About SiRO

SiRO (Studies in Radicalism Online) is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of resources for the study of radicalism and the digital research environment. The activities of this effort are driven by three primary goals:

  • to provide a virtual community for those engaged in the study of radicalism and
  • to meet emerging needs of this community, including making recommendations on technological and scholarly standards for electronic scholarship, the aggregation of data, and the ability to discover and repurpose this data, and
  • to aggregate resources (both primary and secondary) relevant to radicalism studies.

To these ends SiRO has created partnerships between the Michigan State University Libraries, the Journal for the Study of Radicalism (MSU Press), and ARC (the Advanced Research Consortium: http://idhmc.tamu.edu/arcgrant/). For more on ARC see the article from Scholarly and Research Communication: http://src-online.ca/index.php/src/article/view/189 . Over time SiRO hopes to vet and publish born-digital projects through peer review, aggregate top-quality digital objects, and to generally create a community through which the study of radicalism moves scholarship forward in these areas.

The Journal for the Study of Radicalism engages in serious, scholarly exploration of the forms, representations, meanings, and historical influences of radical social movements. With sensitivity and openness to historical and cultural contexts of the term, we loosely define “radical,” as distinguished from “reformers,” to mean groups who seek revolutionary alternatives to hegemonic social and political institutions, and who use violent or non-violent means to resist authority and to bring about change. The journal is eclectic, without dogma or strict political agenda, and ranges broadly across social and political groups worldwide, whether typically defined as “left” or “right.” We expect contributors to come from a wide range of fields and disciplines, including ethnography, sociology, political science, literature, history, philosophy, critical media studies, literary studies, religious studies, psychology, women’s studies, and critical race studies. We especially welcome articles that reconceptualize definitions and theories of radicalism, feature underrepresented radical groups, and introduce new topics and methods of study.