Isogloss Workshop is an annual event initiated by Isogloss Collective, a New York-based critical writing and independent publishing group, and co-organized by Accent Society. From January 3 to February 22, 2025, the 2025 Isogloss Workshop took place over 16 courses, using Chinese as the main language. Isogloss Workshop is an annual event initiated by Isogloss Collective, a New York-based critical writing and independent publishing group, and co-organized by Accent Society. From January 3 to February 22, 2025, the 2025 Isogloss Workshop took place over 16 courses, using Chinese as the main language.
You can teach what you want to learn.
Bernard Tschumi, commenting on Peter Cook's speech at GSAPP, Columbia University, on February 27, 2017.
Organizing Format
This is a mutual learning workshop, which regards all participants as learners, and is committed to breaking the boundary and distance between teaching and learning––and achieving knowledge production and sharing through speech, discussion, and interactive questions-and-answers with equal opportunity. The workshop will recruit around 40 fulltime participants as research fellows, and will be divided into four groups to carry out research and present at the suggestion of the research advisors. There are an unlimited number of workshop participants, and there are no assignments, but you are welcome to participate in the discussion.
The fee will be used to pay the remuneration for 7 speakers, 12 reviewers, 12 groups of sharers and 4 groups of research advisors (the ratio of the total number to the research fellows is close to 1:1), and the rest will be used in the author remuneration fund for the upcoming Isogloss Review.
Introduction
Watch past class recordings here
Course Facilitators
Community Building
Media sponsors for the Workshop include ARTDBL (Shenzhen), China Books Review (New York) and Cultbytes (New York). Reviews written by research fellows will be published by the above media and in the Isogloss Review.
Research fellows will be granted membership into Isogloss Commune, which covers a wider range of people than the core Isogloss Collective. They will not only be able to join the WeChat group of the learning community to share research and learning resources, but can also browse all ZOOM recording archives of the workshop, and enjoy the benefits of future community activities including other mutual learning programs. Research fellows who have performed well in review writing and group studies will be accepted as members of the Isogloss Collective and as contributors of the Isogloss Review.
The Isogloss Review relies on communal efforts rather than commercial investment for its founding and growth. Members of the Isogloss Commune are welcome to support the Isogloss Review through a “pay as you wish” model.
Magazine, an English word, originates from the Arabic makhzan, and originally meant "warehouse." The term appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine in London in 1731, where it was used for the first time to refer to regular continuous printed matter containing various content. The first magazine in the world appeared at an earlier time, but was called a “journal”––the literary and scientific journal Le Journal des sçavans, founded by French writer and jurist Denis de Sallo in 1665. As such, it can be said that magazines have existed in human history for less than 400 years. As a medium for expressing ideas, spreading information, and uniting communities, magazines can still be classified as something modern. Even after new media emerged, and people have increasingly begun to worry about "the end of print," the time has not yet arrived to discuss "extinction."The magazines published all over the world over the past 300 years are many, but the Isogloss Workshop only focuses on the independent magazines that are outside the large media industry. They have usually been initiated by individuals or small groups. Out of minority interests and concerns, they pay attention to style, are distributed independently, have a small circulation, and even have very short lifecycles. However, they are effective media for uniting peers and building communities, and some have become important carriers, impetus for schools in literature, art, and thought. Some of them were the outgrowths of blocked publishing channels, while others were creative experiments and spaces for speech begun in a different ways than usual in the staid commercial publishing environment. Even if their field of vision was limited to small, unpopular fields, what they accomplished in the history of world publishing has remained inexhaustible.
[1] Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, Volume 1, 1741-1850 (Harvard University Press, 1930), 6.
[2] In the 1990s, David Carson, the designer of Ray Gun magazine—one of the most visually radical publications of the decade—titled his first monograph, created in collaboration with design critic Lewis Blackwell, The End of Print (Chronicle Books, 1995).
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