Editorial: Keeping the Flame Alive

Abstract

Scholarly journals play a pivotal role in the life of any academic field. As key vehicles for creating, communicating and legitimating disciplinary and practical knowledge, they provide opportunities to disseminate research approaches and accomplishments, policy orientations, reflections on practice and emerging trends. Academic journals not only represent the knowledge base of a given discipline, but also reflect its history, trends, research norms and social structure of communication between scholars and others with professional expertise. This is particularly relevant in a comparatively new and diverse academic and practitioner-oriented field like adult education. How adult education professionals and scholars communicate with each other through their various journals, although necessarily partial and subjective, both reflects and constitutes the field and helps shape its future development.