Abstract
This new year will bring important changes. It is the 20th year of the modest journal launched with so much care and creativity by Paul Willis and Mats Trondman, our founding editors. It is wonderful that it has been faring so well for 20 years now, developing a profile of its own in the field of social sciences. We have played with the idea of turning this year already into a jubilee, but we hope soon to reach our 25th year. Too many jubilees means inflation, so we are aiming for a proper 25th-year celebration.
After 20 years, however, we must work for the continuing rejuvenation of the journal. One step in this is the promotion of Robert Davidson to managing editor, in line with his increasingly prodigious contributions to the running of the journal. Editorial assistant is too humble a title for all the work he does.
The next step in this is the introduction of Dr Francio Guadeloupe as editor. Francio will serve as editor for anthropology. There will be an intermezzo for one year when he will serve as editor together with Peter Geschiere. Then, in early 2021 both Paul Willis and Peter Geschiere will step down and a rejuvenated team – Sarah Bracke, Francio Guadeloupe, and Robert Davidson – will take things over.
For most anthropologists, Francio Guadeloupe will need little introduction. Raised in the Caribbean (roots in the Dutch, French, English, and Spanish Caribbean) he came to the Netherlands at age 18, combining singing in a band and positions as a social worker in various parts of the Netherlands with the study of anthropology at what was then called the Catholic University of Nijmegen. His PhD was published by the University of California Press under the title Chanting down the new Jerusalem: Calypso, Christianity, and capitalism in the Caribbean. He published widely – both in academic journals and outside the walls of the academy – about the continuing impact of colonial racism and global capital on present-day popular understandings of national and religious belonging, cultural diversity, and mass-media constructions of the truth. His new book, forthcoming with Mississippi University Press, is called So How Does it Feel to be a Black Man in the Netherlands? An Anthropological Account. Next to his position in anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, he served recently as President of the University of St. Martin (2013–2017), surviving the Irma hurricane disaster, and he will soon take up a part-time position at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. We are very happy that Francio could join the team, and we are certain that he will bring new ideas to the journal.
In other respects, we continue along the lines established by our founding editors – notably the accent on ‘theoretically-informed ethnography’. Our citation index continues to be most satisfactory, and the increasing numbers of submission we receive from all over the globe indicate the continuing relevance of our orientation. More recently we started an ongoing debate in the journal on the special problems for qualitative research posed by the increasing pressures of making research data publicly accessible (see editorial 2017, Vol. 18, No. 3). This volume also includes a contribution on that theme. We invite authors to join this debate, as it is one of the topics that will concern all qualitative researchers in the social sciences in the near future.
Another recent issue is the demand for open access of all published articles. We follow with due critical interest the push towards open access by Coalition S, a platform of European national research funding organizations, supported by the European Commission and the European Research Council, as well as the policies SAGE, our publisher, is developing in this context. We share many of the concerns that inspired Coalition S, yet we also want to push back against the new inequalities established by the so-called Author Processing Charges. We believe the current academic publishing model can and should be changed in more inclusive and participatory ways, in which access is more open to readers, without however making the authors pay for the costs of publishing and arranging peer review.
These topics promise to rock the publishing world in the near future. We will do our best to steer our boat as sanely as possible through all of this.