Dear IJURR authors and reviewers,
Earlier this year, we slowed down our editorial work in order to take account of the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. While we have been moving reviewed and accepted papers towards publication, we have not been sending new papers out for review.
We now hope to return to our full scope of editorial activities. We are fully aware that it will not be possible to normalize what remains an unprecedented social crisis and public health emergency. We wish to recognize, however, the unequal burdens of social reproduction and collective care that shape who is able to, or chooses to, participate in academic publishing under conditions of crisis. Keenly aware that many academic journals, including IJURR, are seeing a drop in submissions by women scholars, we will prioritize such submissions in our review process. We will do the same for early-career researchers for whom academic publishing is not a luxurious choice but rather a necessity in what are increasingly dire academic times. Such prioritization does not mean that these submissions will be fast-tracked to publication; rather it means that we will put them at the front of the review queue so that at a time of limited review capacity they get more immediate attention.
We also encourage authors to consider our various genres of articles and essays since some of these might be more amenable to the present moment of reflection and analysis than others. These include web-only features like Urban Now and Spotlight On, as well as the Interventions section in the print journal, in which submissions need not conform to the research-based scholarship that may be more difficult or less relevant to produce in this moment.
We look forward to hearing from you and working with you. Stay well.
IJURR Editors
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