Technological Cultures is a new journal that will be published by Beewolf Press beginning in November 2025.
Technologies (here understood as products and processes of technical thinking, as applied to solve perceived problems or needs) are increasingly recognised as culturally contingent. The ways in which technologies—both material and immaterial—are imagined, researched, designed, produced, implemented, maintained, abandoned, and replaced are dependent on deep-rooted yet changeable cultural forms.
By the same token, other cultural products and processes are created and shaped through the technologies that enable, carry, and transmit them. For example, transport infrastructure (roads, bridges, railways, ports, etc.) can bring distinct cultures into relation, with the precise cultural interactions being conditioned by the infrastructure’s technical and physical attributes. Technologies used for producing energy, food, shelter, and countless other essentials of human life are intricately entangled within the social and economic systems out of which cultures emerge. Communication infrastructures (satellites, towers, cables, etc.) and tools (phones, computers, pens, etc.) may produce the illusion of a borderless and increasingly immaterial world but are both strongly situated and inevitably ideological, producing path dependencies and creating cultures in their own image. When new materials and technologies are produced, resultant technological interventions may prompt major changes in cultural production and expression. Sociotechnical networks and imaginaries govern the ways in which people live, love, work, and fight; innovate and conserve; and perceive their pasts and futures. Only through research that interrogates the dual and mutually constitutive material and immaterial aspects of technology and culture can we understand not only human societies as they are today but also human societies as they might be in the future.
Technological Cultures will be published as a diamond open access (free to read and publish in) journal. It will be an interdisciplinary journal that brings together perspectives from across the STEM disciplines (particularly technology and engineering) and the social sciences (particularly STS, urban studies, geography, and anthropology) with the aim of better understanding the ways in which technology and culture influence one another. Although some papers will be more or less influenced by certain research traditions, all papers in the journal will maintain a focus on connections between infrastructure and culture. Technological Cultures will be open to both quantitative and qualitative approaches and particularly welcome articles that combine methods and styles from across disciplines. The journal will publish papers in a wide range of genres, provided that it is possible for them to undergo peer review: for example, original research articles, review papers, and conceptual and methodological articles.
Editors-in-chief
Ping Su (South China University of Technology)
Adam Grydehøj (South China University of Technology)