Editorial for IFJP Issue 22.1
By: Brooke A. Ackerly, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Meenashi Gopinath, Marysia Zalewski
We end our editorial for issue 22.1, “Feminism+Knowledge+Politics,” by asking the question: “What are the key contours of feminist knowledge production to you?”
Our editorial team’s first IFJP conference (San Francisco, 2018) focused on the politics of knowledge, knowledge production, and feminisms’ roles in these. The conversations were rich and engaging. In Issue 22.1 we see both the fruits and extensions of those conversations.
There is a broad range of editorial activity that we engage in that is outside of the narrow purview of soliciting articles and reviews. That larger process has enabled us to scrutinize our own certitudes and to be individually and collectively more attentive and permeable to alternative, less familiar, and more unconventional methods of reasoning, interpretation, and even syntax. We have also strived to take on the challenges of making connections among the universes of policy, activism, and scholarship.
As aspiring editors in 2017, we set out our mission. While the heart of that mission remains the same, as we have worked together for two years, and Meenakshi Gopinath transitions off and Krishna Menon transitions on, it seems a good time to revisit and recommit to while revising our collective commitments:
During our editorial tenure, we aim to continue to cultivate the role of the International Feminist Journal of Politics as the leading global source of cutting-edge feminist research on international politics. The editorial leadership team strives to develop a journal whose pages, authors, and readership reflect the full spectrum of scholarly engagement with issues of feminist international politics around the world. We provide a platform for voices from the field that have not found genuinely democratic spaces for expression and engagement. We welcome and work with diversity and difference as sources of strength. Colleagues and students who participate in the editorial endeavor and processes will enjoy opportunities to learn and contribute. By networking through complementary digital media, we intend to foster wider conversations around the scholarship published in the journal’s pages, and to extend its impact. Finally, we plan to practice editorial leadership in a way that cultivates broad editorial leadership capacity. We hope that members of our editorial team will participate richly across roles and that some may propose an editorial team of their own in the future.
As you read Issue 22.1 and consider the contours of feminisms, the politics of knowledge, and politics, we hope that you will join us online and on social media to keep this conversation rich and engaging. To facilitate this, we are delighted to make the Conversations section and two articles free access for the first six months of their publication.