Ishtar Press. An independent academic publisher of impactful and progressive books and innovative journals.

What we publish

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Ishtar Press publishes scholarly books and peer-reviewed journals in the social sciences and humanities. We are organised around the global challenges that define our moment, and around the future-facing scholarship that helps us understand and respond to them. Our editorial focus areas include:

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• Global inequalities, justice, and the futures of equality, diversity, and inclusion

• Work, organisations, and the changing conditions of human labour

• Decolonial and postcolonial scholarship, including translations and dialogues across traditions

• Critical futures: emerging social theory, technological transformation, and the futures of institutional power

• Identity, intersectionality, and the politics of recognition

• Ethics, meaning, and the human dimensions of contemporary life

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Plurilingual, plurimethod, transdisciplinary

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These three commitments shape how we work.

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Plurilingual.

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We publish in English, but we do not assume English. We commission translations, we welcome work that draws on scholarly traditions written in other languages, and we treat the dominance of Anglophone academic publishing as a problem to be addressed rather than a default to be accepted. Our authors and editors come from linguistic communities across the world, and our books carry their thinking.

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Plurimethod.

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We are not committed to any single methodological tradition. We publish quantitative, qualitative, theoretical, historical, interpretive, comparative, and mixed-method work. We believe methodological pluralism is a strength, and we ask our peer reviewers to engage with the methods authors actually use rather than the methods reviewers happen to prefer.

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Transdisciplinary.

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The questions that matter most do not respect disciplinary boundaries. We publish work that crosses, combines, and exceeds the disciplines of the modern university, and we are particularly interested in scholarship that brings traditions into conversation that academic structures have kept apart.

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How we are different

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Academic publishing has narrowed. A handful of corporate conglomerates dominate the field, and the books and journals they publish increasingly reflect commercial conformity rather than intellectual ambition. Independent academic presses exist to do what large publishers will not: take risks on important work, publish scholars who challenge established assumptions, and produce books and journals as objects of care rather than as units of output.

Ishtar Press is one of those independent presses. We are small by design. We choose what to publish on the basis of intellectual merit and public value. We work closely with our authors. We treat peer review as a craft. And we believe a publisher's catalogue should reflect what matters now, not what sold last year.

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Our name

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Ishtar is one of the oldest recorded deities in human history, a Mesopotamian goddess of love, war, justice, and transformation. Her story, the descent into the underworld and the return, is among the earliest recorded narratives of crossing thresholds and bringing back knowledge. We chose her name because she predates the Greco-Roman canon that has dominated Western intellectual branding, because she represents power held by figures often written out of history, and because her name signals a press willing to look beyond the obvious for its sources of wisdom.

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Our values

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These commitments guide our editorial decisions:

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• Scholarly integrity. We publish nothing that has not been independently peer-reviewed. We do not engage in pay-to-publish models that compromise editorial standards.

• Equity in practice. Our editorial boards, peer reviewers, and author lists reflect the diversity of the global scholarly community. We actively seek work from scholars in the Global South, early-career researchers, and others underrepresented in academic publishing.

• Linguistic justice. We treat the dominance of English in academic publishing as a problem, not a given. We commission translations, support multilingual scholarship, and edit with care for authors writing in second or third languages.

• Methodological pluralism. We publish across the full range of social science and humanities methods, and ask our reviewers to engage with the work on its own terms.

• Decolonial sensibility. We treat questions about whose knowledge counts, in which languages, and through which institutions, as central to what academic publishing is for.

• Craft and care. Every book is designed, copy-edited, and produced with attention. Books are objects, not just files, and we make ours well.