On Power and Obligation in Publishing

Abstract

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?