The presentation will introduce the “journal as method,” an approach developed with Koni Benson and Mahvish Ahmad as part of the Revolutionary Papers collective. By this we mean approaching the journal as a social object—embedded in the relationships, contributions, conversations, and collective labors that brought it into being—rather than as a static archive of individually authored texts. I will discuss ways in which scholars can shift our attention from focusing on isolated articles to the processes, conversations, and political commitments that shaped the journal’s form and life. The method approaches anticolonial journals were not just as containers of information, but as active, processual tools of worldmaking. Produced by many hands—writers, editors, printers, distributors—these publications generated thought and culture in the midst of struggle, forged counterhegemonic ideas and aesthetics, and created spaces for collective creation and debate. In centering these collaborative dynamics, we work to interrupt the binary between “primary” and “secondary” sources, push back against the primacy of individual authorship, and reframe periodicals as living institutions of thought whose practices remain relevant to how anticolonialism can be studied and practiced today.

Dr. Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Global South and Middle Eastern Literatures at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialization in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. Her upcoming book, Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print (EUP, 2026), reconstructs a history of anticolonial Palestinian and Jewish literary and cultural collaborations from the 1950s to the present. Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research collaboration on 20th-century anticolonial and anti-imperial periodicals (https://revolutionarypapers.org/). She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, and cultures destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence. Her recent articles appear in Journal of Levantine Studies, Modernism/modernity, and Radical History Review. More information at https://www.hanamorgenstern.org/.