Abstract
The ‘Feminist Futures’ series (Issues 135 and 136) marks the beginning of a new direction for Feminist Review, reflecting our priority to generate and be part of a dialogue between the ‘past’ of where we have been and the ‘future’ in the making, a shared one amongst us. Since new members joined in September 2021, the FR collective has been reimagining how to centre care in editorial practice: for us, authors, reviewers and readers. This includes being more intentional in foregrounding the forms, methods and experiments we wish to invite and see published in the journal.
The Feminist Futures call for papers asked: ‘What are the “feminist futures” we are seeking to collectively build, and what strategies, activisms, methodologies and epistemologies might guide us there?’. In response, we had the privilege of receiving an unprecedented number of richly creative and deeply reflective contributions. It became apparent that the knowledge shared so generously with us should extend across two issues, representing multiple forms of thinking, methods, creativities and experiments that pursuing this line of inquiry opens up.
‘Dialogues Within’, the first instalment of the two-part Feminist Futures series, features dialogues among different women and non-binary folk coming together in reflection, solidarity, contestation and/or resistance through community building, activism and movements. The diversity of voices challenges normative scholarly approaches, inviting new methodologies, pedagogies and interventions from critically different positions and perspectives. Together, these intergenerational conversations think through legacies of movements and activisms.
This issue features works received through the Feminist Futures call for papers and manuscripts received as unthemed Currents submissions resonating thematically with ‘dialogues’. Inviting some Currents authors to the themed issue attests to the collaborative possibilities engendered by more organic editorial practices. Additionally, we include Open Space pieces created by members of the FR collective as an approach to sustain dialogue between editors, contributors and readers. It is with this spirit of meeting one another in a space of meaningful enquiry that we also share pieces exploring ongoing ‘dialogues within’ the collective over the past two years.
The curation of ‘Feminist Futures I: Dialogues Within’ emerged through animated discussion of connections that different editors made, guided by shared resonances (and productive tensions), rather than adherence to a previously conceived outline of what the issue ‘should be’. One approach also signals many possibilities. We invite you to discover and share the resonances emerging from your exploration of this issue so that we may be in community with ‘other kinds of dreams’ (Jordan, cited in Parmar, 1989; Oparah, 1998) and with one another.