Our Mission & Vision
Our Vision
We envision a transformed academic landscape where the legitimacy of scholarship is measured not by the medium of its expression, but by its intellectual rigor, ethical integrity, and transformative potential. Our vision is for a future where audio-visual research is no longer a niche or experimental practice, but a central, respected, and foundational mode of academic inquiry. We see a world where universities, libraries, and scholars instinctively turn to audio-visual archives as primary sources, recognizing that the full spectrum of human knowledge cannot be contained within the written word alone. This future academy will be one that embraces multi-modal learning, acknowledging that true understanding is achieved through a synthesis of the visual, the auditory, and the textual.
In this future, the barriers to entry for non-traditional scholars and knowledge keepers will be significantly lowered. We envision a global academic community where the oral traditions of indigenous cultures, the embodied knowledge of performance artists, the situated expertise of community activists, and the dynamic dialogues of public intellectuals are all recognized as valid and citable forms of scholarship. This will be an academy that is more inclusive, more equitable, and more reflective of the diverse ways in which knowledge is created and shared across human societies. Our vision is to be a catalyst for this change, creating the standards and platforms that make this more just and comprehensive world of scholarship possible.
Furthermore, we see the Journal of Socio-Cultural Narratives becoming an essential and permanent fixture in the digital humanities and social sciences infrastructure. Our vision is for the journal to be a trusted, globally recognized repository, a critical resource for researchers exploring the complexities of culture, sexuality, and society. It will be a living archive, constantly growing and evolving, where future generations of scholars can not only read about the critical discourses of our time but can see and hear them as they unfolded. We envision our platform being integrated into university curricula, cited in dissertations, and used as a primary source for documentaries, further research, and public education.
Ultimately, our vision is to foster a deeper and more empathetic mode of intellectual engagement. By allowing our audience to witness the human beings behind the ideas, to see the passion in their expressions and hear the conviction in their voices, we aim to cultivate a form of scholarship that is not detached and abstract, but connected and deeply human. We believe that this empathetic connection is not a distraction from rigor but is, in fact, essential to it. Our vision is for a world where academic inquiry is not just an intellectual exercise, but a profound act of witnessing, understanding, and connection.
Our Mission
The Journal of Socio-Cultural Narratives was founded with the explicit mission to champion interdisciplinary scholarship exclusively through an audio-visual format. We are a pioneering peer-reviewed platform dedicated to documenting the unfiltered, unapologetic, and unconventional conversations that occur at the intersections of sexuality, culture, and society. Our primary mission is to execute a direct and sustained challenge to the historical primacy of the written word in academic publishing. We do this by creating, curating, and preserving scholarship that is "born-digital" and "born-audio-visual," treating the artifact not as supplementary material, but as the central text of the scholarly work itself.
To achieve this, our mission is operationalized through a commitment to preserving the integrity of the original intellectual encounter. We operate from the conviction that the most vital insights into human experience—the nuances of tone, the significance of non-verbal cues, the rhythm of dialogue, and the directness of spoken testimony—are invaluable data points that are often flattened, decontextualized, or lost entirely in transcription. Our methodological mission is therefore to act as stewards of these encounters, using high-quality audio-visual documentation to capture and present these conversations in their native format, allowing audiences to engage directly with the primary source in a way that text alone cannot replicate.
A core part of our mission is to actively build a more inclusive and equitable archive of knowledge. We are committed to seeking out and amplifying voices that have been historically underrepresented, marginalized, or entirely absent in traditional academic publishing. This includes, but is not limited to, the work of scholars from the Global South, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC intellectuals, artists, activists, and community experts whose knowledge is often produced outside of the formal academy. Our mission is not to passively wait for submissions, but to proactively engage in the work of finding and documenting these critical perspectives, thereby positioning the journal as an engine for decolonial thought and a platform for radical inquiry.
Finally, our mission extends to the very infrastructure of our journal. We are committed to a model of sustainable, ethical, and independent open-access publishing. This means our platform is built on low-carbon technologies to minimize our environmental impact. It means all our content is freely available without paywalls, ensuring the widest possible access. And it means we operate with complete financial independence, free from commercial or institutional pressures that could compromise our editorial vision. Our mission, therefore, is not just to publish content, but to embody a set of principles that offers a new, more ethical model for what academic publishing can be.