Building on Tradition, Looking Ahead: Introducing New Editors‐in‐Chief

We are honored to follow our colleague, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus, John Fraser, in leading Curator: The Museum Journal. Our field owes him a debt, as does Wiley Publishing, for nine years of service. We are grateful for his sage guidance as we enter this work; we could not do so without him. We do not undertake the Editors-in-Chief position lightly, and we know we have big shoes to fill as we move into this role. We follow a line of Editors-in-Chief dedicated to enhancing the prestige of our Journal: Harry L. Shapiro, Thomas D. Nicholson, Samuel M. Taylor, Zahava Doering, and John Fraser. We are thankful to be joined by our Associate Editors and Editorial Board, a team of museum professionals and theorists dedicated to excellence in the museum field. While our Journal has highlighted the merit of museum professionals, their value predates its founding in 1958. Since then, our profession has evolved, and so has the Journal. Yet, throughout our history, we have not wavered in our commitment to museum professionals. Our authors, reviewers, and editorial board push the edges of museum practice. Museum professionals depend on the wealth of information and encouragement that Curator: The Museum Journal provides. As our profession advances, we will emphasize progressive practices, addressing the movements shaping our field and the evolving roles of museum professionals. To do this, we will continue our trajectory, moving beyond the published writers well known within our field. We seek a growing cadre of museum practitioners, researchers, and theorists at every stage of their careers. We offer a platform for exploration, debate, and discussion of the current curatorial practices. Our readers need to hear from museum professionals, people in the trenches of our work—people who rarely write and publish their efforts. We call on those who attend local museum conferences and care for small- and medium-sized collections to share their experiences and practices. We hear from the “big” museums and the well-known names; we welcome their continued submissions. Yet most museums are small in size and filled with wisdom—it is time they stepped out of the shadows. We are a platform for new and early-career museum professionals starting their journey and interpreting older practices for our current times. We want to hear from the future, the voices of our museum program students, eager to learn and change the field. We have colleagues with specialties outside the museum field who provide services to our museums—such as architects, educators, and sustainability experts—and we offer a place for their outside perspectives on our practice. We must hear from those new voices as they are the future of our field. We have a duty to be the platform for a spectrum of experiences and knowledges. Our future depends on a platform that provides a spectrum of experiences and knowledges, and for that we call on you. For those who feel their writing is not submission-worthy, we want to support your efforts through training programs and help you through a process that is not as daunting as it seems. We value the voices of all museum professionals, from household names, as it were, to the quiet, previously unheard. As a field, we are not a monolith, and this Journal will be diverse in the voices we hear. As begun by our immediate predecessors, John Fraser and Zahava Doering, we will further a Journal that crosses geopolitical lines. We will continue the Journal's tradition of seeking authors and reviewers from the global south. We will carry on providing side-by-side language publications, a process in which the original language and the English translation reside together in our pages. We shake off Western-Eurocentric museum practices that emphasize a history of oppression and call for those practicing in other areas and in other ways. To that end, our platform seeks diverse and alternative epistemologies in research and practice. We intend to be a beacon of inclusive journals, emphasizing the stories museums tell about themselves, their collections, and people. We will bring to the forefront practices that contest assumptions around class, race, gender, sexuality, and dis/ability. Our platform challenges the biases inherent in our collection management systems, curatorial practices, and knowledge infrastructures. We recognize the uniqueness of our museums and, simultaneously, the threads that connect our similar practices. Our world faces new challenges, ones never before encountered by museums: a rapidly changing climate, a deluge of technological advancements, and the mobility of people and objects. In addition to these changes, we continue to tackle the devastations of war, the oppressions of peoples, and political upheaval. Our Journal has published special issues on these subjects, including incarceration, Black Lives Matter, and war crimes. It is time to bring these issues into the mainstream of our Journal. As we enter a challenging era in museum history, we undertake our positions knowing that we, individually and collectively, have an opportunity to change our field. We call on you to write articles and review the works of others. When we reach out to you, answer the call to serve our museum professional community and expand the body of research literature—this Journal works because of you. As your EICs, we welcome the opportunity to lead this Journal, and we are honored to work alongside you.