About the Journal

Critical Gambling Studies is an international journal established in 2019 to publish disciplinary and interdisciplinary research on gambling.  It aims to address urgent questions raised by the social, technological, legal, and cultural entanglements of contemporary gambling.

The open access, double-blind peer-reviewed journal is published bi-annually.

We are open to different theoretical frameworks and methodological traditions, including: phenomenology; ethnography; meta-analysis and big data analytics; Black studies, critical race and Indigenous studies; critical disability studies, science and technology studies (STS), conjunctural analysis; experimental studies; survey methods; fieldwork; semiotic analysis; psychoanalysis; political economy; narrative analysis; statistical analysis and quantitative methods; and archival research.

We welcome original research and writing from researchers working in disciplines including: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, sociology, politics, criminology, information science, aesthetics, history, economics, literature, theology, art history, architecture, tourism and leisure studies, public health, and law. We are also keen to consider interdisciplinary approaches to gambling research within an activist tradition.  Our focus is primarily on original research in the humanities and social sciences (including law and policy studies), but we welcome accessible and critical work in medicine, life sciences, environmental sciences, and other disciplines. While we warmly welcome critical and original work on gambling addictions, including that which interrogates concepts and measures of disordered or pathological gambling, we are keen to move beyond addiction research as the primary focus of gambling studies.

Questions addressed by our authors include:

• How do subcultures emerge from, produce, and sustain gambling in everyday life?
• What questions are emerging from the growing relationship between gambling and videogaming?
• How is gambling entangled within the global sport, esport, media, and entertainment industries?
• How does gambling make and unmake social identities?
• How are gambling products, promotion, and regulation shaped by surveillance associated with big data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
• Where do financial and recreational activities end, and where does gambling begin? How and why are the boundaries shifting, and with what effects?
• What can we learn from gambling ‘scandals’ in, and across, different jurisdictions?
• What can we learn from gambling iconography, architecture, and spaces? What do the aesthetic dimensions of gambling add to our debates about visual culture, and digital humanities?
• What ethical dilemmas does commercial gambling pose for providers, regulators, researchers, consumers and health professionals? What explains shifts in regulatory approach?
• How do the politics of feminism, post-feminism, queer and trans theory shape existing and emerging arguments about gambling and gender?
• What is the genealogy of terms used to regulate gamblers such as ‘addiction’, ‘disorder’, ‘responsibility’, ‘freedom’ and ‘enjoyment’?
• What do gambling’s histories tell us about its current configurations?
• How do historical and ongoing sovereignty struggles in settler-occupied nations shape cultural representations of, and academic research on, Indigenous gambling?
• What is gambling's role in sustaining and disrupting biopolitical formations of race and whiteness in different national and transnational contexts?
• What kind of subjective states and moments are unique to the gambling experience?
• How can critical disability studies provide a new lens for understanding gambling?
• How do we critically explore the multi-faceted impacts of COVID-19 on gambling spaces, without entrenching the pathologisation of play?
• How does gambling shape national and transnational popular cultures?
• How is gambling valued or sanctioned in different religious practices and theological doctrines?
• How are places and spaces of gambling linked to the political economy of villages, towns, cities, regions and nations?
• What are the roles of human and non-human actants in gambling assemblages?
• What can we learn about governmentality, or biopolitics, from the governance of gambling?
• How does gambling studies function as a sub-discipline, and what can greater reflexivity about its epistemology and methods offer the field?

The Editors welcome proposals for special issues on current themes within gambling studies.

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