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And just like that, Sarah Jones and Rebecca Schmor are in charge.

As regular contributors to the , but also frequent collaborators on academic projects, they responded to a call for a new editor with a measured enthusiasm.

“We were initially drawn to them because of the non-anonymized peer review: Since we were both students at the time, we saw it as a chance to grow as academic writers and get transparent feedback beyond the traditional, closed-door peer review used by many other journals in the field,” said co-editor Jones, an OISE doctoral candidate.

J-BILD is a semi-annual open access, collaborative peer-review journal which publishes scholarly works from all stages of the research cycle – including research proposals, literature reviews, research articles, and book/article reviews.

The journal aims to promote academic scholarship and critical discourse related to issues of belonging, identity, language and diversity, particularly within the fields of Education, Sociolinguistics, Critical Sociolinguistics, Applied Linguistics, and Linguistic Anthropology.

“The J-BILD community made us feel welcome and valued, and we both knew we wanted to contribute to the journal in some capacity, either as reviewers or editors. We had also edited a book together the year before, so we knew we had something to offer as co-editors,” explained Jones.

The call for an editor specifically asked for a pair of applicants. Jones and Schmor’s professional partnership and collective experience both with J-BILD and with academic editing made it an easy decision to apply.

“We hadn't worked on a big project together in a while, and we were nearing the end of our tenure as OISE students,” described Schmor, who earned her PhD in 2024. “We had done a lot of learning and growing, together and individually, during our doctoral studies, and so we both felt ready to take on a more professional, non-student role and begin to explore our respective post-PhD paths.”

From their first meeting with the founding J-BILD editors, they knew it was the perfect fit for them in terms of their academic values and principles.

OISE asked the partners a number of questions about their collaborations, past and present, and their vision for their J-BILD tenure. The following questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

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Jones: Rebecca has said it really beautifully already. We have been collaborating for almost five years now, and what started as a way to support each other in developing our academic identities has since developed into a rich collaborative partnership that is both professionally fruitful and rooted in deep personal admiration for each other. We advocate for, challenge, and engage with each other (like Rebecca has already mentioned) as “critical friends”, and our partnership has been a powerful drive for me. I continue to be deeply grateful, and am honoured that we are carrying this orientation to collegiality and community with us to J-BILD.

How did your time at OISE (with each other) refine you for the task of editing J-BILD?

Jones: One thing we both appreciated about our time at OISE was the autonomy. We were each supported by our supervisors to consider our individual strengths and pursue our own avenues for growth. For example, when we decided we wanted to edit a book together, one of our supervisors agreed to come on as a co-editor and the other contributed the afterword. Nothing was prescribed and no one insisted there was one way to be successful in academia. We are grateful to have been given opportunities without expectations, as well as a safe place to develop our skills around established scholars who were also available mentors.

The second big takeaway from OISE was a writing class we took together taught by Clare Kosnik, a professor in the department of curriculum, teaching & learning at OISE. Kosnik taught us to treat all writing as a work-in-progress and to use everything as an opportunity for learning. Kosnik had us share our writing often and early, which mitigated feelings of imposterism or vulnerability. In many ways, this helped shape our approach to writing and editing, and informs our commitment to J-BILD’s model of  established by the founding editors.

Is your pedagogical/research approach any different from how you would approach J-BILD work? 

Schmor: Our own research approaches align with and embody J-BILD values in several ways. I am committed to research that interrogates and disrupts harmful norms and practices (such as deficit-based views of learners or languages) not only thematically but also in the selection and employment of empirical methods. The qualitative methods I have used and created are ones that honour and value the voices and experiences of the participants and communities involved - it is important to me that J-BILD also practices what it preaches.

Jones: My research is all about dynamic, shifting language practices, and how those are used to achieve complex interactional goals. My research repertoire is eclectic and I value diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to inquiry. As an educator, I know how important it is for every voice to feel heard, to feel valued, and to be given opportunities for growth. I’m committed to authentic dialogue and diversity in scholarship, and this coupled with conscientious curiosity informs my editorial approach to J-BILD. Schmor and I share many of the same research values, but our portfolios are distinct, and I think this strengthens our collective contribution to the journal.

What kind of questions does J-BILD address? What do you like about the journal?

