Abstract:
On a sunny autumn afternoon in Copenhagen I sat down with Dr Rebecca Lund to talk about
her incoming group editorial tenure for NORA: The Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender
Research. Dr Lund is a post-doctoral fellow in Gender Studies at the University of Tampere in
Finland. The conversation traversed many facets of academic publishing and I have chosen to
call on Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘staying with the trouble’ (2016) as an appropriate theme that
linked many of Dr Lund’s insights to her feminist publishing agenda. As a feminist academic
activist now tasked with the editorship of a prominent Nordic feminist academic journal,
Dr Lund explores her ethical obligations to provide a platform that is inclusive and makes
some kind of intervention to the edifces of patriarchal power so embedded in the academic
publishing space. Dr Lund provides an interesting account of how her own research focus
on epistemic injustice can be refexively used in the academic leadership role of editorship
by engaging ‘head on’ with the prominent debates and challenges facing Nordic academia
around intersectionality, race, gender, class, and the political economy of gender politics. As
Haraway insists, ‘staying with the trouble’ involves the ability to face challenges head on
while also recognising the importance of working together, ‘in unexpected collaborations and
combinations … we become-with each other or not at all (2016, p. 4). Dr Lund provides a
wonderful demonstration of a feminist approach to collaboration in academic publishing
and the importance of insisting all voices can be heard and visibilised on and through the
conventional platform of the academic journal. As the frst issue of the new editorial collective
in WSJ, Dr Lund’s experiences and hopes ft well with our own feminist agenda of continuing
the political work of academic publishing in these often ‘troubling’ times.
