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The current organization of academic institutions creates a tension between knowledge and social change. Many scholars put inequality at the center of their research agenda. But they may also be subject to logics of exploitation linked to the commodification and marketization of knowledge and the precarization of the workplace. Such a struggle may appear especially salient now in British universities, where a long series of strike actions are taking place over pay equality and pay levels, casualization, and workload.

Since its inception, Contention has aimed to illuminate our understanding of activism and political behavior across a full variety of contexts and settings. By examining political behavior across multiple geographical and social sites, we can explore unique opportunities to expand the horizon of our theoretical frameworks, test the generalizability and applicability of our claims, and gain a stronger grasp of how different structural arrangements and historical trajectories might shape political action.

This issue of Contention is definitvely international, featuring data and cases from dozens of countries including Rwanda and China. We are proud to be a journal sought out by scholars working on diverse non-Western cases as well as by those conducting ambitious international analyses. As editors, we firmly believe that an interdisciplinary journal is best served by also being international, and as the journal continues to grow, we are looking to turn our attention toward building editorial teams featuring excellent scholars from around the world. We hope that the variety of international cases in our pages will one day be mirrored by a similarly international community of authors, reviewers, and editors.

In this first issue of 2021, we find ourselves still in this strange space of a viral pandemic that first emerged in 2019. Yet contentious politics persists in public places, and the present issue reflects Contention's continued efforts to publish interdisciplinary research-based articles from around the world.

Feminist movements have had a fundamental impact on social life in many different parts of the world. Reforms in marriage and private property laws, as well as change in spheres as diverse as sexual life, contraception, and the work-place have had profound consequences on the way we conceptualize, act and signify gender relations. Feminist thinkers and activists have also brought attention to the impact that the intersectionality of racism, heterosexism, poverty and religious intolerance (among many other factors) can have in people’s lives.