Edinburgh: X Press
A number of monographs from the Whites Writing Whiteness and Olive Schreiner Letters research projects have been published through Edinburgh: X Press, an independent-publishing venture that draws on the facilities of Amazon’s KDP publishing arm and its world-wide sales platform. This operates alongside using established publication channels for other research outputs, including leading international journals. This is part of a research impact strategy designed to use new technologies to develop independent academic publishing and through this produce affordably priced books that are rapidly published and made quickly available. Edinburgh: X Press is committed to selling its books in paperback and a Kindle version at cost price – there are no publishing profits. Consequently, they can be afforded by students and other readers, not only university and college libraries.
Although breaking the mould in these respects, Edinburgh: X Press adheres to well-established scholarly procedures for ensuring quality, with referees commenting in detail on a manuscript and revisions made accordingly. It produces a formatted manuscript for uploading to KDP publishing within weeks of revision and uses the resources of Amazon to make the books available. It publicises its titles using its Lives & Letters mail-list, posts to other lists, and by direct email publicity shots, including to academic journals and their reviews editors.
In addition to existing titles, detailed below, possible future books are on Norbert Elias and ‘travelling theory’, and on letters and auto/biographical theory.
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(2018) Olive Schreiner’s The Dawn of Civilisation & Other Unpublished Wartime Writings .Ed. Liz Stanley, Edinburgh: X Press. Go to https://smile.amazon.co.uk/Olive-Schreiners-Dawn-Civilisation-Unpublished/dp/1980698406/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1527758849&sr=8-4&keywords=liz+stanley
The important feminist writer, theorist and social commentator Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was an ‘absolute pacifist’. Read her on arguing with Lloyd George about the war, ticking off Gandhi for reneging on his principles, planning pacifist activities with Bertrand Russell, helping Fred Pethick-Lawrence join a pacifist group, commiserating with friends about deaths in the trenches and much more. This book publishes for the first time Schreiner’s prescient anti-war manuscripts, never before published in full; her rousing shorter wartime writings; and her engrossing letters with their sharp comments about events, people and organisations.
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(2018) Dorothy Smith, Feminist Sociology and Institutional Ethnography. Liz Stanley, Edinburgh: X Press. Go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dorothy-Feminist-Sociology-Institutional-Ethnography/dp/1973556073/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517491321&sr=8-1&keywords=dorothy+smith
This short introduction to the work of key feminist sociologist and theorist Dorothy E. Smith traces the development of her ideas and thinking across her publications. It provides an accessible guide to her central ideas and concepts, and relatedly shows how these are combined in Smith’s radical project of re-making sociology and the social sciences more generally. Smith’s work and her analysis of texts in particular have influenced the methodological strategies of Whites Writing Whiteness’s regarding letters and their analysis. Dorothy Smith writes: “A fascinating read for me. No biography, no imposed interpretation, but a brilliant discovery of a coherent direction in my work that I could not have fully known myself. I learned from your study and I thank you. Dorothy E. Smith”
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(2017) The Racialising Process: Whites Writing Whiteness in Letters, South Africa 1770s-1970s. Liz Stanley, Edinburgh: X Press. Go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/Racialising-Process-Writing-Whiteness-1770s-1970s/dp/1521403643/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1498211823&sr=8-1&keywords=racialising+process
The Racialising Process explores how white people from the 1770s to the 1970s in South Africa depicted whiteness and its racialised Others of black, coloured, Indian Chinese and other groups, focusing on their letters. It discusses many detailed examples drawn from a wide array of letters and explores the complexities in what people wrote and how to interpret this. It shows that there has been a long term racialising process with distinctive features organised around regulation and categorisation, making the South African experience significantly different from the ‘de/civilising process’ that the sociologist Norbert Elias identified in Europe.
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Last updated: 1 November 2018
