in the day, we saw a line of people walking up the mountain in single file, the first in the line carrying a large pole with a Wifi antenna at its top, looking for a good position to catch the available wifi and route it down to the house. It looked like a religious march in search of connection. Autonomy and self-management do not mean isolation. This initiative was the responsibility of !Mediengruppe Bitnik, an artist duo, and two core members of the ISSA collective who anchor the islands initiative as a practice of embodied tactical media. The co-founders of the Berlin-based collective originate from Vis and Zurich, and deal with reinterpreting urban technological systems that are not meant to be interacted with, utilizing “deliberate loss of control as a means to question established structures.” “When did we agree to these systems layered on top of society?” they asked in their lecture later in the week, describing their impressive opus of playful interferences. They rendered glitched photographs of urban architectural elements into the original stone structures and infiltrated the Zurich opera with phones that randomly dial citizens and transmit usually inaccessible audio, entangling interference with translation. In the spirit of tactical media, they not only initiated the Wifi antenna but also led a workshop titled Your Own Private Pirate Radio Station teaching participants how to assemble a predesigned FM transmitter circuit board to be used as a tactical tool, an artistic device, and a medium of communication. Participants constructed their own pirate radio stations, and, while edging around the law, achieved communicatation in a relatively local but useful radius.

The workshop For a Global Mutiny Against an Empire of Negligence led by the Pirate Care collective, resonated theoretically both with the act of making private radio stations and with the core principles of ISSA. Pirate Care is a research project and a network of activists, scholars, and practitioners who stand against the criminalization of solidarity. Pirate Care was introduced as a concept inspired by the hybrid figure of the pirate in his/her/their militant glory and autonomy, and the invisibility of the renegade figure of revolt. The pirate carer aims to address unequally distributed care, thus breaking empirical strongholds by repositioning knowledge production. In this sense, care is conceptualized as a militant and direct action practice and a partisan terrain of struggle. The concept of pirate care is grounded in its defining elements of breaking the law and claiming disobedience, critical usage of technology, communing private property and partisan knowledge and learning, queering kinship, and federating practices. Ultimately, pirate care unites anarchist legacies by aligning the vocabularies of diverse movements (such as Marxist & Eco Feminist) and federating fragmented pirate care initiatives. The wish to align vocabularies recalls the Praxis panel talk in which the concept of self-management was repositioned as an essentially anarchist framework rather than a communist legacy, thus interrogating the ownership of definitions.

For a Global Mutiny Against an Empire of Negligence. CC 4.0 by ISSA School / BONK productions

The idea of a federation is deeply important for the pirate carers and a concept that is too often forgotten in our leftist spaces. The pirate carers cultivate a profound suspicion towards positions of morality that frequently digress into judgment. Perhaps that is why, as a participant stated later in the day, contemporary political spaces are filled with “leftists who are looking for a political home where there is none”.  Thus the Pirate Care Collective works with other people’s practices of care, even though they do not necessarily agree with their politics, consequently federating common struggles and unions. This type of activation is essential as a subversion of the often unnoticed “elite capture” and co-option of renegade academic discourse and trickle-down activism. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, in his recent book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), states that elite capture is what “stands between us and a transformative, nonsectarian, coalitional politics.” Federating, allyship, and a possible political home for the future left represent a strong undercurrent of thought accompanying the wide breadth of activities at ISSA.

The Pirate Care Collective facilitated a playful and simultaneously dystopic workshop. We were presented with the scenario of being stuck on the island because the mainland had suffered an acute breakdown of infrastructure and civil society. We were then divided into groups and challenged to take roles based on our capabilities of care and assistance. What would we do first? Who does what? Who and what should we take care of? A challenging exercise as you can imagine since it is always the case in such settings that there is an under-representation of engineers, doctors, and herbalists, and an overrepresentation of writers and painters. Nevertheless, throughout the exercise, we realized that skills that are not always valued, such as cooking and emotional perseverance, are essential in small utopias. What will always be needed is clear and calm communication, humor, and (pirate) care, all skills that we expanded during the ISSA conference.

