2020 and Beyond.

Abstract

2020 and Beyond Michael Blackie and MK Czerwiec (bio) When this issue goes to print, I will have been Executive Editor of Literature and Medicine for three years. My tenure began in January 2020, two months before lockdown. Although time during the pandemic's first year lacked clear punctuation, with days becoming weeks and weeks becoming months, it felt as if there was no time at all to pause and think deeply and purposefully about the work I was charged to do for a journal I have respected for decades. That feeling persists even now as I sit down to write this reflection. Unlike my predecessors, whose pieces cover specific time periods and who were able to look retrospectively on the volumes they shepherded to print, I find drawing such connections daunting for two reasons. First, I simply do not have the objectivity distance provides; I'm in the thick of it. Second, because I inherited most of the content that appeared in the first two volumes, it strikes me as inappropriate to reflect on its significance. In what follows, then, I recount the motivations behind the changes I made to the journal's structure and conclude by looking forward to the conversations I believe these changes make possible. Since taking this position, four new Associate Editors accepted my invitation to join Literature and Medicine's Advisory Board—Sari Altschuler, Juliet McMullin, Lorenzo Servitje, and Jaipreet Virdi. Travis Chi Wing Lau came on board as the new Book Review Editor, and MK Czerwiec became the journal's first Comics Editor. As leaders and defining voices in disability studies, graphic medicine, indigenous studies, community-engaged scholarship, technoculture, popular culture, and digital humanities, these scholars' work expands the board's already impressive reach and ensures it will continue to be in the vanguard of exploring representational and cultural practices concerning health care and the body. I introduced a new section, Front Matter, in the fall issue of my first year. Featuring critical reflective pieces on a particular theme, word, or object, Front Matter has thus far taken up Breathing, Protest, Mask, and Rubbish. These contributions intentionally depart from traditional [End Page 229] academic essays in style and genre, while still adhering to scholarly standards. They engage pressing issues relevant to health broadly defined, and are shorter in length, usually between 500 and 2,000 words long. Three realities motivated the decision to limit their length. The first concerned time. Because L&M is published semiannually, with one of its issues devoted to a theme, authors can wait up to two years before they see their accepted essays appear in print. Front Matter pieces are reviewed in house rather than being sent out for external peer review, a process that can drag on for months (I could write an essay-length lament on the pandemic's disruption of the peer review process). This expedited review process means the journal can now feature more work by more contributors each year. The second reality concerned attention. Readers increasingly find reading lengthy essays not directly related to their areas of research a formidable task. Though the pandemic's warping of time is partly to blame for our diminished attention spans, I suspect the true culprits are small screens and social media. (How many times, dear reader, have you looked at your smart phone while reading this reflection, or those of my predecessors?) By design, then, Front Matter pieces demand less of a time commitment from readers while still providing them with critical explorations of health-related topics they have come to expect from L&M. Ideally, these pieces will entice readers to commit to reading through longer essays they might not otherwise. The third reality that motivated me to launch Front Matter was the existence of a troubling and persistent lacuna. In an essay appearing in L&M in 2016, Olivia Banner called out "the historical neglect of African-American literature in seminal scholarship" published in this journal and the field of medical humanities more generally (28), and challenged both to address it.1 In late May of 2020, this neglect merged for me with the murder of George Floyd, the other defining event of that...