From the outset of our editorship as a collective in 2024, we have sought to strengthen the journal’s identity, expand its reach, and foreground the kinds of experimental and creative scholarship that distinguish it within anthropology, we have treated Anthropology & Humanism as a commons. We hold to a simple claim: scholarship is a public good, and creativity is not ornament but method. Now we face the possibility that A&H may no longer exist in its current form after early 2027.
What is happening
Ahead of the 2027 publishing contract negotiations, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) has notified each AAA journal that the overall publishing portfolio—now over twenty academic journals—will be substantially reduced. More than an administrative adjustment, this shift compels hard choices about future hosting, collaborations, and the forms of scholarship that can be sustained for each individual journal, also for A&H.
The AAA presented sections and journals with three options:
Option 1: Merge with other AAA journals or join a new AAA-sponsored collaborative journal: AAA has asked all small and medium-sized journals to find collaborative ways to merge.
Option 2 (Verbatim from AAA): “Some sections may find that a library publishing option best suits their publishing goals…. Library publishers are small, mission-driven publishers within academic libraries that offer a limited set of publishing services and typically publish journals on a “diamond” open-access basis: that is, free for both authors and readers.”
Option 3 (Verbatim from AAA): “Sections who wish to remove their journals from the portfolio and not pursue a library collective option may pursue a section-sponsored publishing partnership.”
Our vision: creativity and multimodality as praxis
From the beginning, our vision statement (December 2024) has framed multimodality and creativity as a praxis—a way of doing inquiry, teaching and critique. We think with text, image, sound, performance and story. Rigour and imagination are kept together by making evidence and ethics legible within the terms of each form rather than forcing all work into a single template.
What we’ve been building together as a collective of editors on A&H:
- Creative guidelines. We have drafted and tested guidance for submitting, reviewing, citing and archiving creative ethnographic work. Criteria are form-sensitive—craft, ethical clarity, evidentiary transparency, method made visible—so work can be evaluated fairly and taught responsibly.
- Review as care. We pair authors with medium-literate reviewers, invite dialogic and iterative reviews, and encourage “methods of making” notes with multimodal work so process and accountability remain transparent.
- Support for early-career scholars. We open a supportive space for emerging researchers to explore and experiment with creative, multimodal methods, encouraging risk-taking, reflection and growth in their scholarly practice.
- Expanded formats. We support different kinds of formats such as ethnographic plays, annotated image dossiers, audio transcripts and lyric essays grounded in archives. This way we ensure citability, pedagogy and preservation.
- Collective governance. Editorial conversations are open, minutes are shared and disagreement is treated as a pedagogical resource. We are building reproducible practices, not only outputs.
The hosting question
In light of the portfolio reduction, we are actively exploring a new publishing host aligned with our mission. Our due diligence centres on long-term preservation; indexing and discoverability; equitable routes to open access; production support for multimodal work; and infrastructures that serve community-facing scholarship. The aim is straightforward: to secure a home in which the journal’s intellectual and creative commitments and ethical obligations can flourish.
What guides our choice
Our criteria are public and concrete:
- Genuine support for creative, multimodal scholarship without compulsory textual conformity
- Equity of access for authors and readers beyond well-resourced institutions
- Care-centred review and transparent editorial practice
- Protection of the journal as a commons, not a product line
What comes next
As our pathway clarifies through on-going meetings with the AAAs, we will share further updates. Meanwhile, our editorial work continues: mentoring submissions, expanding and enacting the creative guidelines, and curating forthcoming special sections that embody Anthropology & Humanism’s commitment to method, ethics and imagination.
With thanks to everyone who reads with care, reviews with patience and creates with courage.
The A&H editorial collective
