The socio-political context of the past two years has pushed us to reflect upon our principles and fundamentals, both in a professional and social sense. The past year in particular has reinforced the fact that our very foundations are distorted, and we have much to unlearn in order to question and protest the marginalisation that has been culturally ingrained in our personal and professional behaviours.
As a publication, we support critical thinking and provocation, encouraging our contributors to challenge the norms that we have been taught to believe. The year leading up to our third issue underlined the importance of discussing something relevant and essential to our cultural interactions, which brought us to the theme identity.
At the start of our journey of research into identity, we knew it would be a learning process for us, in our attempt to understand this complex and multifaceted concept, and the myriad of meanings it is loaded with. In the context of Covid-19, our methods of working have changed in order to adapt to this new virtual reality, which, albeit less tactile, have given us more opportunities to engage with people around the world, and listen to a diverse range of voices that critically interrogate our ways of living and perceptions. From weekly discussions and sharing of literature and resources, our process took us to the collective attendance of lectures and events that were followed by team discussions. This inspired -ism to do something new and host a series of online talks with speakers who we felt question and problematise identity in their work. We were joined by T Sakhi,
/other and Rebearth, who reflected on themes ranging from provocation, the Orient vs the Occident, the decolonisation of the educational system, the expression of identity and locality and our physical and natural environment. Thus, beyond seeking contributions, we wanted to encourage engagement and interaction in the crossover of ideas and experiences. This helped reveal and question the countless barriers, biases and misinterpretations within our profession, which has been favourable to the Global, more particularly the Western, whilst simultaneously less considerate of the local and cultural diversities inherent to the dynamics of our collective identities. Additionally, it spurred conversations regarding the dilemma between the negative effects associated with globalism, in contrast to the positives of knowledge sharing and multiculturalism, leading in to discussions of agency and power in cross-boundary relationships.Learning from others has been a key part of our process, which activated us to do similar in this issue by pursuing new means of engaging with the very organisations and people that have inspired us. We therefore decided to expose the opinions and perspectives of a variety of voices that emerged to celebrate diversity, culture and the environment, through a new section within the publication: the micro interviews. These have been intentionally dispersed within the issue, as brief interludes in-between our contributors’ works, with the purpose of allowing our readers to engage in various thought-provoking moments of reflection.
Albeit in a constrained environment of minimal social interaction and a complete rethinking of the way we work and curate -ism, our team found the production of this issue incredibly nutritious, at times difficult, but most of all educational. We truly hope you find the contributions as stimulating as we have, and hope you enjoy reading issue 03 as much as we have enjoyed producing it.