Aims and Scope
How can we re-imagine society in an era of climate change, pandemic, hunger, poverty, questions of racial, ethnic and gender justice and other pressing global societal challenges? Significant threats and dangers lie ahead of us, but so do opportunities, as new ways of being, thinking, and doing emerge. This new fully open access journal aims to facilitate thinking about these positive new trajectories and to become the journal of choice to address the complexities of global social challenges across disciplines and fields. It will be the first such journal to be based in the social sciences, whilst also engaging with research from humanities, arts and STEM. Including marginalised, minority and Indigenous world views, the journal will be an important home for research which contributes to the creation of alternative futures that acknowledge past injustices and are socially and environmentally just and sustaining. It will also welcome conceptual and methodological developments which expand our thinking and enable greater understanding.
The Global Social Challenges Journal will facilitate the publication of multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research internationally within and beyond academia as well as welcoming single discipline work. Engaging with innovative and critical perspectives, including decolonial and Southern epistemologies and their relationship with those of the Global North, it will respond directly to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and encompass co-production and other participatory approaches. The journal will recognise new methodologies, offering a range of novel and more traditional outputs. Highly accessible, impactful, and policy-facing, it hopes to foster dialogue between academics, policymakers, thought leaders, NGOs, practitioners, and the public. By publishing fully open access evidence-based, collaborative work in the collective interest through a not-for-profit university press, the journal will enable the sharing of knowledge needed to help build a fairer world, across and for the Global South and North.
Themes
These are linked to but not limited by the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.
We will aim to address these and other issues in the context of their interplay with systemic divisions resulting from class, racialisation, gender and sexuality.
- Cities and communities
- Climate change, energy and sustainability
- Conflict, security and peace
- Democracy, power and governance
- Education and learning
- Equality, diversity and inclusion
- The future of work, finance and the economy
- Health and wellbeing
- Hunger, food, water and shelter
- Interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches
- Justice, law and human rights
- Life stages and intergenerationality
- Migration, mobilities and movement
- Poverty, inequality and social Justice
- Society, culture and arts
- Technology, data and society