Welcome to another issue of thirdspace – our fifth and first to feature some of our new co-editors at the helm. While thirdspace is a joint effort of the editorial team, this issue has been put together by Jessica Blaustein, Sophie Mayer, and Jenéa Tallentire Gilley, with help as always from Kim Snowden.

We’d also like to welcome our newest co-editor to the team. Karen Dias comes to us from the University of Minnesota. Her current research interests centre around the impacts of forced migration and trauma on refugee women and girls' food and body practices. Karen’s enthusiasm has already had a positive impact on thirdspace in her time as a thirdspace associate, and we are looking forward to having her on board as a full co-editor.

And so to our fifth issue. In many ways, this issue is about using the institution to explode the institution. The pieces collected here touch upon central concerns facing women in the academy: the importance of anger and other emotions in pedagogy and research; the experience of racialized women in the truly ivory tower; and identity as a resource for critical thinking, not just through the triad of race/class/gender, but through ethnicity, culture, sexuality, religion, life experience, and position in the academy. All of these deepen feminism by showing the variety it can encompass.

La Flamme offers us a view from ground zero – the experiences of a woman of colour in academia. Her use of personal narrative adds a deep experiential element that women of colour may recognize in their own lives, and (it is hoped) white women can use to begin to think through their own positions and actions in (re)creating the academy as a raced space. La Flamme’s aim is threefold – to bring out her own experiences of the barriers built across racial and gender lines in the classroom and on campus; to offer practical tips for women of colour entering the academy; and also speak to those white women who would be allies.

Similarly, we found Breau's essay powerful for its political desires to think beyond existing norms and structures of literary pedagogy, and perhaps humanities pedagogy more generally. As Breau critically interrogates the 'personal' in the classroom, she challenges dominant institutional deployments of selves as neutral. By refiguring sexual abuse and rape as visible, rather than invisible, elements of both specific personal and literary subjectivities, Breau refigures the classroom as a space in which complex questions and emotions can be engaged to the benefit of both students and teachers.

Klassen's essay asks us to think about how flexible a category "identity" might be - she confronts the disciplinary boundaries of women's studies itself and challenges feminist scholars to recognize their/our own blind spots when it comes to spirituality/belief/religious practices, for she argues feminist scholarship frequently overlooks the importance of religion to power structures all over the world, to individual and social identity movements, and to women's everyday lives. Klassen's claims are important, because she reminds us that women's studies/gender-sexuality studies programs have gained some degree of institutional space in the academy -- and with that presence comes a responsibility to self-reflect, to turn a critical gaze back upon our own disciplinary boundaries.

Kohler Flynn’s critical review of the literature on self-esteem fits here as well, in its assertions that the psychological establishment needs to do much more to take into account a true diversity of identities in forming the methodologies that shape the discipline and the academy. Feminist scholars, because of the diverse and impassioned debates about the role of identity represented in all the pieces in this issue, have a crucial part to play in such a transformation of methodology and practice.

All the pieces in this issue model an ethics of feminist academic identities and practice. It is an ethics always in-the-making... encouraging us to think through/with the complexities of identities… taking those complexities themselves as the starting point... and not fearing the messy ground we encounter with every step.

Our next issue in March 2004 is a special issue on Representation and Transgressive Sexualities. Our call went out for papers dealing in monstrous women, the femme fatale, deviant/transgressive/ subversive sexualities, and future landscapes of sexualities. The response was phenomenal, and the number of wonderfully conceived papers of quality scholarship were enough to make any editor’s heart proud. So we are very excited to be producing what will be a lively, engaging issue around themes that are on the cutting edge of scholarship.

And future issues… As always, we are looking for feminist scholarship of the widest definition, from any and all emerging scholars. If you are new to the publishing scene, do check out our guide to getting published – it will set you firmly on your feet. Consider us for your first piece! And if you are an old hand at the process, go ahead and submit your work – this is your journal.