We are thrilled to be writing to you as the new editors of Ethnologia Europaea, taking over from Marie Sandberg and Monique Scheer, who did an incredible job of guiding the journal for many years. Editor-in-chief Alexandra Schwell is a professor of empirical cultural analysis at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) with an interest in the anthropology of the political, popular culture, border studies, ethnographic methods, and Europeanization processes. She co-convenes the EASA Anthropology of Security Network. Editor-in-chief Laura Stark is a professor of ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä (Finland) with a background in folklore studies and an interest in theories on power, gender and sexuality. Associate Editor Pilvi Hämeenaho is a postdoctoral researcher of ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä with an interest in marginalization, disability studies and social sustainability. The editorial team also consists of Production Manager Magdalena Tellenbach and the editorial board, of which there are many new members!

Under Marie’s and Monique’s leadership, EE moved to an open access online publication model on March 1st, 2019, making the journal more inclusive and accessible. Our publisher is now the Open Library of Humanities (OLH), an open access publication platform that includes a Library Partnership Subsidy model. This means there are no article processing charges (APCs) for our authors/institutions and no fees for readers, ensuring equal access by all readers and authors. This, combined with EE’s high quality and forward-looking vision, puts us in a very good position in the rapidly changing world of scientific journal publication.

As the new editors of EE, we are passionate about maintaining EE’s standards of excellence. EE will continue to lead scholarly conversations in a manner that serves our core disciplines ethnology, folklore studies, and cultural anthropology, and also our sister fields in social anthropology, historical anthropology, cultural history, sociology, educational sciences, migration studies, cultural studies, critical heritage studies, and museum studies.

Now that the journal’s accessibility has been significantly enhanced by using a gold open access model, it is time to turn our attention to making our journal more widely known. We are already listed on Scopus and DOAJ, and searchable through Google Scholar. We will continue to be proactive at conferences in our field by, for example, co-hosting a journal workshop called How to Get Published at the SIEF conference in 2021.

We would like to invite each of you to consider contributing articles to our open issues or proposing special issues for EE (click here for author guidelines or special issue guidelines). We especially welcome submissions that contribute to ongoing debates and discussions within ethnology, folklore studies, and cultural anthropology. Theoretical interventions that connect research in these disciplines to anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQI+, and decolonial impulses are of particular interest for inclusion in the journal’s future offerings. We welcome both ethnographically-oriented and archive-based studies. As the journal seeks to continue its international focus, we support work that is transnational, yet also reflects approaches that mirror the uniqueness of local contexts.

In the spring of 2022, we will start a new section, Ethnographic Snapshots, in which scholars can publish shorter contributions (max. 2,000 words). The goal is not only to provide a fast-tracked forum for field reports and work in progress that can make a contribution to existing intellectual discussion, but also to react quickly to emerging topics and themes of current social and scientific importance.

The present issue, Culture and Heritage under Construction, bridges the Atlantic to bring together scholarly discussions from both Europe and North America, connected by the thread of the late Barbro Klein’s outstanding scholarship. It is fitting that EE’s core fields are brought together in Klein’s expertise: she received her Ph.D. in folklore and anthropology in 1970 from Indiana University and was later professor of ethnology at the University of Stockholm. She was director emerita of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and a member of the executive board of the American Folklore Society. Klein will be long remembered not only for her keen intellectual curiosity and ideas that still inspire, but also for her warmth and kindness shown to everyone, most notably students and scholars at the early stages of their careers.