FROM THE EDITOR

t’s somewhat inevitable—and I think, forgivable—that I’m going to wax nostalgic in my final foreword, but hopefully it’s still a worthwhile reflection. AdHoc started in a serendipitous way. At the time I was living with co-founder, Kristen Loveland, CC ’06, when complaining about Spectator coverage, we thought we’d try our own hand at starting a publication. We wanted it to be dedicated to “progressive” issues with a tendency towards analysis rather than stenography. It was an uncertain and audacious project. We didn’t exactly know what “progressive” meant, but we believed that somewhere in the process, we would happen upon it. I think we were right.

Our first issue was a progressive chocolate box of issues: from environmental concerns in the West Harlem expansion to abortion rights to intelligent design rhetoric, with some fiction thrown into the mix. It looked aesthetically painful with a cover that made my teeth hurt. But I loved it because it was ours—the result of a broad collaboration of different thinkers.

The issues have not changed much, but our manner of articulating them has. The West Harlem expansion is still ever-present, but now situated within the context of the expansions of other universities in Emma Jacobs’ “Growing Pains” (p. 10). Karen Leung, in “Writing Over the White-Out” (p. 17) tackles the “representation problem” in mainstream campus publications and suggests how institutions should re-think these questions of (mis)representation. Complementing the article is Zoe Towns’ “Ethnic Studies Strife” (p. 14), which describes student efforts to create scholarly space for Ethnic Studies. Past themes come back too: consumption in the form of ovaries (p. 23), local community struggles where the battleground takes place in garden spaces (p. 27), and financial aid reform for General Studies students (p. 12).

AdHoc was never my entire life. While it required sleepless nights and countless emails, it was only one way I thought about structures of inequality, and more importantly, how to undo them. As the editorial board changes, so too does the magazine. As editor I tried to ensure the marginal issues were not left there, which meant that we, as a magazine, had to be self-critical enough to realize we were not free from “the system.” Since we did not work under a guise of “objectivity” we had to ask: Why do we write? Implicit in that question is: What does our writing accomplish?

Writing is a form of praxis, and like any action, it either disrupts or reinforces hierarchy. If we are building a progressive coalition and bringing together a diverse collection of thinkers and activists, then we must arm ourselves with knowledge and be unafraid to challenge the powers that be.

E. Alex Jung,
Editor