WE ARE A1*! – Celebrations, thanks and... departures
At last, after a two-year-delay, Qualis Periódicos* for the 2017-2020 quadrennium was officially announced and, with great enthusiasm, I can share with everyone – authors, reviewers and readers – that... WE ARE A1!
In its first quadrennial, Ephemera was evaluated with the highest score possible, given by “Higher Education Personnel Improvement Coordination” (CAPES) to journals of national and international excellence only. There are many requirements for A1 status eligibility, and we have met these requirements in less than three years, since the journal was founded in 2018. Ephemera was born, survived, and developed during times of intense attack on Brazilian public universities – on lecturers, scholars, students – and also on science, philosophy, arts, culture and democracy in our country.
But we won. We resisted and won, in a certain sense, inspired by the pact proposed by Conceição Evaristo: “they agreed to kill us, but we agreed not to die” ...
Over the course of these five years, our young Ephemera had gone through a fantastic process of growth and coming-of-age, and I would like to share with you the scale of it all, like an overall balance, from its first issue in 2018 to its latest, in 2022.
There were ten issues in a five-year span, along with the organization of six dossiers (three of them were divided into two issues, due to the number of manuscripts received), resulting in 114 qualified articles published in more than 1870 pages. These results were the product of a huge amount of invisible work, quite unnoticed by the outside world. Over forty overloaded peers read and assessed more than 300 submissions, and of which far less than half would actually be published, and in some cases after thorough review. I had the pleasure of editing and publishing more than 150 manuscripts, authored by scholars from more than 40 different institutions, home and overseas – these being divided into at least 12 countries in North and South Americas, Africa, Europe, and Australia. Papers in English, French and Spanish were translated to Portuguese, making qualified performing arts research more available to a broader number of readers in our country.
As Editor-in-chief, I have been at the forefront of this endeavor since the beginning, having started a journal practically from scratch, with absolutely no funds and just a little help /support (considering the size of the task), in an absolutely dire scenario, as said, for sciences and humanities in Brazil: therefore, this score represents a major victory. In these five years, I learned and grew a lot as a professional. Even though I solely edited two dossiers and three issues, I also took part in the editing of every single issue since – apart from guest editors and some voluntary help – I never had a crew to work with… Therefore, I was proofreader, translator, layout designer, organizer, programmer, website maintainer, responsible for contacting reviewers & authors and jack-of-all-trades for other functions that a journal might require, rain or shine. I wanted to share this because hardly anyone imagines the state in which the process of disseminating scientific, philosophical and artistic production in Brazil is found – our “not to die” pact symbolizes a stubbornness and an intransigent option for life and for a civilizing pact in a planetary context so adverse and contaminated by individualism, immediacy, racism, misogyny, denialism of science and malicious revisionism; characteristics of the imperialist and colonialist strategy of imposing necropolitics on the social bond. Persevering is necessary. And the choosing of themes like “Black poetics of re(existence)” and “Latin American theater (beyond colonization)”, among others, was not made by chance, quite the opposite: they are landmarks of our editorial choice into resisting.
However, this victory of life would not have been possible without the concrete revolutionary praxis of a few people who donated a bit of their time and their excellent work without receiving absolutely no compensation – like Éden Peretta, responsible for our wonderful covers and author of the journal’s beautiful graphic design; Leandro Pires, who always collaborated with French and English proofreading; Tamira Mantovani, Spanish-language proofreader and guest co-editor on at least three issues; and Estela Willeman, proofreader, advisor and friend. To you, my “THANK YOU SO MUCH”!
Of course, this achievement would not have been possible without the precious collaboration of our guest editors and their proposals for current, thought-provoking, and necessary topics. And, obviously, Ephemera would not exist without the intellectual investment of our countless authors, home and overseas, who decided to publish and wanted to believe in a new, unscored journal… To you, I leave not only a THANK YOU, but above all my recognition for the shared excellence and credibility given to Ephemera. However, most of all, I would like to thank the reviewers: relevant scholars and specialists in their respective areas of knowledge, who invested their time and energy, over these years, through careful evaluations, which allowed the level of rigor that the journal reached. Your participation made this A1 possible. Few of us get to know how precious a good review is and how difficult it is to get peers not only with the necessary expertise, but – primarily – the availability for such a complex work, however invisible and unpaid. This A1 score was also built by each and every one of you: guest editors, authors and reviewers!
Here is something else: after five years of hard and exhausting work, I believe I have satisfactorily fulfilled my role here. Then I say goodbye to the editorship of the now consolidated Ephemera journal. This is my farewell gift to Performing Arts Graduate Program, from Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil. To our former colleague, Éden Peretta, our longtime partner and natural successor, I leave my best wishes for success in a historic moment that, I hope, will bring less political upheavals and challenges than the last six years, but the reconstruction of social values and the necessary appreciation of the humanities and sciences instead.
Long live Ephemera!
Luciana da Costa Dias
(Editor-in-Chief 2018-2022)
* Qualis Periódicos is an official Brazilian system that classifies scientific journals according to levels of quality and impact of the contents of the publications. It is maintained by “Higher Education Personnel Improvement Coordination” (CAPES) from Secretary of education (MEC), Brazil.
