Idea: Scholarly journal for activism & social change
I've been reading about the history of Physics over the last 120 years, and a lot happens through scholarly journals. Physicists do experimental research, craft theories, come up with new mathematical formulas, and they write papers and submit them to scholarly journals. Other physicists read these papers, dismiss ideas they don't like (more on this in an upcoming book review), and build upon or test ideas they're interested in.
Much of the progress of science seems to be a result of these scholarly journals.
There was a group of physicists that was somewhat rebellious, which formed a new semi-scholarly journal meant as sort of a pre-publication for controversial ideas, so that thoughts & theories could be discussed, even if they weren't a proper fit for the more established and orthodox journals.
And this SPARKED AN IDEA. An idea that may already exist in the world, idk.
But it would be so sick to have a journal like that for social change and activism. I think it would be best separated into two distinct journals.
One journal would focus on societal problems and what solutions are actually attempted. Like, take a city with a lot of gun crime, leaders implemented some new policies, and saw a reduction in that gun crime. An article would describe the issue in that city, what the policies actually did, and the outcome of those policies.
The other journal would be focused on the activism side - community members & activists advocating for policy changes. Take the same example of a city with high gun crime, and there's a group with policy ideas that would hopefully address the gun crime. An article in this journal would go over the process the group took to form itself, put together their proposals, and the advocacy efforts that eventually got city leaders to adopt those policies.
I have engaged in a fair bit of advocacy and activism myself, and there's at least three articles I would want to submit to the activist journal. One would be about an incredibly easy and successful effort to overturn a discriminatory housing policy. Another would be about getting Pride Fest off the ground in my community, along with the successes and failures of those organizing efforts. A third would be about an abortion rights group I co-organized, which was far less successful. There's possibly other articles I would be interested in submitting too.
Such journals would need to take certain stances about human rights, but that would get tricky. The racists are often extremely effective at making change happen. Leftists could learn from their efforts. But the journal shouldn't be promoting any sort of bigotry. So idunno where you'd wanna draw the line on that. It also shouldn't necessarily be leftist - a lot of important issues are decidedly not leftist - right to repair, clean air & water, access to healthcare.
Certain approaches are leftist, certain solutions are leftist, but not all successful approaches and solutions are, and so such a journal probably shouldn't be "leftist", even if it supports certain human rights that U.S. Republicans are opposed to.