Digital publishing is an emerging research field that seeks to define methodologies and methods that intervene on intersecting politics and challenges at the centre of digital publishing industries. Publishing industries are struggling in Canada, with fewer venues to cover independent and emerging work by Indigenous creators, resulting in a need for new, disruptive, and innovative models for digital publishing.
As of March 2022, the Digital Wahkohtowin & Cultural Governance Lab is partnering with GUTS magazine to develop processes and ethics for sustainable and Indigenous-mandated digital publishing. GUTS Magazine is a digital, non-hierarchically run feminist magazine publishing literary essays and reviews, long-form journalism, interviews, fiction, poetry, and new media to further feminist discourse, criticism, and community engagement. The Digital Wahkohtowin & Cultural Governance Lab will partner with GUTS to commission, edit, and publish special content related to our gatherings and research fabrications. The special issues, edited by The Digital Wahkohtowin & Cultural Governance Lab and GUTS editorial board, serve as thematic interrogations into the issues at the core of the research activities happening at the Lab.
There is important work being done in the Humanities around reframing academic publishing to be inclusive of new formats for public discourse. The Digital Wahkohtowin & Cultural Governance Lab will be a part of the work of expanding notions of literary publishing to include podcasts and produce new episodes of Dr. Jas M. Morgan’s podcast just fem things. just fem things is a podcast about the things that feminists love. The X University English Department student community will engage in the writing, producing, and releasing new episodes.