by Ronaldo Munck
This is an opportune moment, I believe, to debate the future of Latin American studies journals, given their variety and well-established nature. My own standpoint derives from a long-term membership of the Latin American Perspectives advisory panel and a brief stint as chief editor of the Bulletin of Latin American Research (UK) as well as membership of around a dozen editorial boards of journals dedicated to labor and globalization studies. And, of course, as has any other active researcher I have faced the demands made by the powers that be on where we should publish and what we should publish.
I am also in a liminal position as someone born in Latin America but resident and working in Europe. It is noteworthy that Ronald Chilcote’s call for comments on publishing and politics in Latin American studies specifically mentions this category of people who are neither clearly from the North or from Latin America. While this is sociologically interesting, I do wonder if we should also avoid any forms of essentialism that might make one’s epistemological position somehow dependent on one’s place of residence (or of origin, for that matter).
Indirectly I will be taking up some of the questions that Chilcote raised:
Can our journals act as a forum for debate and dialogue between “Northern” and “Latin American” researchers? My brief answer would be yes, of course, but then I would wonder about the term “dialogue” (maybe rather UN-speak?) and also about the danger of essentializing these two constituencies.
To what extent does the politics of Latin America set the empirical and theoretical agendas of our journals? Well, it all depends on how that politics is translated into the professional academic milieu within which …
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Latin American Perspectives
July 2016 vol. 43 no. 4 Abstract, pages 118-120
