Interface: a journal for and about social movements is an open-access, peer-reviewed online journal bringing together activists from different movements and different countries, researchers working with movements, and engaged academics from different disciplines. The purpose is to contribute to the production of knowledge that can help us gain insights across movements and issues, across continents and cultures, and across political and disciplinary traditions: learning from each other’s struggles. Each issue is read by perhaps 20,000 movement activists and researchers around the world (as of 2018).
Interface is open-access (free), globally organised in different regional collectives and multi-lingual. We aim to develop analysis and knowledge that allow lessons to be learned from specific movement processes and experiences and translated into a form useful for other movements – hence our name. In doing so, our goal is to include material that can be used in a range of ways by movements – in terms of its content, its language, its purpose and its form. As a “practitioner journal”, the peer-reviewed elements of the journal have one activist and one academic reviewer each. Other pieces are edited so as to speak to as wide a range of movement participants and researchers as possible.
You can get a sense of who we are by looking at some of what the editors have written, our past editors, our original mission statement and who we wanted to reach when we started out, and what happened in the first five years.
Or, of course, by reading our past and present issues!
If you find Interface a useful site for dialogue and learning from each other, please think about submitting an article yourself.
Interface is basically an extended dialogue between people producing knowledge in, for or about social movements, whether in movement or academic settings, or both. We are a participatory journal, so always looking for new participants – movement activists and researchers as well as sympathisers, with any level of skill and any language!
We need help in the various regional collectives that make up the journal, in refereeing articles, in translation and in helping us with our online processes. Interface is as global and multi-lingual as we can make it.