Mission Statement
Allegra began in 2013 as a small group of renegade anthropologists creating a voice for themselves in the margins of the neoliberal academy. Today, it has become a veritable movement emboldening a large number of anthropologists and other academics to enliven the “dead space” between standard academic publication and fast moving public debates. Allegra maintains that this space is where intellectual innovation happens at its best. No great thinkers ever emerged from the quarantined space of academic disciplines where the polished aesthetic of writing for one’s colleagues (and national frameworks to evaluate excellency) takes priority over the viscerality of the issue at hand. Instead, from Rigoberta Menchù to Marx, bell hooks to Arendt, Fanon to Foucault and many others, intellectuals targeted their thinking directly at the conflicts and injustices they saw around them.
Allegra surmises that our desire to enliven the “dead space” is shared widely among anthropologists, many of whom (if not most) find themselves lacking institutional security. Material precarity, as such, is a further cause of the marginalisation of alternative perspectives. Hence, Allegra further recognizes an irony in today’s academia that plagues disciplined research: that the struggle for success within traditional academic publishing venues reproduces a steep academic hierarchy in which few people affiliated with high-profile universities command the highest citation rates and, with it, receive the greatest professional recognition. As a result, a political-economy of citational practices emerges that undercuts the breadth and depth of critical thinking inherent in the mass of marginalised academics.
Allegra seeks to provide its contributors with the chance to showcase their best critical thinking, replete with the originality of their own perspectives, on issues affecting the world today. As such, Allegra welcomes contributions in different formats that speak to pressing sociopolitical issues, broadly informed by the beauty of ethnography and the critical potential of anthropology. Allegra rejects the tyranny of metrics and hierarchical practices of gatekeeping, organising instead as a loose collective of like-minded and volunteer enthusiasts. In neoliberal academia, acts of kindness and support become radical; as such Allegra also does not follow the traditional double-blind model of peer review but opts for a dialogical, trust-based model of review to open up new spaces for the nurturing of ideas and the co-production of knowledge. Allegra’s motto “Anthropology for radical optimism” does not stem not from naiveté, but rather from a firm awareness that justice follows from open-minded inquiry.
Legal Structure
Allegralaboratory.net is hosted by Les Indépendantes (formerly Programme Indépendant de Recherche), a Swiss non-profit association founded in April 2018 and specialising in science communication, education and research. The association aims to promote women’s talents, knowledge and competencies by facilitating synergies between arts and sciences. All donations received via the website will be put on Les Indépendantes’ bank account and will be spent on the site exclusively to cover costs of website maintenance and design as well as running costs (server fees and technical web support).
All editors of the site work on a voluntary basis. Allegralaboratory.net neither pays for its contributions nor reserves copy-right for its content. Articles on Allegra were published under a CC-BY license until April 5, 2021. Since April 5, 2021, articles on Allegra are being published under a BY-NC-SA licence (See Author Guidelines).