Last but not least | entanglements

Nolas, M., Varvantakis, C., Long, R., Walton, E., and Logan, B. (2022). Last but not least, entanglements, 5(1): 1-7

This is the final issue of the online, open access journal entanglements: experiments in multimodal ethnography. entanglements was set up in Spring 2018 by Christos, Melissa and Robyn, later to be joined by Beth and Ellie, and with the contribution of Sarah Lynch in between. We were also joined by an awesome editorial board of like minded colleagues who have supported this experiment through their dedication and work, as well as by more than a hundred authors who have entrusted their work and their thoughts with us.

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In many ways the conditions under which entanglements came about were atypical. Projects such as the one we all met on and worked on for five years are rare; they can be, or at least where for us, little oases orbiting the ebbs and flows of daily academic life, ebbs and flows that are becoming increasingly more constrained, financially and ideologically difficult for many to bear. With projects and buyouts at an end, with changes in contracts, with the need to step out of the academy for some of us, with ambivalence about stepping back into or staying in the academy in different roles for many of us, and with burnout a looming threat on the horizon, running a project such as entanglements, and maintaining its open, experimental, playful, and caring ethos to the standards that we and you have become accustomed to, has just become too hard.  The journal has been run on an actual shoestring not a proverbial one, out of pocket, without the funding to be able to remunerate the labour put in, and without institutional support despite best efforts, making it exceedingly hard to sustain. Even labours of love have their limits.

In the meantime, the task at hand is one of digital preservation. We are conscious of our responsibility to past authors and future readers to maintain the work submitted to entanglements accessible in perpetuity (or as much as that is possible given the perishability of digital objects). We are working behind the scenes to ensure that all published material will be archived in a way that will be openly accessible and as close as possible to the original publication format, for generations to come.

So this is the last issue. We have not taken this decision lightly but downing tools at this point in time also feels right for us. We have been extremely lucky to meet and to converse with brilliant researchers and scholars over the last five years, and we are grateful that this little desire line of a journal found a fecund audience for a while. We hadn’t expected that. As for us, we will continue our work with and for openness, playfulness, experimentation, joy, equity, and justice in our varied roles; we don’t believe these things to be mutually exclusive or incompatible. And we are pretty confident that in this path, we will meet again. But, from here, for now, we are afraid we have to beat it.