Letter from the Editor

Maggie Wander

doi:10.5070/r73151187

Abstract

On behalf of the editorial board, I would like to thank the department of History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) and the Arts Division at the University of California, Santa Cruz for their financial support. We are particularly grateful to the former director of graduate studies of HAVC, Professor Boreth Ly, for advocating on our behalf and to the amazing staff in the HAVC department, including Ruby Lipsenthal and Meredith Dyer. Thanks also to Professors Carolyn Dean, Derek Conrad Murray, and Kyle Parry for serving as our advisory board. Thank you to the team at eScholarship for answering our many questions and for making our open access mission a reality. We also appreciate all the peer reviewers for their time, and Paula Dragosh for copyediting. We are thrilled to include in this issue guest contributors whom we invited to participate in this volume, and we are so grateful for their participation: Christina Maranci; Boreth Ly with Catherine Ries, Michelle Yee, and Christina Ayson-Plank; and Katerina Martina Teaiwa. We are also hugely grateful to Michael Conlee, our amazing intern, and to Porter College at UCSC for funding the internship. Thanks to Kate Korroch, the founding managing editor, and all past editorial board members at Refract for ensuring our project has lasting power. And finally, we wish to thank the numerous colleagues and mentors who engage with visual studies and have encouraged this project from the start, as well as the amazing thinkers and makers who contributed to this volume.

Highlights

It may come as no surprise that Refract’s third volume emerges out of incredibly difficult circumstances in Santa Cruz, California, and beyond
As we were sending out the Call for Papers for this issue titled “Hauntings and Traces,” a group of graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz began calling for a Cost of Living Adjustment to offset the egregiously low income we are paid as Academic Student Employees, which does not cover the minimal cost of living in an increasingly unaffordable Santa Cruz and San Francisco Bay area
The campaign was not without its problems, creating schisms within the graduate student body and even within Refract’s editorial board. Much of this tension remains unresolved, and one reason is that the COVID-19 pandemic forced the UCSC campus to close for the Spring 2020 quarter

Summary

Introduction

It may come as no surprise that Refract’s third volume emerges out of incredibly difficult circumstances in Santa Cruz, California, and beyond. Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal Journal Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal, 3(1)

Results

Conclusion