Commoning Ethnography is back! Download Volume 5 now from our website.
This issue extends our interests in collaboration, activism, ethnography during the pandemic, and the poetics of ethnography, both conceptual and graphic. It features wonderful articles by Han Tao, Hailing Zhao, and Rachel Douglas-Jones; Amber Adams, Nichelle Barton, Hanna Hochstetler, Maresi Starzmann, Claudia Vallejo-Torres, and their community collaborators; Veronica Miranda; Knut Graw; and Letizia Bonanno, along with a book review by Andreja Phillips.
All our articles are open-access.
Excerpt from the editorial, “On Power and Obligation in Publishing”:
"Welcome to Volume 5 of Commoning Ethnography.
We’ll start with the obvious: this issue was a challenge to produce. It arrives nearly three calendar years after our last issue. This was not our plan. There are myriad reasons for the issue’s untimeliness. Chiefly, these have to do with a quite volatile period in the life of our institution in the long wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as it played out in its own untimely way in Aotearoa. They also have to do with changes in our personal circumstances and shifting personnel on the editorial collective.
Rather than unpack these circumstances, the experience of trying desperately to publish the journal while also keeping up with all the other things in life has raised a different set of questions: What is the nature of the relationship between author and editor? What kinds of obligations, responsibilities, and power relationships are enfolded into that relationship? What happens when those asymmetries shift around? ...
It should be said that it makes no sense to deny that an editorial staff has power over authors. Of course we do. It is ultimately an editorial team’s decision to publish a piece or not. However, under these extenuating circumstances a new question arose: What do journals owe to those who submit their work to us? What kind of relationship is the relationship between author and editor?
These feel to us like very Commoning Ethnography questions."
- The Commoning Ethnography Editorial Collective