Mona Oraby

I’ve long been interested in how we think about and conceptualize scholarly ideas. As editor, I have worked with academics at all career stages to convey specialist knowledge using more accessible language. Even after multiple rounds of developmental editing, barriers to reader engagement sometimes remain. This has partly to do with the nature of scholarly argumentation. Images can help to overcome these barriers, enabling authors to reach a wider audience.

Tape recorder used by Malcolm X. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. In what follows, Mona Oraby, longtime editor of The Immanent Frame, and Najha Zigbi-Johnson, editor of Mapping Malcolm, discuss Malcolm X’s legacy, bridging academic scholarship and community-based intellectual work, editorial practice, and the need for critical, transdisciplinary research.

In the early months of 2023, Jewish Israelis flooded the streets of Israel in a massive display of civil disobedience to save their “Jewish democracy.” They referred to the crumbling of democratic checks and balances as a “judicial coup” engineered by an extremist coalition that came to power in the Knesset at the end of 2022.