About Oppositional Conversations
Oppositional Conversations is a peer reviewed, inter-disciplinary, quarterly, on-line journal that broadens understanding of social issues by putting scholars from varied ideological and disciplinary perspectives into conversation four times a year on a single topic. Each issue will pose a set of questions around a theme of particular current relevance.
This journal is the brainchild of a community of scholars of color who are Mellon fellows and who, by life histories and by choice, are committed to intellectual and social transformation. Our lived experience of “remaking the center from the margins” inspires us to create an intellectual space for scholarship that provokes as many questions as it answers; challenges as it enlightens; inspires passion as well as compassion. Having lived and worked in spaces of social and intellectual “discomfort,” we are profoundly aware that discomfort need not be intellectually disabling. In fact we have found it essential for intellectual growth. Through Oppositional Conversations we enjoin our fellow scholars to collaborate with us continually to create and recreate the experience of “creative destruction” that has played such a key role in the evolution and realization of our own intellectual, political, and artistic energies.
Scholars, practitioners, activists, and general readers will find articles, interviews, reviews, artistic contributions, and essays that invite reexamination of deeply held assumptions and enrich cultural and political debate. Our goal is for readers to come away from each issue having grappled intellectually with the unfamiliar and having experienced “the familiar made strange.” We intend to take full advantage of the opportunities cyberspace provides to extend the reach of our pedagogy, discussions, and debates beyond the paper and ink printed page and across geographical and ideological borders into both traditional and intellectually and socially innovative interpretive communities.
- The Editors
About the Editors
O. Hugo Benavides
Professor of Anthropology, Latin American and Latino Studies, and International Political Economy and Development at Fordham University. Oppositional Conversations at its core is about the life of the mind and the belief that ideas, knowledge and the word matter. And a renewed commitment to community and solidarity.
Zine Magubane
Zine Magubane is a Professor of Sociology at Boston College and Chair of the Global and Transnational Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association. Her work has appeared in Signs, Gender and Society, Current Sociology, and Political Power and Social Theory. She is currently working on a book called Decolonizing Sociology: Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism and the Making of a Science of Society.
Maurice Stevens
Professor of Comparative Studies, Ohio State University. I play in this space of interrelation because I believe that more is possible when we bring complexity and difference into our dialogues without expecting reconciliation. Contestation, collaboration, and articulation all create a kind of unity that can hold complexity and difference without ignoring things we find difficult to talk about. Oppositional Conversations invites this kind of imagining and engagement.
Cally L. Waite
Associate Professor of History and Education, teachers College, Columbia University and Director, Mellon Mays Graduate Initiatives Program at the Social Science Research Council. For me, Oppositional Conversations at its founding, and now in its relaunch, has always been about the love of ideas. It is for exploring, arguing, and learning with a set of fearless thinkers who are always seeking.
Peter Dimock - Consulting Editor and Copyeditor
Bobby Cardos - Design and Layout
Contact Us:
info@oppositionalconversations.org