The series has distinctive theoretical goals, as signaled by its title. Following the so-called “cultural turn,” the study of culture became a major preoccupation of nearly all disciplines in the social sciences – with the major exception of economics – and has given rise to the fledgling discipline, or quasi-discipline, of cultural studies. We adopt a rigorous interdisciplinary theoretical perspective, designated by our use of the terms “practice” and “meaning” rather than “culture,” as the latter has been used so promiscuously over the past two decades in both academic and popular discourse as to proliferate a host of unacknowledged ambiguities.

Our editors, who come from four different fields of social science—Anthropology (William Mazzarella and Kaushik Sunder Rajan), Sociology (Andreas Glaeser), History (William H. Sewell Jr.), and Political Science (Lisa Wedeen)—are interested in the widest possible range of practices of meaning – in ritual, political theory, work, urban design, religion, shopping, social movements, music, economic exchange, science, leisure, kinship – which is to say, any arena or aspect of human life in which meanings are made. 3CT solicits distinguished scholarly manuscripts that share our methodological and epistemological commitments to innovation in interpretive social science, to probing interdisciplinary contact, and to work combining rigorous theoretical reflection with empirically rich accounts of local experience.