Mission Statement
Allegra Lab is a peer-reviewed anthropology journal concerned with making the world (un)safe for human (in)difference. It promotes public anthropology by publishing scholarship that seeks to enliven the dead space between more conventional academic outputs and fast moving public debates. Allegra Lab maintains that this space is where intellectual innovation happens at its best. We seek to provide contributors with the chance to showcase original critical thinking on issues affecting the world today. We welcome contributions in different formats (essays, fieldnotes, book and film reviews, thematic threads, conversations, fictions) that speak to pressing sociopolitical concerns, broadly informed by the beauty of ethnography and the critical potential of anthropology.Â
Founded in 2013, Allegra Lab has evolved into an independent, multimodal, open-access, publication platform open to a broad range of textual and non-textual submissions including podcasts, videos, audio recordings, photos, drawings, graphic novels, and virtual objects. Multimodal anthropology traverses across all submission types (e.g. an essay is an essay, whether it is done through photos or texts, a book review is a book review, whether it is produced via podcast or text and so on).
Run independently from traditional for-profit publishers, Allegra Lab is organised as a collective, working against hierarchical practices of gatekeeping. It has pioneered a dialogical, trust-based model of care review, including review protocols for non-textual submissions, to open up new spaces for the nurturing of ideas and the co-production of knowledge. In neoliberal academia, such acts of solidarity become radical.
Legal Structure
Allegralaboratory.net is owned by Les Indépendantes, a Swiss non-profit association, which specialises in science communication, education and research. All donations received are spent to cover running costs, including website maintenance and hosting.
All Allegra editors work on a voluntary basis. Allegralaboratory.net neither pays for its contributions nor reserves copyright for its content. Until 5 April 2021, contributions on Allegra Lab were published under a CC-BY license. Since then, we publish under a CC-BY-NC licence (See Contributor Guidelines).