Our First Open Access Issue! Notre premier numéro en accès libre !

Where to start? It seems so much happened this past year. The eleventh of March 2021 marked one year since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Vaccine roll-out is now the topic of the day. Public health orders give hope for further openings at the same time as threats of fourth and fifth waves loom large. Still, the promise of an in-person fall term for public universities brightens the horizon. Possibility is in the air. While a more lightness-of-being is long-awaited, the penetrating questions about social life and social organization that the pandemic has brought on remain as urgent as ever. At another level, 18 January 2021 became a historic day for Anthropologica as we officially moved to open access. We are proud to say that our journal became an international leader in promoting non-commercial, open source, ethical, sustainable, and free access to scholarly research. Most notably, the open access model we opted for neither has paywalls nor requires any publication payments from the authors. We are publishing our journal with the University of Victoria’s Libraries, a non-profit university press. We are collaborating with Coalition Publica, a “game changing,” non-commercial, national initiative that disseminates and advances digital scholarly research. To reduce the production costs and to insure the sustainability of our model, we eliminated the printed copies of the journal (a decision that was supported by CASCA members in the 2018 survey). In addition, we are re-channeling public funding and fully managing the production process in-house. Our overall aim remains the delivery of a publication that features high quality and innovative scholarly research in cultural anthropology. One of the advantages of managing the production of the journal ourselves is the capacity this allows us to respond quickly to pressing issues and debates emerging in our world –such as the COVID-19 pandemic –and to provide a space to discuss those questions in our journal. Our late breaking call for papers (CFP), “Giving Shape to COVID-19 through Anthropological Lenses,” saw an inpouring of excellent submissions. This demonstrates that our journal has a strong role to play in connecting our readership with timely issues through in-depth, creative, and unique ethnographically inspired scholarship, at varied lengths and various stages of analyses. The COVID-19 special section is, indeed, momentous. Having said this, we worried that by the time we published the papers submitted after our CFP back in May 2020, they would be “old news”. Instead, this set of sixteen essays and articles is both a rich ethnographic documentation of the early pandemic months in 2020 and a provocation for anthropological consideration of what should come next for our respective local communities as well as those further away. The bundle—that includes autobiographical and experimental writing— offers a deeply reflexive commentary on a range of social and cultural COVID-related happenings in different countries and places in the world, including Canada, the United States, Taiwan, South Africa, and cyberspace. Yet, they are also linked by several common themes: neologisms, art, textile making, and other creative expressions that arose from changes to everyday life; new orientations to and speculations about the future; specific forms of embodiment, subjectivity, emotions, habitus related to new temporalities and spatialities; exacerbations of social and economic inequities; and, deep fissures in societal responses and the politics of care. Our CFP, which encouraged shorter pieces and tentative analyses, has brought to light, too, the adaptability and nimbleness of anthropological research and its inherently collaborative nature. All authors show how the global pandemic has touched the everyday lives and subjectivities of those around them and themselves, economically, emotionally, medically, technologically, expressively, socially, culturally, …