A Note from the Editorial Board

Dear Readers, 

W

hen the SPARK editorial board came together in October to determine a theme for this year’s issue, we had a lot on our minds and hearts. We discussed many possible themes: the interplay of grief/joy, past/future, solidarity/othering, ableism/inclusivity, and more. For the underrepresented communities that SPARK serves, so much pain and trauma is on the surface today, from legacy systems like borders and colonialism, to expanding threats like climate disasters and neofascism. And shortly after writing the call for submissions, Operation Metro Surge targeted Minneapolis. Ultimately, we questioned and awed at how our communities create joy even in intense social moments like this one. We wondered how the ancestors, and their survivance, supported us. And we dreamed, hoped, and felt activated for the future. Thus a theme arose: Legacies, Inheritance, Futures. The collection of art, stories, and scholarship from across the diasporas in this year’s issue engage with this theme in intimate and intersectional ways, bringing to light how experiences in academia can both limit and support communities and cultural connections. Below SPARK editors give their thoughts on legacies, inheritance, futures and the process of helping develop pieces in this issue.

John Dieck:

For me, the theme “Legacies, Inheritances, and Futures” is inseparable from the discipline of history itself—a reminder that the archive is never inert, that it breathes unevenly through the present. 

As a historian trained to trace the afterlives of empire, commodities, and power, I am attuned to how what appears settled is in fact still unfolding: colonial policies that sediment into markets, categories that linger in language, violences that reorganize themselves under new names. To edit in this moment, amid a politically tumultuous United States where histories are actively contested, redacted, and weaponized, is to recognize inheritance as both burden and method. It is also deeply personal. As the child of an immigrant mother, I carry a lineage shaped by movement, precarity, and reinvention; an inheritance not only of memory, but of translation—between languages, between worlds, between what is remembered and what must be imagined. Editing these pieces, I found myself asking not just what we inherit, but what we are compelled to interpret, to refuse, to reassemble into something livable.

Isabella Irtifa:

The theme “Legacies, Inheritances, and Futures” asks us to consider how care and resistance move across generations. In this volume, contributors grapple with the ongoing trauma of u.s. imperialism and how these histories shape our relationships to our bodies, land, and to one another. This theme led me to reflect on qahr, () an Arabic term that names a collective, inherited experience of heartbreak and rage born from violence that reverberates through generations. Through this, grief and (be)longing become ways of knowing and understanding ourselves in relation to what we carry forward. The contributors powerfully reveal how inheritance is negotiated, whether through language, parenthood, or expression, offering forms of storytelling that resist extraction while reaching toward connection. 

SPARK is a relational practice, and is about listening and being accountable to the stories entrusted in these pages. In this volume, contributors explore building solidarities that sustain us. These solidarities take shape in how we hold one another and reclaim time stolen by imprisonment, displacement, and erasure through presence and care. Together, these pieces demonstrate that the futures we collectively imagine open spaces for radical transformation. 

Hannah Jo King:

Trauma can play tricks on our memory. Memories can get stuck in time, their context misplaced through a continual loop of the past. Yet memory is also a source of reprieve and joy and knowledge. In remembering our true selves, our ancestors and cultures, memory is intergenerational resistance and resurgence. Moving through memory in safe, collective ways can heal the past and offer hope to the future. What do we want the future generations to remember about us? How can the past or the future support us in the trauma of now? These are the questions and reflections that sit with me after serving as a SPARK editor this year. 

Recently, I’ve been part of collective efforts to make go-bags. With comrades, with friends, with my students. And while this practice is growing in popularity thanks to Octavia Butler and climate justice leaders like Roxxanne O’Brien, CMEJ Minneapolis, adrienne marie brown and Autumn Brown, the historian Tiya Miles taught me that go bag/runny sacks are in fact an old technology, a practice among the slave/fugitive generation (All that She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake). I tell my students that emergency preparedness is scary in the beginning: imagining it, packing away each item you’ll need, literally walking through the steps to keep you safe; but that over time it can be empowering. Preparing gives us muscle memory, perhaps even ancestral memory. It helps us form community and opens our eyes to the crises in front of us. Having this resource in place lets us shift energy, moving from fear and paralysis to strategy and action. I’m in awe of the survivance of my ancestors. Of what I call their Black ecologies of survival. Because of their legacy I have the courage to prepare for a liberated future.

Risa Lama-Luther:

For me, this year’s theme came to feel less like a linear progression and more like an ongoing negotiation—one that is lived, contested, and continually remade. Across the issue, inheritance was not something simply received, but something actively taken up, resisted, and reworked. Legacies did not appear as stable or singular; rather, they were remembered unevenly, carried differently and differentially across bodies and generations, and, at times, contested or deeply loved. What emerged was a sense that inheritance can be both grounding and burdensome, offering belonging while also demanding navigation. In turn, the futures imagined in these works were not clean or resolved, but relational and unfinished; dependent on who is allowed to belong, whose knowledge is recognized, and how communities move forward together.

Editing pushed me to reconsider what it means to engage this theme in practice. Rather than guiding contributors toward coherence or resolution, many pieces held contradiction—between past and present, harm and care, belonging and exclusion—and my role became one of supporting that complexity rather than smoothing it out. This reinforced how SPARK’s editorial approach differs from more traditional academic publishing: it’s not about making pieces conform, but about helping contributors articulate their intentions while preserving the integrity of their voice and method. In doing so, SPARK creates space for forms of knowledge often marginalized in the academy—memoir, poetry, visual archives—and treats them as central.

This year’s volume also felt deeply personal. Navigating my own doctoral training alongside motherhood for the first time, I found myself thinking not only about academic/professional legacies, but about what I am carrying forward, and what I hope to remake, for my child. The questions at the center of this issue became ones I could not keep at a distance: what do we inherit, what do we refuse, and what do we make possible for those who come after us?

Lindsey Willow Smith:

Beginning the editorial process while under ICE Occupation and as our community continues to struggle for liberation for all of our neighbors, the responsibility of inheritance stood out in these pieces. Inheritance does not come lying down or closed eyed. I was honored to serve as an editor for the authors who contributed to this issue of  SPARK and shared their inheritances of knowledge with me.

Inheritance as a broad category captures many moments of passages of knowledges. Viewing inheritance as a type of relation, several of the pieces in this issue show ways that inheritances inside and outside of the academy shape our lives. Reimaging inheritance as a responsibility to future generations, several of the authors discuss the ways their previous generations of ancestors and academics have shaped their living situations, and their hopes for the future generations. Reflecting on this as an editor, I think of all of my relations I bring with me in all of the work I do. As an Ojibwe woman and descendant of boarding school survivors, I consider what my ancestors’ prayers for me are. The Ojibwe word aanikoobijigan means both great grandparent and great grandchild, connecting us through generations as one and the same; my ancestors are me, I am one of the future ancestors, my children will be my ancestors–we are all inheriting each other’s love. Enacting inheritance in the present through this form of responsibility makes this issue of  SPARK alive with these hopes.