Making Space

I have been an avid reader of Health Promotion Practice since its first issue in January 2020. Our journal was a steady source of continuing education and professional development for most of my career. Over the years and like so many others, I turned to our journal when I needed references for a paper or grant proposal, or wondered how others had solved the problem I had just encountered, or built the program I was imagining. Its contents weave throughout every public health course reading list I ever developed (and I developed a lot of them!). I was thrilled to publish (a bit) in HPP and actively encouraged others to do so. But what I have loved most about this journal is the way in which it has encouraged/guided/forced me to grow as a sentient and responsible person in a complicated and always changing/never changing context. Reading through its paper issues (when that was a thing) always brought new words and ideas and people into my everyday life—Who Knows the Streets as Well as the Homeless? (Right???). . . The R Word in Indian Country (what is that???). . . The Power of Collaborative Solutions (Tell me more!!!). I loved getting HPP in the mail, eagerly taking the issue out of its plastic wrap in my kitchen, and pouring over the table of contents to see what they had put together this time. For 18 years, successive HPP Editors Randy Schwartz, Leonard Jack, Jr., and Jesus Ramírez-Valles—and their Editorial Board colleagues—brought me worlds and tools and confidence beyond what I knew from my own practice and networks. It sounds corny, I know—but I loved this journal.

And then it was my turn.

For the past 6 years, I have had the honor and “so damn daily” responsibility ¹ of serving as the Editor ² of HPP I was excited and brimming with enthusiasm for what our journal could do and be when I applied for the position. Since then, the “HPP Village” has never let me down. Indeed, I feel like I could do this forever and still learn something new every day. But a journal is not a possession and being its editor is not a right. A journal—this journal in particular—is a human project with the opportunity to make a difference in ways that other things we do might not. Rare and powerful trimtabs such as these—journal and position—are most impactful when no one stays in place too long. Therefore, with deepest gratitude, I will soon join my colleagues as the newest of the HPP Editors Emeriti (plain language: previous editors) and pass the torch to the next runner.

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We have done a lot at HPP over the past 6 years:

We developed 36 issues plus 5 supplements, 5 focus issues, and 2 online collections

We published over 1,000 pieces, including 27 poems, and aired 145 podcast episodes

We processed over 4,000 manuscripts, engaging at least that many reviewers, many of them several times

We achieved our first impact factor earlier this year—and we did it “our way.”

Our dedicated Editorial Manager, Jeanine Robitaille, kept this all in play, transitioning to Miranda Bohl of J&J Publishing in recent months. Our Sage partners, particularly Publishing Editors Jessica Hill, Stephanie Valladao, and Tara Newby; Production Content Manager Alan Carabes; Editorial Assistant Isaac Hirsch, Account Executive Stacey Wayne, and Associate Director Lauren Hunt expertly guided us through waters that were often new to us, sometimes choppy, but always, eventually, the current we needed to realize what we envisioned. SOPHE staff, particularly former CEO M. Elaine Auld and current Interim CEO William Datema provided unfailing support for HPP on the other side of the necessary firewall that separates the business from the content of publishing. So many of the things we were able to do—the curated content, open collections, author showcases, new formats, papers in Spanish, SAGE Perspectives blog posts, to name just a few—required extra work (and likely quite a leap of faith) from these colleagues. You don’t often see their names but their fingerprints are there!

I have worked every day on HPP from a second floor room above the street in my house—by myself. But I have never worked alone. Our little hive thrums with the energy, ideas, passions, projects, and opinions of our intergenerational, international, intersectional Editorial Board. The vision of each Editorial Director ³ brought new ideas and resources to HPP—our thriving, signature departments and attention to the power of words from Holly Mata, our social media presence from Frank Strona, our eye for citable content from Jagdish Khubchandani, our Implementation Science format from Melissa Valerio-Shewmaker, our author development efforts from LaNita Wright, and The HPP Podcast from Arden Castle. Their steady, working commitment to HPP’s mission was invaluable to what we were able to do.

And what did we do? Here is my Top 10 (but I could easily list 100!)

1. We brought so much that was new to HPP: Climate justice, precarious work, period poverty, from 1619 to COVID-19, radical practice and radical welcome, opera and dance and hip hop and improv, waiora, citizen science, caring labor, trans joy, epistemic violence, abolitionist organizing, queer studies, critical refugee studies, generational displacement, and food sovereignty are just some of the ways we sought to expand the language and imagination of health promotion practice.

2. We opened up our pages to research topics and frameworks also new to our journal: Policy to support low wage workers, white supremacist practices of research funding organizations, the influence of social media and its appropriate use in our scholarship, topic models and word mining, task and role shifting, crowdsourcing, policy reach equity, archiving, participatory monitoring and evaluation, intersectionality, and more, offering HPP readers a sense of the world beyond traditional health promotion research and an invitation to bring the skills and theories that have served us so well as a profession to the level called for by the times.

