The tension between theory and practice, between knowing and doing, and between political philosophy and policy making is at the core of the intellectual debate among critical social scientists and political activists, generating questions of methodology, epistemology, ontology, ethics, and politics. By revealing the dialectic between gender and power within the theory-practice nexus to be constitutive of these problematics, feminist scholarship has transformed the disciplines it has engaged—at its most powerful fusing theory and practice into self-reflexive, theoretically informed praxis; in other words, a practice of theorizing that has a direct impact on the issues, subjects, and areas it studies. Transcending the binary between theory and practice through praxis has illuminated the need to understand activism as entailing theorizing, and scholarship itself as a form of political practice.Since it was launched seven years ago, “Third Space” has deployed theory as a form of action—that is, praxis—and, by valuing the epistemic insights coming from a position at the margins, has questioned and tried to intervene in the imbalances in power and thus the circulation of ideas and arguments, between scholars in the global North and South. In the process it has become an important platform for the dissemination of a plurality of locally situated feminist experiences, even as the intellectual community that has coalesced through these pages continues to work toward encouraging more frequent and fruitful intersections between knowledge produced by activists and that produced by scholars, and toward disseminating research produced by the feminist scholars located outside Anglophone academic spaces.Reinforcing the theory-praxis nexus is a core principle guiding the feminist political and intellectual work deployed in “Third Space”—work that necessitates three feminist practices: working together, caring for one another, and periodically passing the torch. Each demands a high level of mutual trust and a sense of hope for the future. None of them comes spontaneously or easily.Yet, as we are in the third year of a pandemic that has taken millions of lives while transforming the ways we relate to one another, and as feelings of grief and fear that came with the pandemic are now augmented by feelings of grief and fear for the global consequences of the Russian invasion and, as of the spring of 2022, the literal destruction of Ukraine—a fear familiar to Middle Eastern people—it seems to us that in these days more than ever, three subversive acts of survival are necessary, if not for the human species, then at least for what remains of our humanity: trust, care for one another, and hope for the future.In other words, if it would be naive to assert that we are living in feminist times, it is not so naive to affirm that radical feminism that upholds the need for trust, care, and hope is what is necessary to spread the seeds of a new humanism.It is in these days of isolation, war, displacement, and grief that we are inheriting the curatorship of “Third Space,” the section of JMEWS launched in 2015 by miriam cooke, Banu Gökariksel, and Frances Hasso and later (since 2019) curated by Susana Galán and Angie Abdelmonem. In taking up this service, we aim primarily to respond to the act of trust we received from our predecessors with an act of care and hope for the future.Today “Third Space” is a well-known platform for the production and dissemination of critical knowledge about women’s, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies in Southwest Asia, North Africa, and their diasporas. In continuity with our predecessors, we aim to broaden opportunities to bridge the gap between multiple forms of knowledge production and dissemination by encouraging conversations among artists, activists, journalists, students, and scholars who explore the gendered dynamics of the major challenges of the day in their historical depth: wars, displacement, the clear signs of climate breakdown we are experiencing globally, and of course the pandemic.“Third Space” has from the start aimed to decenter the production and circulation of knowledge and encourage practices of discursively locating public debates about feminism, women, gender, and sexuality. Inspired by the praxis of our predecessors and by the theoretical insights produced by Indigenous and First Nations scholars, who for the past twenty years have been at the forefront of a comprehensive reconceptualization of the collaborative ontology and ethics of knowledge production, we believe that this effort needs to be continued and further amplified to help create a community of learners that, by valuing locally situated knowledges, contributes to epistemic and political shifts in the ways power relationships are structured.In this first issue we feature a cover-art concept essay about Zehra Doğan’s artwork Mêrdin (Mardin), in which the artist expresses the intertwining of women’s transmission of collective memories with the practice of weaving carpets in Kurdistan.The contemplation of the visual representations of memory and the ideas that these representations transmit across generations continues throughout the three pieces presented in this issue of “Third Space.” The first, “Tarkib’s Contemporary Arts Festival in Baghdad: Women Artists Play and Perform Memories and New (Hi)stories of Iraq,” is by Marta Bellingreri, a journalist specializing in the Arab world and an independent scholar with a PhD from the University of Palermo in Italy. Bellingreri analyzes the works of two emerging women artists, Roze Muhammed and Lanah Haddad, whom she interviewed at the 2021 edition of the independent Arts Festival in Baghdad; looks at their work as a testimony of the ways young Iraqi artists articulate traumatic memories; and examines how they express their new visions for Iraqi art.In the second piece, “Aaru: A Journey to the Underworld of the Subconscious,” Yasmine Allam, a Danish Egyptian writer and art critic who completed her studies in the United Kingdom and is based in Cairo, reviews a recent art exhibition by Nermine Hammam, who explores grief and trauma by revisiting ancient tropes in Egyptian art.The third piece is a tribute by the Australian feminist human rights activist Louise Cox to her auntie, Janet Venn-Brown, painter and activist for Palestinian rights, who died on August 6, 2021, in Sydney, where she was born ninety-six years earlier.Together, these pieces invite us to engage in a conversation about memory and temporality and about the power of the visual arts to fulfill the human need for connecting the present to the past and the future, in a movement that Australian First Nations scholars and artists would call songspirals, or ways of exploring the connection between country, culture, people, and story.