James Bridle, artist and technologist who moved to an island in the Aegean, spoke of his experiments with fog collectors and water purifiers during his lecture and his delight that the ISSA team was developing the same knowledge. Bridle was playful, speaking about the interconnectivity of the world on a metaphysical and organic level rather than an infrastructural and extractivist level. He talked about the hearing of plants and the dancing of bees as active sensory participants in the world and described the solar community of which he is a member on the island where he lives. A solar community provides access to energy for member households through an autonomous solar grid, literally and metaphorically redistributing power through self-management.  Power communities are increasingly common, yet remain especially important to islands that are at bigger risk of being isolated from the main power grids of the mainland. “What was considered the periphery is actually the future,” explained James. The peripheries of the islands are places to prototype and experiment both because they are experiencing the climate conditions of the future and because of the archipelagic poesis ingrained in their seclusion and immersion.

Silvia Federici, an Italian feminist, activist, and writer, addressed us by Zoom in the beautiful, sculpted stone movie theatre in Komiža. She said we must work on “rebuilding the commons and inventing new ways of being together. Crucial as a form of self-defense is expanding our imagination — the new world will not burst out of our head like Minerva from the head of Zeus. It will follow a period of experimentation, breaking with the isolation of the individualization of society, where we don’t confront capitalism alone. We do it in our everyday life by changing how we reproduce life and ourselves.” The ISSA School of Social Autonomy attempts just that, by experimenting and weaving ancestral knowledge with a multiplicity of contemporary and historic schools of thought leaving us all with a profound sense of community, excitement, and hope. When I returned to the depressing and apathetic private conversations of everyday urban life in a capital city on the mainland, I encouraged my friends to join us on the island of the future, where the effects of building and learning together are collective, invigorating and visceral.

Credit: Matteo Principi

Theory on Demand #53

Localizing Design Studies: Perspectives on Turkey

Edited by Deniz Hasirci, Tuba Doğu, Deniz Avci, Gozde Damla Turhan-Haskara, Aybüke Taşer

Contributors: Deniz Hasirci, Deniz Avci, Tuba Doğu, Gözde Damla Turhan-Haskara, Filiz Özbengi Uslu, Elif Karakuş, Selen Çiçek, Mine Özkar, Hande Yıldız Çekindir, Gökçe Çağatay, Tuba Doğu, Anıl Dinç Demirbilek, Canberk Yurt, Sölen Kipöz, Özgül Kılınçarslan, Osman Demirbaş

Localizing Design Studies: Perspectives on Turkey includes research that ranges from case/field implementation ideas to quantitative/scientific data surveys to social, theoretical, and historical studies from all subfields of design to address the countless parallel and overlapping realities of design in the post-pandemic era. The post-covid period and unprecedented earthquakes in Turkey have made us question the role of design in our everyday lives, while the advent of dynamic technologies in design has made us reconsider the design realities that surround us. Quality research showcases the state of graduate work in the various fields of design studies.

Since the early 2000s studies in design and design history in Turkey have been developing an
increasingly strong profile. This visibility has been evidenced by the growing number of related
international conferences, innovative research initiatives and book and journal publications. All of these have been sustained by a significant platform of innovative doctoral research which has in turn been informed by a wide and diverse range of contemporary theoretical and historical approaches. This edited book provides valuable insights to the complexities of design and its impacts from a variety of recent Turkish perspectives as articulated by a new generation of Turkish scholars.

— Professor Emeritus Jonathan M Woodham, Associate, Centre for Design History,
University of Brighton, UK

Since its inception nearly two decades ago, the design studies course has championed research
fostering critical thinking and examining the ever-evolving dimensions of design. This includes
diverse methodologies, from practical applications and empirical studies to theoretical and historical analyses. In a world increasingly fragile due to shifting political dynamics, environmental crises, ongoing conflicts and wars, the urgency for innovative design responses has grown. Turkey’s devastating 2023 earthquake and global challenges like pandemics demand adaptive solutions, integrating technological advancements such as AI, blockchain, and the metaverse while redefining the designer’s role. This book explores these pressing themes, offering a journey into uncharted territories where resilience, serendipity, and innovation intersect.

— Professor Tevfik Balcıoğlu

Links to the pdf, epub and the Lulu page to order a paper copy can be found HERE

12 Dec 2024 18:00 – 20:00, Framer Framed, Oranje-Vrijstaatkade 71, Amsterdam

On 12 December 2024 at Framer Framed, System of Systems launches the first two books in their Managing Displacement series: Outsourcing and Extraction. System of Systems is a research project that analyses the bureaucratic, spatial, and technological conditions shaping Europe’s migration landscape.

The themes of each edition will be discussed by three contributors: critical media scholar Ariana Dongus, spatial and visual researcher Stefanos Levidis, and lecturer Hassan Ould Moctar, and is followed by a Q&A.

