LAUSR

Becoming more inclusive, appreciating and negotiating difference, and counteracting the coloniality of knowledge – these goals have been central for IFJP editors from the inception of the journal at the turn of the millennium. Twenty-three years on, the list of the top ten countries from which our submissions originate now includes China, India, Brazil, and Turkey; however, IFJP remains an Anglophone journal whose authors and readers continue to come disproportionately from the UK and the US. In 2023, about 60 percent of our submissions are from these two countries, followed by about 10 percent from Australia (on par with China). Conversely, as measured by article downloads, 52 percent of our readers are from Europe, mostly from the UK, followed by North America (22 percent). The next highest category are readers from Asia, accounting for 11 percent. IFJP can thus rightly claim to be an international journal – though its weight is in the Western Anglosphere. Clearly, the geographical pattern of submissions and downloads is just one indicator of many to measure inclusion and diversity, and not a particularly good one with regard to most dimensions of difference. We also believe that we are doing better when looking at the themes covered in the journal’s articles, which invariably explore and critique power relations of all kinds. However, it is worth reflecting on why a feminist journal attuned to global dynamics of power and committed to fostering dialogue across borders has difficulty moving beyond the Western Anglosphere. There are, of course, multiple reasons that we could cite for the geographical hegemony reproduced in our pages, and though we can no doubt try even harder, it is worth recognizing the power structures that preserve inequalities in global knowledge production and dissemination. These include the coloniality of epistemes and the English language as much as material differences related to funding and infrastructures. We are particularly concerned about the way in which new information technologies are threatening to aggravate existing hierarchies and exclusions. On the one hand, the Open Access (OA) movement is tearing down the paywalls that limit who can read our articles. Thus, article downloads for IFJP have almost quadrupled since 2015, and the most downloaded articles in the journal tend to be OA. On the other hand, OA is turning publishing into a privilege that can only be enjoyed by authors at well-resourced institutions that pay the publishers’ substantial fees for processing articles, thereby amplifying epistemic injustice.