Year: 2022
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: On January 14, 2021, the authors of this edited volume met over Zoom for a four-hour discussion.We had disseminated a reading list some months prior to the meeting and had received fi rst drafts from thirteen authors for ten chapters in the weeks prior to the event.We had to work with an eighteen-hour time difference between our easternmost and our westernmost authors-some of them had just woken up for our Zoom meeting, while for others, it was already bedtime.The aim of the meeting was, as we, the editors, had envisioned it, to offer the authors food for thought, to allow them to present their chapters and listen to their peers' presentations, in order to assemble a cohesive manuscript from their revised, fi nal submissions.Equipped with enthusiasm and a foolproof plan, we welcomed everyone to the Zoom conversation that day.All the authors introduced themselves, and we proceeded with the presentations of our individual chapters.Halfway through the meeting, one author halfheartedly admitted to struggling with the concept of the edited volume, that of sentient landscapes capable of xenophobia.Later, three coauthors presenting one of the chapters focused their presentations on the various ways in which both the concept of sentience and that of xenophobia seemed to not fully fi t their ethnographic experience.A long conversation followed on how other chapters could potentially inform and dialogue with the data from our skeptics' chapters.Perhaps naively, we, the editors of the manuscript, had not expected that any of our authors would feel confl icted about the core concept of the manuscript.Months later, several drafts needed a third set of revisions, which were meant to create a more productive dialogue between the book's core concept and the authors' data.In our subsequent editorial conversations, after receiving the fi nal versions of our authors' chapters, we noticed that some of this tension was still present in the narratives of our colleagues.
Source: Berghahn Books
Author: Alexandra Coțofană
Language: English
Subfield: Geography, Planning and Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4382681963