Editor’s Notes

I am excited to be writing my first editor’s notes for this issue of Ethnic Studies Review. I feel honored to have this opportunity and to meet this responsibility. I have been working with the journal for several years, working on building relationships and imagining new possibilities. I am especially pleased to have added some new editorial team members, Jason Magabo Perez and Vineeta Singh. Both are wonderful thought partners and visionaries for the field of Ethnic Studies and for the vital work of community-building, collaboration, and knowledge production. I also want to officially thank and welcome an astounding new advisory board. I encourage our readers to review this impressive list of scholars and leaders who have offered their guidance to the editorial team and the journal.

The new additions signal my intentions to shift the journal toward some new endeavors and approaches. The most important change comes in the form of a sustained effort to broaden the kind of work we publish. Ethnic Studies is a unique field. Born of activism and community empowerment, we want to continue that legacy by expanding the types of work being published. We will continue with peer-reviewed research and theoretical writings, which will always provide a solid core for this scholarly journal. In addition, we seek to better reflect the other work we are doing in the world; work that needs more recognition and acknowledgement. So, I encourage readers to submit their “other” work of community-building, research encounters, pedagogical interventions, critical interviews, recorded dialogues, artistic creations, and so much more. We want to feature the things that matter to those of us in Ethnic Studies. We want to encourage collaborations and knowledge-sharing. We want to celebrate activist engagements that move us toward freedom and liberation, toward decolonization and radical kinships. We want more student voices. We want to more intentionally consider the links and the divides between higher education and the K–12 system (which is clearly the newest battleground for Ethnic Studies). We need to share more and build better. We must seek ways to highlight the critical conversations already taking place, and to publish them for wider audiences, for bigger and healthier families.

This issue offers a glimpse of those developments, which have been occurring over the last several issues. Here, we offer a more robust set of conversations as a way to illustrate these new directions. We offer one of the first artistic submissions in some time, with a piece by Oakland, California, based artist Robert Liu-Trujillo. “Ethnic Studies in Every School” represents the holistic embrace we hope to foster within the pages of Ethnic Studies Review, as well as signals the extended scope of our intended audiences and mediums. We may just see more from Robert in the near future—stay posted! Past editor Ron Scapp brings us an interview with Lina Abirafeh, who also offers her own commentary, both of which address the role of women in the Arab world. This seems especially poignant given the current crises in Palestine, which is compounded by efforts to mark refusals of Zionism and settler colonialism in Israel as anti-Semitic. Kyle Mays offers us a critical approach to rethinking the categories of Black and Indigenous, which continues his larger work. Ron Reed and Kari Norgaard provide an urgent discussion of fire management practices, in terms of both effectiveness and an Indigenous cultural context. They help us reframe our understanding of fire, reminding us of the nourishing possibilities when we can see that “fire is food” and so much more. We have paired together the important annual report on anti-Asian violence from the Stop AAPI Hate organization, with a discussion from scholar-activist Tamara Nopper who maps out the history of Asian American activism against violence, solidarity movements, as well as the real dangers for this moment of reflection to unintentionally (or sometimes strategically) produce further anti-Black outcomes. In the research article included in this issue, we find a narrative intervention into the unhealthy labor conditions of migrant poultry processors. Geovani Ramírez’s “Chicken Doctors” shares personal and family experiences of creative and impossible efforts to thrive.

We hope this collection of ideas and interventions proves appealing, engaging, and productive to your work and life, your institutional efforts, and your community responsibilities. Let this also serve as an invitation for new ideas, new submissions, and new partnerships.