Against the Current: An Introduction to the Inaugural Issue
Valentina Proust, Sim Gill, Lucila Rozas Urrunaga, Cienna Davis[1]
doi: https://doi.org/10.58117/p24t-av07
SIREN! came out of a long, collaborative process that began with organizing the Transnational Feminist Network Symposium at the University of Pennsylvania in 2024. Over roughly two years, we worked together across different time zones and institutional settings. We repeatedly revised ideas, formats, and logistics in order to create a feminist space that could genuinely hold different kinds of knowledge at once. The goal was not simply to include multiple disciplines or perspectives. It was to make them interact, so that artistic practice, scholarly writing, and collective discussion could inform and reshape one another rather than sit in separate categories.
This process culminated in the symposium’s culminating event, the contemporary art exhibition Present Futures: Experiments in Feminist Futurity. In the exhibition, artworks and academic ideas were not treated as parallel tracks. They were interwoven ways of thinking. Visitors moved between them without clear boundaries, allowing each form of work to alter how the others were understood. Through this experience, a shared rejection of linear models of knowledge became more concrete. Knowledge does not develop in a straight sequence, with one step cleanly following another. It is iterative and messy. It builds, loops back, and is revised through encounter and constraint.
Within that ongoing process, SIREN! was not a separate outcome that arrived afterward. It emerged as part of the same momentum. It is an extension of the work already happening, shaped by the same conditions, conversations, and experiments.
***
We are a digital open-access feminist multimedia magazine devoted to amplifying voices that are too often positioned at the margins of academic discourse or excluded from it altogether. We bring together feminist theory, media practice, artistic experimentation, and activist knowledge not as separate domains but as interwoven modes of thinking and making. Our aim is to challenge inherited models of academic publishing by centering collaboration, care, and solidarity, while supporting early-career scholars, artists, and activists who are reimagining scholarship as accessible, relational, and alive to dialogue across disciplines and practices.
***
The name SIREN! carries a deliberate weight. In classical mythology sirens are rendered as figures of seduction and danger voices that disrupt navigation and draw sailors away from the certainty of mapped routes. Feminist theory has long unsettled this framing, reclaiming the siren as a figure of multiplicity, resistance, and sonic excess. She becomes not a warning against deviation but an emblem of epistemic refusal, a voice that resists containment within singular meaning. In this reading the siren is not one voice but many, a chorus that exceeds translation into dominant forms of knowledge. She speaks to what cannot be neatly disciplined or fully contained within academic language, to the unruly textures of feminist thought as it moves across bodies, media, and histories. Within this movement, academic writing and artistic practice are not distinct terrains but part of the same shifting surface. Each carries traces of the other. Each reshapes what it means to know.
But we did not arrive at this listening on our own.
SIREN! is part of a longer feminist tradition of building spaces otherwise, outside and against the logics of the dominant, of creating what Audre Lorde named the tools the master’s house was never meant to hold. We think alongside transnational feminist scholars, artists, and activists who have insisted on the political urgency of knowledge-making as a relational and embodied practice. From the epistemic interventions of Gloria Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval, whose work on mestiza consciousness and differential consciousness reimagines subjectivity as border crossing and strategic movement, to the enduring contributions of Black feminist thought articulated by Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks, who have taught us that knowledge is always situated, ethical, and accountable to lived experience. We are equally shaped by María Lugones’ coalitional feminism and her theorization of the coloniality of gender, which continues to unsettle the very categories through which we think relation, power, and difference.
Alongside these genealogies, we remain attentive to feminist scholars whose work has traced the material and political infrastructures of transnational life, including Inderpal Grewal, whose analyses of the 1990s show how the circulation of people, goods, social movements, and rights discourses produces transnational subjects shaped through and against a global American culture. We are also indebted to Radha Hedge, whose feminist praxis and community-based organizing, including her role in fostering one of the first domestic violence shelters in the United States for South Asian women, reminds us that feminist theory is never separate from the urgent work of building institutions of care, safety, and survival. Across these lineages, we remain attentive to the many feminist scholars and practitioners who have insisted that representation is never merely aesthetic, that it matters deeply who speaks, who is heard, and through what forms, infrastructures, and channels meaning circulates.
***
The magazine is edited by a collective of feminist scholars: Cienna Davis, Sim Gill, Valentina Proust, and Lucila Rozas Urrunaga. We come to this project from different disciplinary locations and engagement with feminist theory, transnational media practices, and experimental methodologies. But across our work, we share a commitment to form as method, to the idea that how knowledge is produced is inseparable from what it comes to mean.
SIREN! is therefore both a publication and a proposition. The seven contributions that compose this inaugural issue are, each in their own way, an act of turning toward. They emerge from different locations and speak in distinct registers, moving across archives, languages, and geographies that do not converge into a single point but instead resonate in relation. What binds them is a shared refusal of silence, erasure, and the epistemological hierarchies that have long determined whose knowledge is made legible, and whose is not. Each piece interrupts these inheritances in its own register, whether through text, image, sound, or experimental form, insisting on other ways of knowing and telling.
These contributions were selected not only for their individual rigor and creativity, but for what they generate in relation to one another. We were attentive to the conversations they open across difference, the silences they make audible, and the forms of solidarity they begin to assemble across disciplinary and methodological boundaries. Read together, they do not form a linear sequence so much as a shifting field of encounter, where meaning emerges through proximity, friction, and return. Alongside full analytical essays and multimodal works, this issue also includes Research Escalator pieces: short works-in-progress developed in dialogue with an expert mentor, reflecting our commitment to accompanying ideas at every stage of their becoming.
