Crossings was established to encourage and openly facilitate collaborative projects which, while rigorous in practice and astute in vision, are neither adjudicated by, nor answerable to, purely academic protocols. That is to say, we understand the purpose of our journal to be the bringing together of academics and non-academics, technicians and theorists, artists and policy makers, within selected fields of inquiry in order that their ideas—textual, interactive, imagistic—may be exchanged and that through this exchange fruitful collaborations might be forged.

How, for instance, might different areas of study form productive intellectual work groups and through these formations begin to pursue innovative questions? How might postcolonial studies pair itself with gender studies, or political observers find themselves in dialog with architects? How might gay and lesbian studies inform rhetoric programs, or photo journalists facilitate the work of ethicists? How might sixteenth-century studies inform, as well as be informed by, twentieth-century studies? In other words, how might one think about the “journal” as more than a textual extension of an academic infrastructure and begin to think of it as a tool for the construction of an intellectual public space in which its participants (readers and contributors alike) are committed to cooperative engagement with people outside their disciplinary domain. In what way might these unlikely pairings and the collaborative hybrids they constitute assist us in abandoning the presumptive notion of disciplinary integrity that we both regularly adhere to and often find an insulating comfort in.

Crossings, therefore, seeks to function outside the disciplinary model of knowledge, not because this model is intrinsically flawed or because it does not have its own set of virtues, but because we believe there ought to be spaces for thinking about issues that are not governed by disciplinary divisions. It is for this reason that we refer to our journal as “counter-disciplinary.” For us the best possible outcome of our publication would be the development of unique joint projects which, while utilizing our journal as a conduit for establishing contacts, evolve on their own into independent endeavors. It is our hope that all those who contribute to our journal will be open and willing to receive solicitations from readers who seek to work with them on relevant projects and we as editors will do our best to facilitate these lines of professional communication and the active collaborations they pursue.