After many conversations about academic infrastructures and nearly two years of preparation, we are delighted to announce the launch of Commoning Ethnography. Commoning Ethnography is an off-centre, annual, international, peer-engaged, open access, online journal dedicated to examining, criticizing, and redrawing the boundaries of ethnographic research, teaching, knowledge, and praxis. It is curated by an editorial collective which currently consists of Catherine Trundle (co-chair), Eli Elinoff (co-chair), Nayantara Sheoran Appleton and Lorena Gibson.
The first issue is available here: https://ojs.victoria.ac.nz/ce/issue/view/490
This issue contains papers exploring indigeneity and ocean commons, poetry and ethnography, activism and research, feminist commons, sonic ethnography, pedagogical experiments, the relationship between Māori scholarship and anthropology, and more. A good place to start is the editorial introduction by Catherine Trundle and Eli Elinoff which explains the questions that inspired this project and offers an invitation to think together.
Issue 1 includes a general section with pieces by Fiona McCormack, Alex Golub, Nomi Stone, and Luca Sebastiani and Ariana Sánchez Cota. The issue also contains a special section, Debating the Commons in Aotearoa, which contains a set of shorter provocations first delivered at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the founding of cultural anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington in May 2017. Contributors to this special section include Eli Elinoff, Karena Kelly and Catherine Trundle, Lily George, Caroline Bennett, Tarapuhi Vaeau (Bryers-Brown), Dave Wilson, Marama Muru-Lanning, Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, and Brigitte Bönisch-Brednich.
The editorial collective would like to thank Abby Zylla and Debbie Evans for the time and energy they put into the first issue of Commoning Ethnography. We would also like to thank Jeff Sissons for editorial support with the special section of Issue 1, and the peer reviewers for their thoughtful engagements with all articles in this issue.
This journal is part of the wider Ethnography Commons, and we would like to specifically thanks Caroline Bennett and Eli Elinoff for their work in developing our social and digital infrastructures for this project.
We are also pleased to call for papers for Issue 2 of Commoning Ethnography. We are particularly interested in creative, left-field scholarship, that stretches our imagination and pushes us to think about our world and our work in new ways.
Please consider joining us for future issues. We would love to hear from you.
The Commoning Ethnography Editorial Collective