by Oppositional Conversations Editorial Board
The editorial collective at Oppositional Conversations invites long-form essays, creative works, and short commentary for our next issue: Contestations. We welcome contributions that grapple with the many meanings “contestation” takes in our present moment.
Imagine your hands palm to palm rubbing against one another creating friction. Now Imagine your two hands in fists meeting knuckle to knuckle banging into and bouncing off one another. Contestation, we submit, shares characteristics of both these kinds of touch and movement. It is at once the reciprocity created by two palms meeting and producing energy and the sharp bump of knuckle meeting knuckle. Contestation can be fluid. Change can come from the energy of rubbing up against one another but also from a place where finally there is no give, where resolution is paralyzed between opposing sources. We propose an understanding of contestation as a continuum and a continuous process. Contestation need not be simply the place where disagreement lives. Contestation, we believe, can be a space that many occupy simultaneously without resolution or supremacy—a generative locus for reconfigured flows of understanding.
In a journal entitled Oppositional Conversations the term “contestation” might seem redundant. We want to complicate the word and give it nuance. The editors of Oppositional Conversation have worked closely together and known each other for years, and yet “contestation” best captures the spirit in which the journal was founded. We don’t always agree with each other. In fact, we are drawn into conversation with each other by our disagreements, by our different understandings of the ideas, theories, and topics that matter. We have chosen the theme of “contestation” precisely for its open-ended, fluid nature. It brings so many fields of thought—so many communicative practices—into play. We have also chosen it because we feel that the stakes are high in the way it is understood within any given encounter. Many of us are seeking solidarity in the midst of a crisis. This is a risky proposition. Instead of the reciprocity and community we seek we may find ourselves facing further fracture. But it is a risk that we are excited to take. We invite others to explore “contestation” with us. It is you, our readers, to whom we most wish to talk and by whom we most want to be changed.