(2020) 1 TWAIL Review 1-6
ISSN 2563-6693
Published under a Creative Commons licence. 

A journal, and everything that accompanies it, is a community, and every writer needs a community and the solidarity it provides. A scholar, particularly a young scholar seeking now to establish herself is confronted with a host of complications. In addition to all the challenges presented by a rapidly changing academic environment, she is subject to the great stresses of publishing prolifically, teaching large and anxious classes  and developing a profile, measurable by the metrics and rankings developed by our industry. Social media platforms have become essential parts of this process. These could serve important purposes in democratizing scholarship, as projects like TWAILR and Afronomics have themselves so successfully demonstrated. And yet, this whirl of statistics – of citations, retweets and likes – surely creates its own difficulties and anxieties.  In the midst of all this my hope is that the TWAIL Review will be a haven and provide a different sort of forum to young scholars, that it will help them find their voice, engage with a community that may be critical but which is still sympathetic.