Welcome to the first issue of the Review for 2020. We hope that you find the various parts of this issue of interest and we look forward to sharing other issues of the Review with you later on in the year. We have included a number of substantive review papers, discussion papers and regular book reviews in this issue.
The first contribution by Paul Spickard, is an obituary Mudrooroo, an important Aboriginal writer and culture figure in Australia. As the obituary notes, he was an important writer and commentator and his writing addressed important issues about Aboriginal identity and culture.
We have also included three substantive review papers in this issue of the Review. The first paper, by Alice Bloch, is focused on the development and expansion of refugee studies as a field of scholarship and research. Bloch’s paper provides an overview of the key dynamics that have helped to shape research agendas in this field, and it also engages with the evolution of policy agendas in the contemporary environment. Given the importance of current controversies about refugees in various parts of the globe Bloch’s paper provides a helpful overview of recent scholarship as well as suggesting avenues for future investigation.
This is followed by Heather O’Connell’s exploration of the location of monuments commemorating the Confederacy in the US South. O’Connell’s account draws on a data set of Confederate monuments located in public spaces in the US South, and it seeks to utilize the data in order to situate the importance of the monuments from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Given the role of recent controversies about the role of monuments in memorializing the legacies of both slavery and colonialism the issues touched upon by O’Connell’s paper will be of interest to a wide range of our readers.
The final substantive paper in this issue, by Emma Gonzalez-Lesser, provides a detailed exploration of the place of Jewishness within scholarly research on race, ethnicity and religion. Gonzalez-Lesser argues that there is a need to fundamentally rethink how Jewishness is considered in current research agendas. In developing her account, she argues that it is important to address the conceptual limitations of existing accounts of Jewishness within dominant sociological accounts.
In developing the Review one of our key concerns was to provide a space for more debate about key issues that we have addressed in the journal. In this issue, we included debate pieces focused on issues that we have covered in previous issues of the journal. In a previous issue of the Review (39:13, 2016) we included a symposium on Jennifer Lee and Mi Zhou’s book on The Asian American Achievement Paradox. In this issue, we continue this conversation by including a critical commentary by Suzanne Model, followed by a response from Lee and Zhou. More recently, we carried a paper by Van C. Tran, Jennifer lee and Tiffany Huang that seeks to reassess the question of Asian second-generation advantage (42: 13, 2019). In addition to the original paper we included an exchange between the authors and L. J. Zigerell on both substantive and methodological issues. In this issue we carry a further critical response to this paper by Arthur Sakamoto and Li Hsu.
We conclude this issue of the Review with a wide range of regular book reviews that cover some of the most important recent books in the field.