Launching Interface: a journal for and about social movements

We are proud to announce the launch of Interface, a new global online journal dedicated to research carried out from and for social movements by movement practitioners and engaged academics alike. We are looking for articles of all kinds as well as people interested in helping create the journal at many different levels. This email has some basic information, and more is available on our website at www.interfacejournal.net.

Call for Papers: Issue 1, "Movement knowledge"

Interface is a new journal launched by activists and academics around the world in response to the development and increased visibility of social movements in the last few years -- and the immense amount of knowledge generated in this process. This knowledge is created across the globe, and in many contexts and a variety of ways, and it constitutes an incredibly valuable resource for the further development of social movements. Interface responds to this need, as a tool to help our movements learn from each other's struggles.

Interface is a forum bringing together activists from different movements and different countries, researchers working with movements, and progressive academics from various countries to contribute to the production of knowledge that can help us gain insights across movements and issues, across continents and cultures, and across theoretical and disciplinary traditions. To this end, Interface seeks to develop analysis and knowledge that allow lessons to be learned from specific movement processes and experiences and translated into a form useful for other movements. In doing so, our goal is to include material that can be used in a range of ways by movements in terms of its content, its language, its purpose and its form.

We are currently seeking contributions to the first issue of Interface and welcome contributions by movement participants and academics who are developing movement-relevant theory and research. The theme of this first issue, which will be published on January 1st 2009, is "movement knowledge": what we know, how we create knowledge, what we do with it and how it can make a difference either in movement struggles or in creating a different and better world. We invite both formal research (qualitative and quantitative) and practically-grounded work on all aspects of social movements. We are seeking work in a range of different formats, such as conventional articles, review essays, facilitated discussions and interviews, action notes, teaching notes, key documents and analysis, book reviews and beyond.

In order to achieve this, research contributions will be reviewed by both activist and academic peers, other material will be sympathetically edited, and the editorial process generally will be geared towards assisting authors to find ways of expressing their understanding, so that we all can be heard across geographical, social and political distances. The deadline for contributions for the first issue is September 1st 2008. Guidelines for contributors and contact details are available on our webpage at www.interfacejournal.net.