Ariana Dongus is a critical media scholar. She researches refugees, migration, and technology, focusing on AI’s social aspects, digital labour exploitation, and invisible infrastructures. Formerly at HfG Karlsruhe, where she taught media theory and coordinated a research group on critical AI, she is now a Research Fellow at TU Dresden.

Stefanos Levidis is a spatial and visual researcher, and is the co-founder and co-director of Forensic Architecture Initiative Athens (FAIA). Stefanos has been working with Forensic Architecture and Forensis since 2016, overseeing the agencies’ work on borders and migration and holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths.

Hassan Ould Moctar is a Lecturer in the Anthropology of Migration at SOAS, University of London. He holds a PhD in Development Studies which he obtained from SOAS. His research focuses on the relationship between migration, borders, and development processes, with a regional focus on Mauritania, the West African Sahel, and the Sahara.

Register here

More about the series:

Managing Displacement explores the intricate web of migration management within and beyond Europe’s borders. Each publication begins with a theme or term to examine processes that restrict, surveil, or obscure displaced people.

The first publication, Outsourcing, examines how the EU extends its borders beyond the continent by outsourcing border control. Recognising this practice within a historical trajectory of colonial ordering, it shows how responsibility is systematically deferred and how racist structures are propagated through border management.

Outsourcing contributors: Border Violence Monitoring Network, FRAUD, Nadine El-Enany, Hassan Ould Moctar.

The second publication, Extraction, offers a transhistorical perspective on contemporary border systems. The contributions explore extraction as a process that drives displacement, with enduring effects due to environmental devastation. They also examine extraction as a direct mechanism of border management that financially profits from those who are displaced.

Extraction contributors: Ariana Dongus, Radha D’Souza, Stefanos Levidis, Angela Melitopoulos.

‘Managing Displacement’ is a publication series that explores the intricate web of migration management within and beyond Europe’s borders. Each publication begins with a theme, or term, in order to examine processes that restrict, surveil or obscure displaced people.

—

Those displaced and seeking to inhabit the social, political, and economic imaginaries of ‘Europe’ are met with an increasingly hostile frontier. The confluence of obscure legal processes, rising anti-migrant rhetoric, and the use of heavily funded private contractors has enforced the idea of Europe as a ‘fortress’. The very notion of Europe – freedom of movement for some and restriction for others – is upheld through austere migration policy by the European Union, influencing many aspects of political life on the continent and beyond.

Each book in the series delves into a term and a process deployed to restrict, surveil, or obscure displaced peoples. Underpinning the publications is the understanding that displacement is deeply entangled with historical legacies of colonialism, resource extraction, and late-stage capitalism. We seek to redress the framing of displacement as something to be managed, by re-defining the processes employed to do so.

Edited by System of Systems
Published in December 2024

Designed by Rose Nordin
Copyedited by Harriet Foyster

Theory on Demand #54

In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround

Edited by Joshua Neves and Marc Steinberg

Convenience is the feeling and aspiration that animates our platformed present. As such, it poses urgent techno-political questions about the everyday digital habitus. From next-day delivery, gig work, and tele-health to cashless payment systems, data centers, and policing – convenience is an affordance and an enclosure; our logistical surround. Driving every experience of convenience is the precarious work, proprietary algorithms, or predatory schemes that subtend it. This collaborative book traces how the logistical surround is transformed by thickening digital economies and networked rituals, examining contemporary conveniences across a wide range of practices and geographies. Contributors examine the ineluctable relation between convenience and its constitutive opposite, inconvenience, considering its infrastructural, affective, and compulsory dimensions. Living in convenience is thus both a hyper visible manifestation of so-called late capitalism and a pervasive mood that fades into the background (like the data centers that power it). Bringing the agonistic relation of in/convenience to center stage, this volume analyzes the logistics of delivery, streaming porn, cloud computing, water infrastructures, smartness paradigms, convenience stores, sleep apps, surveillance, AI ethics, and much more – rethinking the cultural politics of convenience for the present conjuncture.

Contributors: Darren Byler, Orit Halpern, Armin Beverungen, Mél Hogan, Steven Gonzalez, Tung Hui-Hu, Susanna Paasonen, Neta Alexander, Rahul Mukherjee, Liza Rose Cirolia, Andrea Pollio, Tomasz Hollanek, Maya Indira Ganesh

Joshua Neves is Associate Professor, Concordia University, and author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy. Marc Steinberg is Professor of Cinema, Concordia University, and author of The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet.

Order a copy or download publication HERE