A Note from the Editorial Board

Dear Readers, 

Each year, SPARK provides space for its editors to share their reflections on the year’s theme. It is with excitement that we, the editors, present the latest letter to our readers, based on the experience of working on this fifth volume. We hope that the letter helps you understand the rationale behind the edition.

Editors have spent the past few months shepherding a kaleidoscope of pieces. Our contributors share the belief in the productive power of difference, be it in knowledge creation, community formation, or self-reflection. It is evident from working with the contributors’ pieces that solidarity is forged not in the absence of difference, but within it. 

Below SPARK editors give their thoughts on difference and the process of helping develop the pieces in this issue. 

Zainab: 

I took a class called Global Medicinals in my freshman year of college. It was co-taught by a historian and a biologist, and it fundamentally altered how I think about knowledge systems different from my own. We investigated healing traditions from around the world, from Japanese Kampo, to Indian Ayurveda, to my family’s Nigerian herbalism. We compared and contrasted them to the biomedical model of health that tends to be associated with hospitals and white coats. Until this point, my education had championed medical discoveries generated in a lab or “empirically validated” in an academic institution. While these discoveries have their place and value, too often they are pedestaled while traditional healers are looked down upon. Randomized clinical trials are not the sole arbiter of validity. Alternate paradigms of healing exist, thrive, and should not be discounted. “Different” is not synonymous with “wrong.” 

This informs my current training as a therapist. I’m learning how to help people find the type of well-being that works for them. I regularly encounter clients with worldviews completely different from my own. My job in the therapy room is not to discount anyone’s lived experience simply because it’s unfamiliar. My biases are meant to be left at the door. 

Similarly, my approach to editing is tempered with an understanding that my opinions are not law. There is a distinction between suggestions I believe will actually help strengthen a piece, and suggestions borne from what I would do if I were the writer. Realizing this (and leaning on the former) made me a much more effective editor. Part of what drew me to SPARK was a value alignment; I loved the idea of a space where researchers could share their work in the way they wanted to, and I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this team. 

John: 

Students tend to mostly read within their discipline in graduate school.  True, some programs at the University of Minnesota straddle multiple fields, but I think many students only take a course in an outside department as part of their degree requirements. Serving as editor for SPARK has exposed me to many topics far afield from my graduate studies in history. Historians typically form connections with their departments, in the locales they study, research institutions like archives and libraries, and through conferences and other meetings. The production of knowledge is thus a communal effort, reflecting the input of the people and places with whom we interact. 

Editing for SPARK has shown me the ways in which a similar process of collaboration takes place in other fields. Our contributors are sharing stories involving participatory-based research, ethnographic fieldwork, and personal interviews. The means of conveying the knowledge to the university community and beyond are bountiful.

This experience has deepened my appreciation for the diversity of methodologies and perspectives that shape academic inquiry across disciplines. Editing for SPARK has not only broadened my intellectual horizons, but also reaffirmed the importance of fostering scholarly communities that are inclusive, curious, and collaborative.

Maija: 

When I was a graduate student, I read a book for a cultural studies class that asked us to critically examine what it means to encounter something radically different from the Self; in other words, what does it mean to encounter something Other. Rather than defining the Other through a negative binary in relation to the Self, we wrestled with the possibilities of encountering something Other on its own terms. The idea of how we experience and understand something very different from the self has always stayed with me.

 As an editor for SPARK, I work with contributors who are in starkly different disciplines from my training as a cultural dance historian and whose lived experiences and histories are frequently distant from my own. Yet, I’ve come to view these differences as opportunities for reflection, transformation, and possibilities of shared allyship. Several of the pieces I worked on addressed the ways in which the durability of dominant systems of power and legacies of colonialism, both within and beyond our institutional borders, establish difference as a way to reduce cultural forms of knowledge production and entire peoples as less than. Yet, as these research stories reveal, encounters with difference are never static or one-sided. Difference moves us, stretches us across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, providing opportunities to find strength and knowledge in unexpected friendships and grow our relations to the multiple histories that shape how we move through the world and experience a shared humanity. 

Risa: 

Raised in a multiracial, multicultural family, I’ve always navigated multiple ways of knowing and being in the world. That upbringing shaped how I approach scholarship: with deep curiosity, a commitment to accessibility, and a constant questioning of whose knowledge counts. As a first-generation graduate student, I’ve had to learn how to translate the often-insular language of academia—not just for myself, but also for my communities and students. Editing for SPARK is a space where that commitment to accessibility and equity comes to life for me. I believe that our work as scholars does not and should not end with research—it extends to how we communicate, collaborate, and care. Helping others shape their writing for broader audiences feels like both a political and personal act of connection.

Hannah Jo:

For people of culture (POCs) in the so-called United States, our experiences of “being different” equip us to be critical, to see nuance, to rebel against oppressive norms, and to appreciate diversity. This is what I have noticed as an editor for SPARK this year. Contributors who I worked with in this issue shared a common thread of experiencing school as a place that institutionalizes a dominant, oppressive culture. From grade school to grad school, contributors have noticed difference because they are different—at least that’s what school repeatedly tells them. I feel a sense of solidarity when reading this year’s batch of essays, poems, and zines. Bento box lunches, Ojibwemowin dreams, and boats crossing the Mekong—these are distinct cultural experiences completely unrelated to my own. Yet, it’s this very multiplicity of cultural resistance and resurgence which resonates. The journey through school breaks and then remakes our spirits; disciplines us away from and then back to our inherited/inherent ways of being and knowing. As we grow into so-called “researchers,” meant to carve out unique spaces in our fields, our differences, which they once tried to diminish, become our greatest sources of knowledge. Difference sharpens our perceptions of the world. 

“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”

We thank our readers for taking the time to participate in these ongoing conversations. We hope that the pieces in this volume provoke reflections on your experiences with difference. 

In solidarity, 

The SPARK Editorial Team