About INTER-

Focus and Scope

We are INTER-, an online, open-access journal run by a diverse team of St. Andrews alumni and academics committed to broadening the space for interdisciplinary conversations in the field of Global Thought.

Why ‘INTER-‘?

INTER- is a prefix and a connective tissue that combines thoughts, disciplines, concepts and fields together. The hyphen points to this relation, the possibility of a ‘betweenness.’ We are inter-disciplinary, working in the interstitial terrain between historical fields of thought, where new connections, vantage points, and research assemblages generate knowledge of a more holistic and diverse nature. We could discuss the inter-national: the institutions, capital flows, pollution, climactic patterns, laws and governance which transcends borders and forces a geopolitical terrain to emerge. We can speak of inter-relations, breaking down the idea of the atomised individual of liberal political thought and thinking instead of the social relations between us, or even the inter-relations of a concept. In all cases, INTER- refers to the new space revealed in the relation itself, and differs from multi- and trans-disciplinarity in this way.

Why Global Thought?

For us, global thought does not denote a specific discipline or tradition of intellectual inquiry. Rather, we understand Global Thought to be about: 

1. Decentering thought, being wary of its universalisation;
2. Thought as always in motion/circulation and changing across space and time;
3. Thought as an archive (that can be built upon, destroyed or lost);
4. Thought as deeply material, reified in objects, productive of the social world (and emergent in the process of production);
5. Thought as culturally, aesthetically and geographically diverse, as inextricable from identity;
6. Thought as enframed by different methodologies, theories, traditions and ancestries of thinking, and inscribed with different values, morals, ideals, sanctities and identities;
7. Thought as politically produced, captured and distributed, subject to and exerting power of various kinds, as capable of fetishisation into ideologies toward the realisation of various ends;
8. Thought as communicable through various mediums, and the mutations through which thought is presented and distributed altering its affect, consumption and acceptance; 
9. Thought as aspiring, or not, toward the status of truth or communication, as representing, describing or revealing reality; 
10. Thought as embodied, in direct continuity with experience and as never static or the product of a ‘transcendental subject.’

This is not a proscriptive list of thought’s characteristics, properties or possibilities; rather, it articulates the conditions of possibility for thought to be global, and in what ways. Understood in this broad way, we can use the framework of global thought, with the commitment of interdisciplinarity, to ask incisive and important questions of our shared world. Global thought discusses and implicates every intellectual discipline and forces interdisciplinarity to explain certain phenomena.

The global thought characteristics of contemporary medical practices (bio-ethics), the revolutions of thought (intellectual history) and the movement of thought across borders (geography), the hegemony of liberal thought (critical theory, political theory) and the geopolitics entailed by such an order (IR, law), the different cultural and social traditions which create liveable space for queer and racialised peoples (gender studies, ethnic and minorities studies). The philosophy of science asks direct questions of how thought can achieve the status of truth, establish the ontological difference between a thought and a fact, ask who/what produces thought, or interrogate how thought becomes knowledge. Anthropology today asks how non-human thought can contribute to a shared representation of reality, and the possibility of inter-species thought. Each of these disciplines, and many more besides, offer different perspectives on Global Thought.

We each participate, produce and reproduce the thought/s which structure or critique our shared reality: thought is truly a global phenomenon. 

Background of INTER-

Emerging from the 2022 cohort of Global, Social and Political Thought (MLitt) at the Graduate School, we are committed to forwarding the ethical goal of a more egalitarian, and accessible research environment, bridging conversations between student, ECR’s, activists, artists and academics in an interdisciplinary, intellectually rigorous forum which covers a variety of disciplines and geographies. In this international, interdisciplinary, interconnected space, we acknowledge the inter-dependency which enables knowledge-production to continue and which ties us into relationships of accountability to the communities, human and non-human, that we research, as well as the institutions within which we move or are embedded. In this same spirit, this newly created journal is shared with you, as a co-created space where, erasing traditional boundaries and borders, we can think in common with a new dynamism about the movements and revolutions of Global Thought.

Publication Frequency

INTER- publishes biannually as a journal in the Summer and Winter of each year. Abstract submissions are open for two weeks in the months of November and May. Our blog, the INTER-Scene, publishes year round with no set schedule.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. We are hosted by OJS (Open-Journal Systems) and published by the Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of St Andrews. We operate with a Creative Commons License to ensure access and free use of articles for the widest possible audience. This agreement means that copyright in the work remains with the author and the author retains the right to reuse the article after publication with INTER-, so long as when the work is reproduced, the original source of publication is cited.

Read more here as to why we chose the name “INTER-” for this purpose.