About Mid Theory
Mid Theory Collective is a space for scholars in the humanities to think, learn, read, and write together. We welcome submissions from anyone, but encourage and prioritize the participation of early-career, independent, and otherwise precariously employed scholars in the humanities. Committed to rediscovering the wonder and enthusiasm of cultural criticism, we aim to be lively and rigorous, timely and thoughtful, energized and inclusive. Alongside publishing a digital little magazine with short essays, reviews (and other such things), we also coordinate reading and writing groups, and facilitate workshops and events that are relevant to our thinking, our lives, and our working conditions. You can join the Collective by reading us, reading with us, writing for us, and participating in our events.
Our Mission Statement:
Guided by the inclusive ethos of a collective, MTC seeks to combine the rigor of public scholarship with the agility and liveliness of a digital little magazine. Our focus is on collaboration, curiosity, and creativity rather than professionalization. As a volunteer-run collective, we imagine this space to be truly public; MTC is not a space to rack up CV lines or to publish a version of your research or “academic journal article-lite” (those spaces already exist!) Rather, we invite you to be guided by your idiosyncratic interests, to experiment in form and thought, to move the center, and to support and be supported by other scholars and critics.
On “Mid Theory”: What do we mean by ‘mid theory’? In the broadest terms, we mean to mark our interest in theoretical and critical works written in the midst of a present that can feel too close, too fast, too much. We find value in objects in the middle of things—objects that are unfinished, suspended, interposed—as well as in those things that underwhelm, flatten, or agitate expectations. Mid theory might also dilate the middle ranges of an idea—objects and questions situated between genres, between disciplines, or between temporalities. We turn our attention to the atmospheres, scenes, and backdrops that currently surround us and think of ourselves as being among rather than apart from our objects of study. We are excited by work that doesn’t try to hold itself above the present moment, passing judgment from on high, but rather embroils itself, even implicates itself in it.
More specifically, and more importantly, “mid theory” locates the space we want to build: a platform for thinking together that exists somewhere between the university and popular media. We want to wrest public intellectualism back from the universities that have captured it over the past few decades—just as we want to recover agile, shorter-form writing as a worthy vehicle for spreading enthusiasm and doing serious thinking, outside of the hype cycle and the rush to produce content. “Mid theory” isn’t a prescriptive method, nor does it denote a specific set of objects or demands. Think of it as an open, fluid orientation to the contemporary. Think of it as an invitation to begin something together, in media res.