Making sense to save the world

We need a hero. As I write this, our earth and its people are increasingly confronting the harsh realities of the Anthropocene—flooding, earthquakes, geopolitical brinksmanship, humanitarian disasters, animus leading to violence, and economic inequality abound. As these multiple crises unfold around us, it’s increasingly challenging, regardless of our vantage point or station in life, to make sense from what we are experiencing. But this feeling certainly isn’t new and is borne out in our modern bardic traditions. Even our superhero stories continue to evolve in their complexity and image of what a superhero is and who a superhero can be. Take Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther as a case in point; while the characters first appeared in print in 1966, the movie franchise born some 52 years later in 2018 traces through time the continued struggle for civil rights, autonomy and, through the portrayal of Wakanda, sovereignty. While echoing familiar tropes of traditional superhero portrayals, the film brings to the global stage transgressive depictions of Black men, women, and places and through the portrayal of multiple antagonists—identifying as White and Black—also complicating the portrayal of colonialism (Bucciferro, 2021).

As scholars and researchers, many of us are prone to eschew the notion of a superhero in these moments; we know there’s no easy fix, no amount of latent or revealed superpowers that can neatly extricate us from what we’ve inherited and created. At the same time, the same imaginary that inspired and brought to life Black Panther over a period of more than 50 years can tell us something about the power of our place in storytelling. With no easy fixes to turn to, as scholars our role is fundamentally to make sense.

Writing from my vantage point as the first associate editor of the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, there is a unique capacity within our community to make sense in a world that relentlessly does not. As scholars coming from many different disciplines, the frame of the city gives us an important lens to explore the questions of our time from increasingly diverse ways of knowing and scholarly viewpoints. The strength of our journal’s home, the Urban Affairs Association (UAA), comes from our diversity of vantage points, institutions, and geographic contexts. We intentionally seek out each other and better each other’s work and scholarly lives. In the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City we have a unique opportunity to participate in conversations that intersect the many issues of our time but that also force us to confront some of the most indelible and powerful structures reflecting both the best and worst of our humanity. We have a scholarly venue within which we must have truly heroic conversations for our time.

For many of us who have been part of the Urban Affairs Association community, UAA has long represented a venue for heroic conversations. Often these conversations are grounded in our disciplinary homes but given a different life through the conversations we are able to have in a space which binds us together through our treatment of the urban. As editors Beebeejaun and Modarres (2020) remind us, “the city is more than a backdrop, and within the milieu of the urban realm, literary and cultural movements, acts of protest, resistance, and solidarity have brought people together in new cultural and political formations” (p. 7). Through the conversations we seek to have in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, our goal is not just the creation of an interdisciplinary venue for our stories, but more importantly leveraging these conversations for the transformation of the world. Through our collective conversations, we make sense, but we also break down boundaries and make change.

As Wilder (2020) reminds us, despite the quantity and quality of existing scholarship engaging race and ethnicity, our conversations in these areas are often obfuscated, relegated to disciplinary siloes, marginalized, constrained by methodological conventions, and limited in their reach to audiences of practice. We have the opportunity to continue to make the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City a place that transcends these challenges and that presents a new model for scholarship centering race and ethnicity.

As the journal’s inaugural associate editor, I have a lot of learning to do—and I am hopeful that much of that learning will occur through opportunities to engage with prospective authors and ultimately through the works submitted to the journal. Along with the editors, my role is to expand the breadth of scholarship reflected in journal submissions to help foster deeper and more powerful conversations. Part of that role is also helping scholars from disciplines not (yet) well represented in our volumes to feel welcome and to see the journal as a potential home for their contributions to our heroic and necessary conversations. If through print, or clicks, or search algorithms you read these words, I am hopeful there is a potential home for your work in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City, or in the Journal of Urban Affairs, and look forward to building a shared conversation together.