Editor's Introduction, Spring 2012

Hello DSQ Readers!

It has been some time since we've offered an Editorial letter to front an issue. We tend to think the issues published these days speak (and very well) for themselves! But this time around, we wanted to make a few comments.

• This issue carries a slate of international papers. We are seeing something quite unprecedented at the DSQ Editorial desk these days—a considerably higher number of submissions from locations around the globe in the past 1-2 years. This trend no doubt has at least two major factors contributing to it:
• The global engagement with disability issues, disability policy, and disability studies that is likely brought about by both the world-wide circulation and ratification of the UNCRPD (United Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities) and the continued engagement over disability taking place with The World Health Organization in conjunction with The World Bank.
• An increased global readership of Disability Studies Quarterly itself since we have gone completely online with the Ohio State University Libraries as our "publisher" and we have also become a free and open access journal, with no paid subscription required.

There are no doubt other factors—both large and small—but those are the two we believe are now playing a significant role in the remarkable rise of international submission to the journal.

These submissions do, however, often (but not always) pose several kinds of challenges. First, it is hard to sometimes find known reviewers for them since they come from countries where we have no reviewer base or little, if any, established Disability Studies scholarship. We've applied several creative methods to this problem and we think it has produced good reviews—and results. Second, many of the authors of this important material are not native English speakers/writers and this poses some additional layers of care with both reviewers and, once accepted for publication, with editing. It has, however, been an invigorating and rewarding challenge to address these issues of language and writing style in making DSQ the truly international journal we hope it will continue to become. Third, because many scholars in international locations are just coming to Disability Studies, and because they also work in places where access to libraries and databases are neither as deep or as broad as what we experience in the more developed world when we endeavor to write or study about disability, the reference and citation interface is not always what we might expect with a comparative article from the stronghold locations of Disability Studies in the English-speaking world (the world that is primarily documented in the important Cushing and Smith 2002 [v. 29.3] Multinational Review of English Language Disability Studies Degrees and Courses.)

Still. We believe the scholarly approach and the knowledge gained from the international papers we've clustered together in this issue are crucial to the further global development of Disability Studies. And we hope, too, that their collective publication will only encourage even more international scholars to submit their work to Disability Studies Quarterly.

Brenda Brueggemann & Scot Danforth
Co-Editors, Disability Studies Quarterly