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Read this to me
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Thank you for stopping by to read our first issue of The Rhizomatic Revolution Review [20130613] ! As a collective, our editorial board firmly believes that BTS as a group and as individual artists, their ARMY of fans, and the relationships between and among all of these elements help create an atmosphere of mutual respect, active participation, and many forms of creation.
Our goal is to create a space to celebrate and facilitate engagement in these activities. ALL people — fans, curious bystanders, casual readers, ARMYs, everyone — are invited in: no age limit, no degree requirements, no gatekeeping. Welcome to our space.
Our journal began as a conversation in a Twitter thread — you know, like so many journals do — about recent articles related to BTS’s work in academic and general interest publications, as well as in the financial press. The conversation included a lot of academic fan-girling and nerdmy-ing and much desire to analyze and write about the works and influence of BTS in a serious, albeit joyful, way. Why not? What was stopping us from actually realizing this vision? Nothing at all, as it turns out.
That is how 11 strangers from all over the world came together through an array of unexpected attractions and connections — rhizomatically — on Twitter to create this publication. We discussed many possibilities related to our scope and mission and made a few course adjustments along the way. We realized we wanted to stretch far beyond academic writing to include creative writing and works of audio and visual expression, as well as people’s personal stories of how BTS affected their lives in deep and meaningful ways.
As our ideas gelled, we recognized we would need the help of an ARMY to give life to this journal. We recruited editors and reviewers, a stellar advisory board, and an attorney. We are incorporated as a non-profit and obtained an ISSN number. We have a technology genius who is constantly finding new ways to connect and expand and include. We have organizational and creative minds that keep us on track, all the while finding new tracks that no one imagined were possible. We have people obsessed with em-dashes and apostrophes. We have artists and people with amazing graphic design skills. We have actual visionaries. We are still wrestling with many challenges related to a multitude of issues, including how to become a multilingual publisher. And we are still having fun doing it.
Consider the serendipity of it all — a group of strangers stumbling across one another, discovering that we have a wide variety of useful skills among the group, and realizing that we all actually really like one another and enjoy working together. Things like that aren’t a coincidence.”
Each member of the editorial board could create an essay or a song or a poem or a drawing to express how BTS has influenced their life in important ways (and some already have). How specific songs have helped lift us up or showed us that other people understand how we feel and care about making it better. How life in the rabbit hole is so much better than we thought it could be.
We have strived to make sure that readers, writers, artists, and people of all ages and from all walks of life feel welcome and are eager to learn and enjoy the work of others as well as to share their own work here. So, again, welcome to our journal.
Do you know BTS?
This work by The Rhizomatic Revolution Review [20130613] is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Illustration by: @thisiskeets