Dear friends and colleagues,
We’re thrilled to step into the co-editorship of Gender & Society. We began our editorial work with new submissions on May 1, 2023. Our first full issue, as the new editorial team, will be out in February 2024.
Given the long history of critical feminist scholarship and leadership by former editors, the SWS Publications Committee, and the SWS community at large, we recognize the responsibilities on us to continue this legacy. We are confident that we will rise to the occasion over the next four years with our team of deputy editors, Professors Erika Busse-Cárdenas (Macalester College), Ben Carrington (University of Southern California), Pei-Chia Lan (National Taiwan University), Ghassan Moussawi (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign) and stef shuster (Michigan State University). The deputy editors reflect what is best in our discipline’s trans/gender/ racial foci. They inflect their sociologies with transnational sensibilities, and with both qualitative and quantitative methodological skills. In addition we have an outstanding team of student managing editors, namely Erin Carpenter and Jasmine Underwood from the University of Georgia and Alexander Holt from the University of Texas at Austin.
We take up our editorship at a particularly troubling time for scholars of gender, in the midst of a concerted backlash against feminism in general and against critical research on gender, race, and sexuality. It seems that global predicaments increase exponentially every year. The list could go on, but here are a few: climate refugees, racial violence, food insecurity, evisceration of reproductive and transgender justice. While troubled by the socio-economic and political zeitgeist, the seven of us recognize that the discipline of sociology is in the throes of a renaissance informed by a wealth of theoretical approaches, methodological innovations, and political orientations. We hope to bring some of that excitement apparent in the discipline to the pages of Gender & Society and that you will consider sending your manuscripts to us.
Under Barbara Risman’s editorial team’s guidance Gender & Society has grown by leaps and bounds. We are grateful for her leadership with the journal. We are also grateful for the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) team that helped us transition into our new roles almost seamlessly.
As the incoming editorial team, we take seriously our responsibilities to both understand and respect the founding principles of this journal and also to move the journal forward, to ensure it remains relevant to the debates and issues of the second decade of the twenty-first century. We welcome submissions from all scholars studying gender and sexuality whose approaches are sociologically informed, even if they are not, formally, sociologists or working within departments of sociology. We encourage all colleagues to submit to us, regardless of geographical location, rank, experience, or time in the academy. We look forward to reading your work, working with you, and seeing you in print in Gender & Society.
Thanks all.Patricia Richards (University of Georgia) and Sharmila Rudrappa (University of Texas at Austin)
Photo of Sharmila Rudrappa and Patricia Richards
Photo Credit: Tracy Ore
