The challenges of fostering an international and interdisciplinary conversation

Abstract

As editors of an international and interdisciplinary journal, one of our primary tasks is to create a hospitable space for perspectives from many different cultures, academic fields and practical settings. At the same time, we must be attentive to diverse interpretations of academic rigour; varied institutional expectations regarding impact factor, acceptance rates and peer review practices; and financial limitations in relation to language translation and manuscript editing. We also remain aware of the high volume of journals competing in the academic marketplace and the increasingly difficult task of attracting article submissions in a world that still does not reward work on children or spirituality at the same level as other scholarly pursuits. Producing a high-quality journal in the face of these many challenges is an exercise in negotiation and compromise. Yet, we cannot lose sight of the importance of listening across cultures, exploring ideas from fields other than our own and attending to how theories are embodied in the practices of those who work most closely with children on a day-to-day basis. One of the most striking aspects of conversations that include scholars and practitioners from different countries is how quickly we discover that the vocabularies we take for granted do not always signify the same meaning outside our cultural context. Take, for example, the term ‘childhood’, which may mean the period of life before the onset of puberty, a longer period that extends from birth until legal adulthood, the first two decades of life or some other span of time defined by cultural norms. Or the term ‘evangelical’, which may refer to all non-Catholic religious traditions in some cultures, a specific set of Protestant traditions with particular theological beliefs in other settings or a specific historical tradition (e.g. the German Evangelical Church). ‘Kindergarten’ can refer to educational systems prior to the start of formal schooling or the first year of formal education. Similar interpretive difficulties can arise with terms like ‘philosophy’, ‘theology’, ‘humanist’, ‘pluralism’ and ‘spirituality’. Rather than expend time and energy looking for common definitions of these key terms, a well-constructed international and interdisciplinary conversation encourages each participant to define these terms contextually and share with listeners (readers) what the speaker (author) means. Furthermore, regular engagement in such conversations reminds us that our terms are socially constructed and thus must be regarded with a hermeneutics of suspicion. Meaning is fluid, not fixed, and we do well to hold our terminology lightly so that we can alter our definitions if they become unhelpful or distracting to our own work or our attempts to communicate with others. International and interdisciplinary conversations also reveal the plurality of academic standards that guide our research. Some scholars are steeped in the statistical methods of quantitative studies, others come from fields and institutional settings that model qualitative methodologies and still others are trained according to a