Logging On

Cheryl Ball, Co-Editor

Special Issue Published

This issue of Kairos is a full special issue on sound and social change, guest edited by Shewonda Leger, Eric Rodriguez, Ja'La Wourman, Shannon Kelly, Rosa Tobin, & Benjamin Lauren. We are excited to be publishing so much amazing and thoughtful work in a range of discourses that highlight the role that sound and music play in a world that is often and (sometimes necessarily) in upheaval. Given the many cultures—musical, racial, political, classist, and otherwise—at play within the context of sound and social change, the journal's inclusive copy-editing style guide became an important resource for our copyeditors, as we navigated the many Englishes these authors called forth to make their arguments. We value the diversity of languages and identity discourses and standardized wording only when any inconsistency seemed confusing to multiple readers. For instance, readers will notice in several webtexts that we use "hip hop" as a noun and "hip-hop" as an adjective. We also edited the variety of racial markers authors employed to capitalize Black, Asian, Latinx, etc., while lowercasing white as a referent to folks from Western Euroamerican backgrounds. Our reason for doing this is to destablilize and reframe the power and white body supremacy of the institutions in which we work, including and especially that of higher education in the US and of scholarly publishing more specifically. We welcome productive, critical feedback and updates to our copyediting guidelines. And we invite you to read the guest editor's introduction on this special issue to find out more about the individual webtexts herein. You're in for a real treat!

Comings and Goings and Goings-On

We are sad to lose a few key staff members this past year, including Associate Editor Will Penman, who is redirecting his academic efforts into other fruitful venues this fall, and PraxisWiki Co-Editor Matt Vetter, who stepped down over the summer to focus his time on some other necessary pursuits. Matt has been a mainstay in the Pwiki section for many years, working alongside Co-Editor Kristi McDuffie, who will now begin a new collaboration with the Topoi/Praxis Section Editors to more fully align the PraxisWiki section with the other peer-reviewed sections of the journal. From an author's perspective, not much will change (at least not for the foreseeable future!), but internally, this adjustment to an even stronger collaborative editorial approach will allow us to work more seamlessly across sections that share common threads.

We are also happy to have two of our associate editors, Elizabeth Chamberlain and Rich Shivener, take on a promotion to become Inventio co-Editors, alongside Madeleine Sorapure. The Inventio section has thrived more than we anticipated when we started it over a decade ago, and with more submissions than we expected, and a shared mission of outreach and process-based atunement that the journal as a whole as taken on, having three editors in that section will help us help authors even more! We will provide you with more details of this growing section and our process-based outreach plans in the January 2022 issue.

With some positions opening up in our associate editor roles, we are happy to have promoted our two interns into assistant editor positions, and we will be promoting many of our assistant editors into associate editor positions this fall. We are still working on the final line-up there, but stay tuned if you're interested in applying for an entry-level editorial position with Kairos because we are GROWING and continue to need more amazing and diverse folks to help us publish this journal and provide outreach to everyone who wants help! Follow us on Twitter (@kairosrtp) for the most up-to-date information.

Our editorial board also continues to grow, with the addition of several new board members including Tessa Brown, Janine Butler, Antonio Byrd, Christina V. Cedillo, Chen Chen, Alexandra Hidalgo, Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Laura Gonzales, Stephanei Kershbaum, Louis Maraj, Zarah C. Moeggenberg, Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Wendi Sierra, Bruce Snaddon, and Sean Zdenek. We will be adding more in the coming year as well, and if you have recommendations for board members, please let us know so we can reach out to folx! We ask authors to suggest who they'd like to review their texts as well as who they do NOT want to review their texts, so we need a strong, ethical, and generous editorial board to help us fulfill our mission. Related, Kairos became a signatory on the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors and has been going through the Library Publishing Coalition's Roadmap for Anti-Racist Practice to see how we as a journal organization can strive to be more anti-racist in our scholarly publishing and academic actions. We welcome your input as we start a DEI Task Force for the journal to help us enact better, more inclusive and equitable practices in all facets of our publishing work.

In related work, we have finally uploaded our new Policies and redesigned some of our core pages to be more readable, including our Submissions and Editorial Board pages. I invite you to review them and let us know what you think!