Aims and scope

The online peer-reviewed academic journal Imaginaires (ISSN : 2780-1896) aims to offer scholars in the field of Cultural studies the opportunity to publish their research and promote the diverse and interdisciplinary nature of their scientific approaches. The journal also aims to examine and update the methods and practices of a discipline protean contours of which are still difficult to delineate, nearly sixty years after it emerged in Birmingham. Since its inception in the 1960s, the field of Cultural Studies has been marked by the popular dimension of the very objects it then chose to examine (television for instance) and has challenged traditional cultural hierarchies. The scholarly interest in new cultural objects resonates with emerging social entities that are now the subjects of dedicated (and perhaps fragmented) fields of research: race studies, gender studies, queer studies, childhood studies, intersectional studies, to name but a few. The journal’s ambition is not only to discuss the discourses conveyed on and by these cultural contents but also to question the very materiality of this culture characterised by industrialisation and mass (re)production (Williams).

Imaginaires is primarily interested in the decentering of so-called highbrow culture and invites scholars to investigate new, popular, cultural objects and explore their material, social, economic, and societal modes and conditions of production and reception. Imaginaires is particularly interested in counter- and sub-cultures, in how they are captured by dominant culture – a phenomenon that may lead to the demise of class culture. Does popular culture assimilate dominant culture discourses, or does it emancipate itself by producing a resistant and/or counter-hegemonic discourse (Gramsci)?

Far from considering the expansion of popular culture as an alienation of the masses or a debasement of highbrow culture (Leavis), Imaginaires embraces popular texts and narratives (genre literature and films, comic books, television, video games, body art) in order to examine their rhetoric and aesthetics.

Convinced that popular culture is an object of study worthy of academic engagement, Imaginaires is ultimately defined as the place of all (cultural) transfers, of all forms of (disciplinary) inter-pollination and (scientific) crossbreeding.

 

Open Access policy and License

  • Publication in open access (without embargo)
  • Publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

 

Publishing policies and Intellectual Property

Imaginaires is an open-access electronic journal. All articles, texts and documents are freely accessible online in order to allow unfettered access to the scientific community and civil society. Authors accept to contribute to this mission of public service: they authorise the free-of-charge publishing of their work on the journal’s website for the entire length of their copyright and undertake to hold the journal’s editors harmless from any costs, damages or other claims, as a result of any related lawsuit. 

Imaginaires does not charge any author fees.

The journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. © Copyright Owner Author

The Authors are entitled to publish their Work later on with another publisher and on any website (open archive, personal or institutional website) provided the full bibliographic reference of the Work’s first publication is mentioned.

The Authors also grant to the Publisher the right to publish the Work in open access under Creative Commons licence CC BY NC SA, for all types and means of exploitation stated hereabove, which means that all people interested shall have the right to reuse all or part of the Work without asking Author’s permission, under the following terms:

  • it is mandatory to credit the Author (BY);
  • the Authors prohibit commercial use of the Work (NC);
  • in case the Work may be modified and if it is actually modified, the derived Contribution must be licensed under the same CC licence (SA)

The Publisher grants to the Authors the non-exclusive right to post/deposit the Version of Record of the Work in an Open access repository or open archive (i.e. a sustainable platform giving free access to all without prior registration) immediately after the publication of the Issue including the Work, be it under a Creative Commons licence BY NC SA. Academic social networks (such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu) are not open access repositories: should the Work be posted on such a network, it must be linked, for sustainability reasons, to the open archive where the Work has been posted.

Open Access pathways permitted:

Submitted Version

Not permitted

Accepted Version

One-year embargo after the article has been published, CC BY-NC-SA, © Copyright Owner Author, conditions: Published source must be acknowledged

Published Version

Permitted, No Embargo, CC BY-NC-SA, © Copyright Owner Author, conditions: Published source must be acknowledged

 

Publication Costs

  • Publication fees: no
  • Submission fees: no

 

Submission and selection procedure

  • Review process: double blind peer review

When responding to calls for papers launched by the journal’s website, the authors submit their proposal as an attachment (.doc or .rtf file) accompanied by a brief biographical note mentioning their institutional affiliation, by sending it to the editors of the thematic issue. If the proposal is retained, the authors are given several months to write the full text and send it to the editors of the thematic issue. The article will then undergo a double-blind peer review process realized by at least two French or international experts, chosen by the issue’s editors. Once anonymized the review reports are sent to the article’s author(s). If modifications are necessary, the article may be sent back and forth between author(s) and reviewer(s) via the editor(s) until the potential acceptance of the article. The journal reserves the right to edit accepted manuscripts (e.g. language corrections, reference formatting and layout).

The journal also welcomes spontaneous contributions. In this case, the authors submit their article as an attachment (.doc or .rtf file) accompanied by a brief biographical note mentioning their institutional affiliation, by sending it to the editorial board. The article will then undergo a double-blind peer review process realized by at least two French or international experts, chosen by the journal’s editorial board. Once anonymized the review reports are sent to the article’s author(s). If modifications are necessary, the article may be sent back and forth between author(s) and reviewer(s) via the editor(s) until the potential acceptance of the article. The journal reserves the right to edit accepted manuscripts (e.g. language corrections, reference formatting and layout).

Use licence

This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

© Copyright Owner Author

Autorship and Contributorship

Contributors sign a rights assignment contract which mentions the exact title of their contribution.

The order of appearance of the names of the contributors of the same contribution is determined by the contributors themselves without intervention by the editor. The order of presentation of contributions in the issue and the nature of these contributions (scientific article, editorial, Varia article, review, translation, writing of a bibliography, etc.) are determined by the scientific editors of the issue. No contribution can be put online without mentioning the name and affiliation of the author.

Disclaim

Contact: presses.universitaires@univ-reims.fr

Ethical Oversight, consent rules, prevention of plagiarism

Each contributor signs a contract of assignment of rights by which he guarantees that his contribution is unpublished and of his own composition: i.e. that it is the intellectual production of the person indicated in the contract and that it has not been publicly disclosed to third parties through a printed or electronic publication. The author has taken permission from the copyright holder to reproduce the matter not owned by them and acknowledged the source.

In case of doubt, the editor submits the contribution to the similarity detection tool provided by the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne. In the case of extracts, figures or tables borrowed from other works, the contributor provides the publisher with the authorisations for reproduction obtained from the rights holders.

The contributor guarantees that the manuscript does not contain anything that could fall under the laws and other provisions relating to defamation and insult, privacy and image rights, offence to public decency or counterfeiting. In particular, he/she guarantees that the contribution does not contain any borrowing from another work, borrowing which would be likely to engage the responsibility of the publisher.