Newsletter: April 2006
Janelle S. Taylor, Contributing Editor
An Open Letter to SMA Members from MAQ’s New Editors
Mark Luborsky and Andrea Sankar
We are delighted to serve the members of SMA as the next editors of Medical AnthropologyQuarterly. The times are ripe for medical anthropology, and it is ready. You can see the ideas, concepts, and insights produced by medical anthropologists are increasingly sought by scholars widely outside our field and the general public. At the same time, the breadth of issues and debates is increasing within the field. Clearly, a host of our core medical anthropology concerns (such as: health, disease and illness; socio-cultural dimensions of health in individuals and groups; suffering and healing; locating the particular in the global laboratory of human societies and conditions; qualitative and mixed methods) are gaining a place in the sense of problem for study by other disciplines, and in local and national level public and policy settings. As Editors we are committed to enhancing MAQ’s vital role in this expansion of our field and the opportunities for change offered by wider recognition of medical anthropology’s offerings.
As we write this letter and reflect on the coming task, we are mindful of the varied demands of editorship. Together we welcome the opportunity to work closely with the incoming editorial board and foreign corresponding editors to sharpen our sense of MAQ’s vision, and foster a vigorous and broad flow of topnotch manuscripts. We believe our joint editorship offers distinctive strengths given our separate scholarly and professional interests, commitment to socially engaged scholarship, and breadth of perspectives in concepts and methods. We relish this extension of our longstanding dinner arguments about culture, health, research and anthropology today. Readers can expect not a monadic editorial voice, but the stew of two long-collaborating cooks (and newlyweds hoping to celebrate our 5th anniversary in the final year of editorship).
What is our vision? Outstanding scholarship across the entire smorgasbord of issues, approaches, and methods in medical anthropology is the menu we envision for MAQ. We seek to encourage and support excellence across the widest range of medical anthropology. We envision MAQ as THE recognized forum for vibrant debates and refinement of ideas, methods in medical anthropology, and for exploring how our field relates to health practice and anthropology in general.
MAQ is our primary commons, a table where SMA serves up the array of intellectual and methodological traditions representing the whole SMA membership and MAQ readership. We will energetically promote MAQ’s creative generative capacity by welcoming the breadth of discourses merited by the topic, methods, and concepts, and state of knowledge in an area. We envision a vigorous MAQ that fosters chafing of juxtaposed arguments and findings as well as those that smoothly blend with each other.
How will we move to realize that vision? We will work to sustain the contributions from the current and prior editors, and to extend the menu of MAQ offerings in new directions. A taste of our plans is offered here, we will describe others in the near future. One priority will be to enhance recognition of MAQ within SMA and beyond the disciplinary and national shores of US medical anthropology. To do so, we will work to raise scholarly and public recognition of medical anthropology insights and contributions. One ingredient will be to boost MAQ’s ISI factor ranking score; this is a priority even given debates about the journal ranking system (and its manipulation). This will also raise the quality of submissions by improving MAQ’s attractiveness to authors. Recipes for improving rankings focus on criteria such as the kinds of citations in articles, and types of articles published. In coming years we will work to evaluate and implement at MAQ salient strategies used by similar journals. Also, we will expand MAQ’s international presence. One step is to join the World Association of Medical Editors, a large association of medical journal editors in 87 countries dedicated to improving editorial processes and accessibility (receptive to qualitative and quantitative methods). WAME’s mission to assist journals in developing countries lends a chance to create reciprocal opportunities for SMA faculty and students. We hope to foster greater awareness of MAQ’s global mission and profile in this fashion. Another priority is to reinvigorate SMA’s sense of belonging to and participation in the MAQ. Look for information about these and a feast of other topics soon.
We genuinely welcome your contributions to the journal.
Sincerely,
Mark and Andrea
Please send column contributions to the SMA Contributing Editor, Janelle Taylor (jstaylor@u.washington.edu)