The issue opens in the terrain of theory and method, with two contributions that ask how feminist knowledges are transmitted, recovered, and kept alive across languages, borders, and times. The first, Translating Black Feminisms: Transnational Currents Then and Now, by Liz Rose and Mariana Felix, centers an act of translation as a political and scholarly intervention. Bringing together a collaborative English translation of the Amefricanifesto with a reflective essay on the process of its making, the piece argues that translation is a contested site where questions of power, access, and epistemic hierarchy are actively negotiated. Writing from their own situated positionalities across the hemisphere, Rose and Felix trace the concept of amefricanidade through its contemporary resonances in abolitionist and liberation movements today. To translate, they insist, is to decide whose knowledge travels, whose theory is read, and whose political horizons become thinkable.
The second contribution moves from the question of how knowledge travels to the question of how it is preserved, and who gets to be remembered. In Epistolary Echoes: Crafting Peruvian Feminist Memory from the Margins, Patricia Chuquiano, Raisa Ferrer-Pizarro, and Eva Santivañez reflect on three years as co-facilitators of Cartas Sonoras Feministas, a sonic documentary project that uses oral archives, autobiographical narrative, and the epistolary form to recover the history of contemporary feminism in Peru through the voices of those who built it in everyday life. Positioning themselves not as researchers but as carteras (mail carriers who mediate exchange) the authors document how audio letters exchanged between feminist activists across Peru’s diverse regions open space for voices that dominant feminist archives have systematically left out.
The issue then moves into the terrain of media, memory, and diaspora, asking how communities in exile claim the airwaves, the archive, and the digital as sites of presence, survival, and recognition. In Nancy Lorenza and Queer Afro-Chicana Digital Afterlives, Anahí Ponce recovers the legacy of Nancy Lorenza Green, an Afro-Chicana artist, healer, and community educator from the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez borderlands. Drawing on what she calls queer fronteriza/e recognition, Ponce traces how Nancy navigated her identities as a queer Afro-Chicana across multiple media and temporalities, asking what happens to the epistemological contributions of queer of color cultural workers when no one is looking for them.
Where Ponce reads across digital and literary archives for a voice that is always present but rarely seen, Amany Al-Sayyed listens for a voice carried through the air itself. In Reading 'Air' in the History of Palestinian Radio in Malta 1982, Al-Sayyed traces the story of her late father, a Palestinian journalist and poet displaced to the refugee camps of Lebanon, who broadcast from Radio Mediterranean in Malta in 1982. Drawing on a single unearthed cassette recording, press cards, and archival documents, the essay is organized as a series of vignettes that mirror the fragmented conditions under which Palestinian memory must be recovered. It asks what it means to read absence in Palestinian history and how form itself can become a method of anti-colonial insistence.
In Critical Media Praxis in Justice Storytelling, Sonia De La Cruz reflects on the making of Melting ICE, a public art exhibit produced in collaboration with La Resistencia, an immigrant-led grassroots organization fighting to shut down the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington. The piece presents Critical Media Praxis, a framework De La Cruz develops to support community-engaged and advocacy-driven storytelling projects that center on social justice. At its core are the testimonios of people detained at the center, whose stories of inhumane conditions and the desire for a life beyond incarceration shape both the content and the ethics of the exhibit.
In Mapping Intimacy: From Condoms to Tampons and the Politics of Bathrooms, Selene Yang takes as starting point the vending machine we can find in bathrooms and reveals it as a site where gender hierarchies, bodily autonomy, and the politics of care are inscribed in the most material terms. Drawing on collaborative geospatial data from OpenStreetMap, Yang maps the global distribution of condom dispensers and menstrual hygiene machines across public and semi-public spaces, showing how a spatial organization reproduces a binary logic of gender but also makes invisible the needs of gestating bodies, trans men, and non-binary people. The infrastructure of the city, the piece argues, is never neutral, as it decides who is entitled to care for their body, where, and under what conditions.
Finally, we turn into the terrain of embodied politics, where the body meets the state, the city, and the structures that decide whose needs are recognized and whose are not. In Contra Roma y el Estado, Yaré Colán opens with a provocation: the return of spirituality in contemporary Western culture (e.g., astrology, tarot, wellness aesthetic) is a continuation of colonial and patriarchal logics dressed in the language of healing. Through a series of cases spanning Mexico, Ecuador, Cuba, and Brazil, Colán traces what it means for Black, Indigenous, and racialized women to hold forms of faith that have been historically criminalized, exoticized, and surveilled. This multimodal piece insists on the rites, the body, and the ancestral, as forms of knowledge and resistance that have survived because they refuse to be domesticated.
This issue also includes a News and Events section, which extends the conversations beyond the academic essay and the multimodal work. Here, readers will find a review of the community screening of Paromita Vohra’s 2025 documentary Working Girls and a dispatch from Las Justicias de Luto, a public performance staged in front of Lima’s Supreme Court of Justice in March 2026 by the feminist collective Collera Red and the Contra Archivx Project. Both pieces remind us that the conversation this journal seeks to amplify does not begin or end on the written page.
***
To publish this journal is itself an act of refusal to the hierarchies that determine whose knowledges count, the algorithmic architectures that decide what reaches us, and the amnesias that dominant culture requires from us. We offer this issue as an invitation to dwell in the friction and the solidarity that emerges when voices that have been pushed to the margins are finally given space to speak to one another.
This is not a complete map, nor does it pretend to be one. We do not ask you to decode it so much as to enter into relation with it. Listen closely. Critique it. Let it shift how you think and let your thinking shift it in return. This is what it means to be a feminist.
The Editorial Collective
Notes
University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication. The authors are the Founding Members of SIREN!, as well as the current members of the Editorial Collective. For inquiries, the Editorial Collective can be reached at [email protected]