| This has been another busy and productive year for our journal. I personally was lucky enough to join a very welcoming and productive team in January 2021, and it has been an honour and a pleasure to work with excellent associate editors and mentees, and especially with Dr Linda Fick, Nadia Grobler, and with Henriette Wagener, who joined us later in the year, handling our publicity and social media portfolio.
It has been a pleasure for me to read and learn so much from all our contributors and reviewers, and across a wide variety of topics, and I am very pleased that debate about science and higher education is alive and well. This was the second year of the COVID pandemic and this has affected us all – we send our condolences to those who have lost friends and family, and wish speedy and full recovery to those who are currently ill. The challenges of the pandemic continue, and science around the pandemic will continue to feature prominently in our pages, as it has done thus far. In this regard, we should like to remind readers of the January 31 deadline for submissions for our special issue on COVID in our context.
This was the year of POPIA, and as a journal we have been fortunate to host important documentation on POPIA, as well as a page dedicated to debates around it. We anticipate closing the dedicated POPIA comments page early in 2022, but as with all other topics we continue to encourage you to submit articles and commentaries to us. We believe in keeping debates alive, and see it as part of our work to provide a platform for robust contestation and discussion.
It is a challenge to maintain a journal so interdisciplinary in nature, and to do justice to the wide range of methods, approaches and ideas, that constitute the range of research engagement in South Africa and Africa. It is not possible for any editor-in-chief to be on top of all developments in all fields; I should like to thank our stalwart associate editors and their mentees for the crucial input they give to the journal. All journals, ultimately, depend on the quality of work submitted to them and on the quality of peer review, so apart from thanks to our in-house team, great kudos to all who submit and review for us. Thank you all.
I wish you and yours all a peaceful and healthy year-end and time of festivities for those who celebrate. And please continue to support and engage with us as you have done. This journal is nothing without its readers, contributors and reviewers – we are grateful to you all.
Leslie Swartz
Editor-in-Chief |
