As we celebrate our fifth year anniversary, we make a departure from our existing practice to publish our first ever non-themed journal. Interestingly, despite every CFP stating that we always are open to non-themed contributions, we frequently receive questions about this so we thought a general issue might help highlight the issue once and for all: we are always open to contributions on any social movement related subject even if we issue themed calls for papers.
Normally, our editorials are jointly written by the editors who have taken the lead on designing the theme of the issue and writing the original call for papers. They are somewhat unusual for journal editorials in that they attempt to be a sort of state of the art on the theme under discussion in the issue, from the perspectives of the editors coordinating the issue. They often involve intense debate, dialogues and compromises between a diverse range of positions before finally coalescing in what we hope are more or less coherent position papers. They take a lot of work and we hope they are in themselves important contributions (the fact that they do get cited and reprinted gives us some basis for this hope).
This issue, however, we are doing something completely different in that we are simply individually reflecting on our experience with the journal since its inception, and offering those reflections in a very loosely edited fashion for any of our readers who might be interested in knowing more about how the Interface project began and where we would like it to go from here. For those of you who simply want to get on to what is in store for you in this issue, you can skip the trip down memory lane, and jump straight to the section titled “In this issue”.
And now for something completely different.....