Race/Ethnicity: Multidisciplinary Global Contexts publishes fresh, innovative thinking on the challenges and opportunities presented by race and ethnicity in the 21st century. Most scholarly journals on race and ethnicity are devoted to certain disciplines, specific geographical locations, singular racial or ethnic identities, or a particular set of issues. They contribute immeasurably to our vital conversation on race and ethnicity, but very few, if any, allow for truly multidisciplinary and comprehensive explorations of the interrelated racial, racialized, and racializing phenomena that typify our increasingly interconnected world. Race/Ethnicity offers a venue that encourages and accommodates heterogeneous thinking about the relationships between race, place, power, and meaning in the contemporary world. Contributors include researchers from inside and outside the academy, as well as advocates, activists, and practitioners of all kinds. With respect to these roles, many contributors will be both/and, rather than either/or. The journal's purpose is to move us toward a better understanding of the dynamics of racial and ethnic hierarchies and to help us fashion the tools needed to dismantle them.

Race/Ethnicity distinguishes its project from other journals in the field through a number of interventionist conceptual characteristics.

Thematic Organization
Foregrounding thematic organization, rather than assembling randomly collected articles, the journal’s conceptual framework engenders new ways of approaching the study of race and ethnicity. Thematic organization provides both breadth and depth in the treatment of one specific issue and evades problems attendant to disciplinarily-framed scholarship.

Radical Interdisciplinarity
The journal promotes multifaceted analysis which works across disciplinary boundaries to consider how race and ethnicity are simultaneously affected by the different vectors of power—economic, political, social, geographic, legal, discursive—operating in culture. In accordance, Race/Ethnicity solicits and publishes material in the humanities and social sciences. It also extends beyond more traditional interdisciplinary areas by integrating less commonly cited disciplines of “science” more thoroughly into the scope of race and ethnic studies. Race/Ethnicity also encourages scholarship in the fields of public health, economics, geography, and biological sciences.

A Conceptualization of Racialization as In-Process
By focusing on processes of racialization and ethnicization, the journal evades treatment of race and ethnicity as preconstituted and static categories. Recent scholarship has enumerated the problems attendant to static conceptualizations of race, instead proffering a theory of racialization that forms, shifts, and reshapes in accordance with operations of power. Race/Ethnicity provides a scholarly space for such methodological approaches that give attention to the social production of racialization and ethnicization within specific and contingent historical moments.  

A Consideration of the Global Context
Race/Ethnicity extends its analytical scope beyond national boundaries. In an increasingly globalizing world, the boundaries of nation-states remain insufficient for comprehensively exploring interrelated cultural, economic, and social formations of race and ethnicity. As scholars have argued, local racialized practices are the result of global communications, economic relationships, and interstate exchanges. Accordingly, the journal encourages scholarly analysis that not only crosses national boundaries and situates analysis within transnational economic flows, but also encourages comparative methodologies that analyze and explain similarities and differences across cultures.

Attention to Grassroots and Community Knowledge
While Race/Ethnicity is primarily a forum for academic scholarship, the journal seeks to integrate the important knowledge generated through activist practitioners and grassroots organizing.