3. We brought content that centered the perspectives of people too often discounted in research: In HPP you will find the voices of Latino day laborers, single mothers, Native youth, frontline public health workers, immigrant nail salon owners, convenience store managers and tribal store workers, immigrant teens, rural families, women who trade sex, people who use drugs, child care workers, parenting women in recovery, promotoras, and so many more who speak from our pages in their own words and/or developed our content as co-authors.

4. We introduced Poetry for the Public’s Health. We published scholarship expressed as poems, comics, text threads, deep reflection, and commentary.

5. We sought our lane in the COVID-19 pandemic. That space and responsibility seem obvious now, but it was not always so. We have continued to mine our experience, with contributions in nearly every issue since the middle of 2020 as authors and communities grapple with what the pandemic meant, what and who was lost, what remains, what we did, and what we learned.

6. We recognized grief, loss, loneliness, and hopelessness as a presence in our lives with real roots and real consequences, worthy of our most tender practice and nuanced ecological scholarship.

7. We created open calls to bring in content we prioritized—the Arts and Public Health Supplement, Native and Indigenous Voices, our Practice Notes Collection “Creating Equity and Social Justice for LGBTQUIA2S+ Youth and Young People,” African practitioners and scholars, critical narrative intervention, and our 2023 series “What Is Anti-Racism in Health Promotion Practice?”

8. We dove deeply into photovoice, seeking out its founders, lifting up contemporary applications, reflecting on the roots, aims, contradictions, and extraordinary potential of this method introduced to HPP readers in our very first issue.

9. We created space for authors to reflect on the deeper meanings of their work, their own identities and positionality, and their path to this point in their lives and careers through The HPP Podcast and HPP Author Profiles.

10. We sought to demystify publishing, striving for a sweet spot in which our journal goals are clear and our standards high, but our embrace is wide, our welcome is warm, and our process—no matter the decision—is respectful and transparent.

We have created processes and protocols and networks, available to the next generation of HPP leaders as they determine their own priorities going forward. The journal’s mission—“a forum for authoritative research, commentary, practical tools, and promising practices that strategically advance the art and science of health promotion”—is the north star, but in an increasingly troubled and troubling sky. The choices they make will matter.

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So, for the ones who will lead HPP’s next turns around the sun, I offer three wishes as I turn over the keys.

I Wish For You The Joy Of Re-Discovering Our Field

You may think you know public health and health promotion—I certainly thought I did. But when you start seeing the range of manuscripts, the author queries, the work being done in so many communities, your world—and your heart—will expand exponentially. Editors and editorial leaders are stewards, storytellers, and curators. You have the platform to amplify what moves you. And you will be moved, I guarantee, by the courage, commitment, hope, generativity, cleverness, and impact of a bold and emboldened health promotion practice.

I Wish For You The Purpose-Driven Energy To Keep Our Journal Vibrant And Relevant

You don’t know it until you’re doing it, but there is a particular energetic rhythm that journal leaders come to embody. Like working the bellows of a bagpipe, we recruit our whole bodies to push air in, then out, establishing a steady, flowing foundation upon which melody—or content—will emerge. The daily work of journal leaders includes reaching out for new authors with things to say (opening the bellows), and “pushing out” review invitations, decision letters, proofs, tables of contents, issues, podcasts, and social media in a continuous cycle that just never stops. It’s been demanding, often exhausting, but it’s what makes the music. My adult son recently told me, on quite another topic, “Mom, your motor runs fast and hot.” He might be right, and that might not always be the best parenting mode. But, for HPP, it was the only way I knew to make sure that we didn’t entrap ourselves in a self-satisfied, funding-driven, hegemonic flow—easier, more familiar, less intensive, but less risky and, thus inevitably, less relevant.

And I Will You The Courage To Stand Firm And Protect This Space

Not all well-written manuscripts will be published in HPP. You have the right and responsibility to make sure that the pages allocated for each issue advance equity and social justice, and that stigmatizing language and regressive models and methods are turned away. The broad global and political context in which you will work is treacherous. You will need to make sure that HPP does not become a Trojan Horse, looking like one thing but legitimizing quite another—a health promotion distorted by hate flexing its power, institutionalized by interlocking professional and academic systems that caved too quickly, and then implemented by earnest practitioners trying to do some good from the locked boxes into which they have tumbled and maintaining the blinders they feel they need to have careers and feed their families. That is not the health promotion I know, but I know it can happen. When ideas are banned and books taken off the shelf, our literature holds the space—but only if we stand firm.

You—HPP’s next editor, leaders, authors, reviewers, readers—are the future of our journal and our field. The space is ready, the torch is passed, the flame burns in you.

With abiding gratitude,Kathleen M. Roe