Vicennium: looking back before moving forward

ABSTRACT

In this outgoing editorial for the 20th Anniversary volume of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Robin M. Boylorn reflects on her editorship using the lens and metaphor of an archivist and an architect.

KEYWORDS:

• 20th anniversary
• historicity
• retroactive storytelling
• culture
• critical studies

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my editorial assistants, LaTonya J. Taylor (volumes 19 and 20) and Cassidy Ellis (volumes 20 and 21), whose work ethic and reliability made them amazing collaborators. Thank you, both, for lending your organizational skills, copyediting eyes, and intellectual curiosities to this project. I also want to express extreme gratitude to Henry Giroux for contributing his brilliant and concise cultural commentary and analysis for the anniversary spotlight article (Henry, it was an honor to celebrate and work with you!). To the guest editors for this volume, Bob Ivie (“looking back”) and Eric King Watts (“moving forward”), thank you for moderating important conversations and for modeling ethical scholarship. Bob, it is an honor to continue what you started as the journal's first editor. Watts, to say I admire and appreciate you would be an understatement. I also want express appreciation to the Editors' Collective who cross-published our statement of solidarity and support for Ahlam Muhtaseb, and to every editor of CC/CS who preceded me, and all of those who will follow me, most especially Marina Levina, the next editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies. Finally, I thank all of the authors who published in my issues, the T&F Journal Editorial Office team (especially Melissa and Rema), and last but not least I extend immense gratitude to my editorial board members, third reviewers, and ad hoc reviewers whose generous and generative feedback was instrumental to my editorship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Stuart Hall, "The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism Among the Theorists," in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 69-70.

2 Robert L. Ivie, “What Are We About?” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 125–26.

3 Bill Chappell, “Supreme Court Declares Same-Sex Marriage Legal in All 50 States,” NPR, June 26, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/26/417717613/supreme-court-rules-all-states-must-allow-same-sex-marriages.

4 Chris Stokel-Walker, “Why has Facebook Changed Its Name to Meta and What is the Metaverse?,” New Scientist, October 29, 2021, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2295438-why-has-facebook-changed-its-name-to-meta-andwhat-is-the-metaverse/#:∼:text=The%20name%20was%20chosen%20to,%E2%80%9CIn%20this%E2%80%A6.

5 Philip Elliott, “The Supreme Court Just Made Same-Sex Marriage More Vulnerable to a Challenge,” Time, June 30, 2023, https://time.com/6291641/supreme-court-same-sex-marriage-vulnerable/.

6 Robin M. Boylorn, “How to be a (Black Woman) Journal Editor during a Pandemic: An Introduction to an Inaugural Issue,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, no. 1 (2022): 1–4.

7 Armond R. Towns, “'Communication Hesitant': An Introduction,” Communication and Race 1, no 1 (2024): 1–11.