Conversations editorial

We are so delighted to join the editorial team as the new Conversations Editors. Sara Shroff is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies and Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Lahore, Pakistan. Meghana Nayak is Professor of Political Science and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at Pace University, New York City, USA. We are grateful for the work and guidance of the previous Conversations Editors, Catia Confortini and Natália Maria Félix de Souza, as well as for the vision of the new editorial team, shine choi, Natália Maria Félix de Souza, Amy Lind, Swati Parashar, Elisabeth Prügl, and Marysia Zalewski.

We are excited about this new position in part because the Conversations section of the journal has shaped our own work and professional trajectories over the years. For example, Meghana cites the Conversations pieces in her 2009 IFJP essay about the positive impact of the journal when she was a junior faculty member. She also curated a “Student Meets Author” Conversations section in Issue 21.4 (2019), learning first-hand about the Conversations Editors’ processes and sharing the dynamics of feminist publishing with her student co-authors. Any meaningful work that she has done or plans to do would be impossible without the IFJP community/ies.

Sara drew upon Conversations pieces as a source of inspiration for her own forthcoming critical conversation on feminist peace, conflict, and accountability with Nour Abu-Assab and Mahdis Azarmandi in an anthology, Conversations on Feminist Peace. She also offers a sacred shoutout to Lily Ling, who first brought the journal to her attention as a graduate student and without whose guidance she would not have been introduced to the fields of postcolonial/decolonial/feminist/queer international relations (IR) and to many of you. For Sara, Lily embodied what the Conversations section of the journal aspires to do, which is to have difficult, necessary, and urgent conversations across genres, geographies, and differently situated geopolitics.

We know each other professionally and personally; we are friends and comrades, which makes co-editing all the more delightful. We met when Sara was hired to teach Peace and Justice Studies courses, a program that is housed in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Pace University. We went on to present on a panel hosted by Lily Ling and Cynthia Weber about Weber’s book Queer International Relations. We have also had numerous conversations about feminist IR theory, and the politics of being brown South Asian women and feminist scholars in the academy. We have discussed our relevant experiences, such as Meghana’s publications in and service to IFJP, and Sara’s tenure as Fellow at the Center for Sexual Diversity Studies at University of Toronto and as an executive committee member of Queer Asia, which includes working with researchers, students, artists, community leaders, and activists transnationally on critical, intersectional dialogues.

We have generated several ideas for developing the Conversations section, to build upon the phenomenal work of Catia and Natália. We would like future sections to live up to the mission of the new editorial team, particularly by including the work of contributors who are wary of academia and academic journals. We want conversations with the misfits, the ones who feel like imposters, the ones who know some secrets about academia; we wish to excavate these tensions with imagination, joy, anger, and possibility.

Consequently, while we remain receptive to a wide range of contributions to the Conversations section, we would like to invite three specific types of submission: reparative conversations, pedagogical experiments, and coalitional thinking. Reparative conversations would address how contributors have felt harmed, misunderstood, or belittled by the peer review process specifically or within “feminist” publishing and feminist academic spaces generally, whether IFJP or other sites, even when “good” things happen, such as getting published or being mentored. Pedagogical experiments would address teaching and the politics of knowledge production, such as with the aforementioned “Student Meets Author” pieces. Other examples could include discussing students’ projects, zines, and art inspired by transnational feminist academics, such as Saara Särmä’s work on feminist/queer collaging, or conversations between junior faculty and graduate students about teaching. Submissions addressing coalitional thinking would involve dialogues with emerging “survivor” leaders, as they build upon their experiences with gender and sexual violence to strengthen and innovate global coalitional work that confronts such violence. Examples may include the recent partnership of me too. International and Global Fund for Women, and transnational solidarities between Afro-descendant, Dalit, and Indigenous communities. We are also interested in conversations with sex worker activists who have been sidelined by anti-trafficking organizations, and explorations of collaborations between academics and activists to better analyze feminist policy making.

Crucially, we commit to continuing the Conversations section’s legacy of experimenting with genres, exploring praxis, and talking together. As noted earlier, the following Conversations piece is part of this Special Issue. Please refer to the Special Issue Editors’ Introduction for further context.

Thank you for the honor of serving as Conversations Editors, and we look forward to hearing your ideas!

The Conversations section is an innovative intervention by IFJP which aims to offer space and opportunity to make strong theoretical and practical contributions to feminist debates that do not necessarily take standard academic forms. It may include interviews with prominent or early-career scholars, practitioners, and activists; narratives and short stories; photo essays, artistic pieces, and poetry; film readings; conference reports; and other “non-traditional” modes of scholarly writing.

Interested authors should submit their articles via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rfjp. Please also upload a biographical note and five keywords. Make sure to edit it thoroughly for language and clarity, format it to correspond to the Taylor & Francis guidelines, and identify it as a submission for the Conversations section.

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at: https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_conversations_shortcut.

Inquiries should be directed to both Conversations Editors.