Our three-year tenure as NORA editors is coming to an end with this issue. Since the autumn of 2015 we have processed 250 contributions and published 48 peer-reviewed articles, 12 position papers, 19 book reviews, and two review essays. Unsurprisingly, most of the peer-reviewed articles originate in the Nordic countries—13 are from Sweden, 11 from Norway, 9 from Finland, 8 from Denmark, and 4 from Iceland. Together they provide a measure of Nordic feminist and gender research today, and we feel privileged to have participated in making this research both visible and available internationally.
Before leaving the journal to the new Finnish editorial team, we would like to use this opportunity to take stock. Did we manage to broaden the disciplinary scope of the journal, as we had hoped, and did contributors take account of our expressed ambition to make research accessible to a diverse academic readership? Although contributions from the social sciences still dominate, the first question may be answered in the positive. Fourteen of the 48 peer-reviewed articles we have published can be categorized as humanist, and most of them have dealt in one way or another with literature or visual media. Six of the articles on literature were published in our special issue on “Gender in Literary Exchange” (issue 4, 2017), a sign that such promotional efforts may pay off. In addition, we were pleased to publish articles by researchers in interdisciplinary fields such as gender studies and indigenous studies. Yet articles written by humanities scholars constitute only about a quarter of the published contributions. Moreover, although we regarded the publication (in issue 2, 2017) of an article from the health and caring sciences as a milestone, it was not followed by others. We would also have welcomed more contributions from history and legal studies.
To answer to the second question is more difficult. NORA is a multi-disciplinary journal, but—with some laudable exceptions—we do not think the contributions communicate well enough beyond the author’s (or authors’) disciplines. Perhaps that is due to the exigencies of present-day neoliberal academia, in which merit is assessed on the basis of specialized disciplinary criteria rather than cross-disciplinary readability. In this highly competitive environment, it may be difficult, if not impossible—even for feminist scholars—to think and write outside of disciplinary boxes. If so, it is a development we can only regret.
Like our Danish predecessors, we have initiated a NORA conference on Nordic feminist and gender research. Thanks in large part to the efforts of Hilde Danielsen, chair of NORA’s editorial board, this will now materialize. Titled “Border Regimes, Territorial Discourses & Feminist Politics”, it will take place in Reykjavik, Iceland, on 22–24 May 2019 (for more information, see https://conference.hi.is/nora/about/). The conference is sponsored by the Icelandic Ministry of Welfare and NIKK (the Nordic Council of Ministers’ gender equality fund), and will be co-hosted by RIKK (Institute for Gender, Equality and Difference), the EDDA Research Centre, and the United Nations University Gender Studies and Training Programme at the University of Iceland. We wish the organizers, hosts, and participants best of luck!
As NORA editors we have accumulated debts of gratitude over the past three years. Firstly, we want to thank our conscientious and indispensable editorial secretary, Elisabet Rogg, our vigilant book editor, Siri Øyslebø Sørensen, and our two insightful guest editors, Anne Birgitte Rønning (issue 4, 2017) and Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen (issue 4, 2018). Thanks also to our junior editors, Amund Rake Hoffart, Solveig Laugerud, Reinert Skumnes, and Anna Young, particularly for establishing and maintaining our Facebook Page (see https://www.facebook.com/norajournal/). The staff at our publisher, Taylor & Francis, have been unfailingly helpful and professional, even when we had problems meeting the submission deadlines. We are particularly grateful to Michelle Peters, Calum Petrie, Josie Brown, Simon Smith, Helen Talbot, and Therese Franzén. As many of our contributors have confirmed, our excellent linguistic editor, Liz Sourbut, has been vitally important for the quality of the work we have published. Throughout our editorial period we have received generous support from our home institutions—the Centre from Gender Research at the University of Oslo and the Centre for Women’s and Gender Research at UiT The Arctic University of Norway—and been encouraged by the enthusiasm and involvement of the two centre leaders, Anne-Jorunn Berg and Ann Therese Lotherington.
Editing NORA has been demanding and time-consuming but also occasionally exhilarating. We do not regret taking on the responsibility three years ago. At that time, the effort to find a Norwegian editorial team had developed into a thriller that was only resolved when it became a question of the journal’s survival. A similar situation unfortunately unfolded during the search for a new editorial team. Fortunately, however, Paula Koskinen Sandberg, Tiina Suopajärvi, and Rebecca Lund at the University of Tampere eventually accepted the challenge, and we feel certain that the journal will be in capable hands.
Last but not least, it goes without saying that NORA, like other academic journals, is dependent on the continued support of good peer reviewers—listed at the end of this issue—as well as of readers and writers. Thank you all.