Schmor: J-BILD addresses research questions at the intersection of its core themes of belonging, identity, language, and diversity. These themes often extend to educational and professional settings, exploring for instance how language impacts learning, or how identity affects hiring. Many J-BILD contributors are social scientists engaged in critical inquiries that seek to improve the livelihoods of systemically excluded communities. Much of J-BILD’s scholarship is qualitative in nature, documenting deeply human accounts of diverse lived experiences that help to critically deconstruct and reimagine harmful social structures, though a wide range of empirical approaches is represented and valued. 

How can J-BILD help facilitate/translate these ideas into concrete actions in the field?

Schmor: As an interdisciplinary scholarly community, J-BILD’s ideas reach across cultures and continents, not just in the dissemination of conceptual, empirical, and practical research implications and recommendations, but also in the act of disrupting harmful peer review practices and humanizing academic publishing through its transparent, supportive peer mentorship review model.

What would you like to achieve as editors of the journal? How do you think each of you would like to grow in this time? 

Schmor: I see this as an opportunity to develop and model kind leadership practices that gently disrupt academic norms while fiercely supporting the growth of other scholars. My intention is to both expand the reach of J-BILD’s ideas through social media (more details below) and extend the J-BILD mentorship experience to more scholars while continuing to provide personal feedback, mentorship, and learning opportunities throughout the publication process. I expect one area of growth to involve navigating the nuances around transparent peer review and existing scholarly networks, ensuring that all J-BILD contributors, including authors, peer mentors, and copy editors, feel comfortable, respected, and supported, while also ensuring that peer review is rooted in rigour and integrity. As we encounter these inevitable challenges, I know we will grow as both editors and people, and strengthen our commitment to the journal’s values as well as our personal convictions.

Jones: My goals are similar. In addition to the areas Schmor has already mentioned, I’ve been doing a lot of learning about author copyrights and intellectual property. J-BILD already has policies in place that protect author autonomy, and I think it’s important to stay critically engaged with those policies amid shifts in technology and ideologies around data sovereignty. Another thing I’d like to see more often is publishing in non-official languages. Scholars deserve to engage with their work in their home language(s), and that includes writing and sharing their knowledge with others. We are actively working on ways to support authors to publish in their choice of language, particularly for those working in Indigenous or under-represented languages. Staying actively engaged with practices of leadership, inclusivity, transparency, and integrity is at the heart of our vision for this journal. This co-editing endeavour will inevitably open opportunities for us to grow individually and together, likely in ways we can’t begin to anticipate.

Why are values of collaboration and accessibility so crucial to your academic values?

Jones: Academia is a notoriously competitive and siloed place, and can be hard to navigate. For new and emerging scholars in particular, it can be hard to position yourself and understand some of the decisions that are crucial for academic success, whether that is tenure or simply knowledge-sharing. And yet collaboration and resource-sharing have been a huge part of our academic journeys. Our partnership has helped us thrive, both as a team and as individuals who support and advocate for each other, and our orientation to authentic community-building (not just networking) has helped us cultivate meaningful connections with other scholars. We both feel strongly that a healthy community succeeds by investing in itself as a whole, and not just bolstering individual members. We are invested in our future colleagues and in the quality of scholarship and research being done in our fields. Finally, we feel strongly that our community deserves access to that knowledge, without barriers created by paywalls or anonymized review processes.

What are you looking forward to as editors the most? 

Jones: I love being part of the current conversations about the academic publishing landscape. This is an exciting time for publishing. GenAI issues are helping us reconceptualize what academic integrity really means, and reminding us to critically engage with our thinking and our writing. Open scholarship is being actively promoted by major Canadian funding agencies, and this has prompted conversations around how accessible open scholarship really is, which I hope will lead to a wider range of options for both writers and readers. Finally, there is a lot of dialogue right now that is helping to problematize peer review, and there is debate in several fields about how peer review could be reimagined to better serve as an equitable, accessible, and even pedagogical (gate-keeping) practice. Long-held norms and assumptions are gently being disrupted right now, and I am so looking forward to being here and participating in that disruption.

Schmor: With one issue already under our belts (under the mentorship of the J-BILD founders), I look forward to building on the core values of the journal in future issues, with a particular goal of extending accessibility beyond academic circles. Part of this goal includes publishing plain-language summaries of J-BILD articles on the  to both broaden and maximize the reach of the published research. One under-explored accessibility barrier is the time it takes to read academic articles, in addition to the academic language used. As the journal evolves, we remain committed to exploring avenues for reducing these barriers and disseminating J-BILD research in diverse and non-traditional modes to help it reach more of the communities impacted by the themes and studies taken up in the journal.