Carving out a space for intellectual autonomy in dangerous times: Theory and Social Inquiry launches at the Open Library of Humanities

We're thrilled to announce the launch issue of Theory and Social Inquiry has been published at the Open Library of Humanities. 

As we reported in May 2024, Theory and Social Inquiry is the successor of Theory and Society, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Springer Nature that covers theoretical analyses of social processes and phenomena. Theory and Society was founded in 1974 by sociologist Alvin Gouldner with the explicit aim of advancing scholarship devoted to the “critique and renewal” of established traditions of social theory and empirical research. 

In their Editorial Introduction to the launch issue, lead editors Greta R. Krippner (Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan) and Monica Prasad (Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Economic and Political Sociology at Johns Hopkins University) write that:

From inside and outside the academy, the times call for a journal of this kind. As we write these words in July of 2025, Harvard University is negotiating with the Trump administration regarding the “viewpoint diversity” of its faculty. At Harvard and elsewhere, the federal government is imposing unprecedented cuts in research funding that have sent higher education into a tailspin. And just one week ago, the President of the University of Virginia resigned from his position, the latest university leader to be ousted for landing on the wrong side of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” These and other developments reveal the full shape of growing public attacks on scholars, with allegations of “politicization” used to suppress intellectual autonomy. 

The Open Library of Humanities was originally conceived in 2013 as a publishing model that could address inequity by removing paywalls to academic research as well as the payment system imposed on authors by commercial publishers. Whilst the open access movement has increased the availability of research to anyone with an internet connection, it has also exacerbated the entrenched problem of authors from institutions without recourse to health funding allowances being able to submit their work to leading journals.

As Profs. Krippner and Prasad write, however, in 2025 the Open Library of Humanities' task is even more urgent. As scholars, we face unprecedented attacks on the autonomy and integrity of our research - particularly in the United States, where Theory and Social Inquiry is based. Defending this hard-won integrity and autonomy is now an imperative political project. As an international community of scholars supported by an international consortium of university libraries and research councils, the Open Library of Humanities can provide the academic freedom to defend sociologists that research diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) if, as Krippner and Prasad note, "that is where the data lead them." We can allow our authors "to challenge and critique capitalism and the current rulers, or to extol them, or to dream up alternative forms of social organization."

About OLH: The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, diamond open-access publisher of 35 journals based at Birkbeck, University of London. With initial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and subsequent support from Arcadia, a charitable fund, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium rather than any author fee. This funding mechanism enables equitable open access in the humanities disciplines, with charges neither to readers nor authors. 

If you like the work that the Open Library of Humanities is doing, please consider asking your institution to support us financially. We cannot operate without our library members. More details for libraries can be found on our signup page. 

Featured image: Mural Detroit Industry, 1932-33, fresco by Diego Rivera at the North Wall of the interior of Detroit Institute of Arts. Image in the public domain.