Technically speaking, The Undergraduate Journal of Social Studies isn’t new. It’s more accurate to say that it was “brought back to life.”
“What really inspired me to revive it was when I found some of the old copies in the [College of Social Studies] CSS Library,” said Alexander Furnas ’11, executive editor of the journal, which is being distributed this semester for the first time since 1987. “I had no idea it had existed before.”
After discovering the lost journal, Furnas, a student and preceptor in the CSS major, set about bringing together a group of like-minded CSS students with the aim of resurrecting the student publication. Together with fellow executive editor Nicolas Mendoza ’11, the vision is becoming a reality. Furnas and Mendoza’s central motivation for re-instituting the journal is to give students the opportunity to share their work with their peers.
“The CSS is a fairly tight-knit community, where we take the same classes together with the same group of people for three years,” Furnas said. “You get familiar with how all these other students argue and what they care about, but we never read anything our classmates have written.”
The journal fields student work from a number of disciplines, specifically those focusing on the main tenets of the CSS program: history, economics, government, and political and social theory.
“A lot of it is about verbal versus written argumentation,” Furnas said. “It’s a very different skill, and seeing people lay out their thought processes in a systematic way is interesting to me and, I imagine, to a lot of other students.”
So far, the journal’s editorial board has received a very positive response from students and has garnered a healthy number of submissions.
“I’m really excited to put it all together,” said associate editor Elizabeth Williams ’13. “I actually got in touch with [Furnas] to get involved with the journal. He was my preceptor, basically my TA, so I just told him how I’d love to help out with it.”
The journal is planned as an adjunct to the CSS program, and has been shaped by the strong student-faculty collaboration for which the major is known.
“The journal’s officially affiliated with the CSS, and it’ll be linked to from the new homepage the department is making,” Furnas said. “The department co-chairs Joyce Jacobsen and Erik Grimmer-Solem were very helpful with institutionalizing the journal, as was Professor of History Cecillia Miller with the process of getting this thing off the ground.”
The editors will begin reviewing submissions in the near future. The journal’s aim is to include articles from a wide variety of viewpoints and disciplines, the editors said.
“I love the idea of opening it up to all sorts of social studies disciplines,” Williams said. “I think that the interdisciplinary factor is really what CSS is about, and it’s really cool that we’re opening it up to anything that’s marginally related to studying society.”
That interdisciplinary bent defines both the major and the journal, setting it apart from its more discipline-oriented peer undergraduate journals.
“It’s a really good opportunity to get something published,” said Connor Larkin ’12, who submitted a research report on the Lebanese civil war and national identity. “This is the only undergraduate journal that CSS has currently, which is good in and of itself, but I also hope that getting a bunch of works like this out there for everyone to see will provoke a lot of discussions about these issues, and I hope there’ll be potential for fostering cooperation between different majors.”
Yet, Furnas thinks the most important aspect of the journal is the intellectual individuality and independence it promotes.
“I don’t like having professors tell me what’s important and then having to remember and regurgitate that,” Furnas said. “I would rather argue about what I think is important with other people, and then we together, through that process, can figure out a little more.”