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Aims, Scope and Content Guidelines

Overview

Esurio is a collaborative, online student-led and peer-reviewed academic journal. With the right funding partner, the first issue could be published online by January 2009. Graduate and undergraduate editors and reviewers will solicit, review and publish, twice annually, student-authored publications from across the province for a national audience. 

The initiative of the Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB) with the support of Meal Exchange brings students together with a community of influential academic and community advisors before a broad cross-sectoral audience.  In this way, Esurio represents a nexus and platform for discussion between the academy, the community, and young people interested in issues related to hunger and poverty.

More than a unique student research publication, Esurio is an educational programme through which young scholars will be given the opportunity to express and explore their voices on topical multi-disciplinary issues. As a network forms around Esurio, students, editors, and advisors will be engaged in creating a difference in various fields of research, study, and applied learning.

Aims

PROJECT SCOPE
The journal will welcome submissions and seek contributions related to hunger and poverty in Ontario.  However, we have a strong focus on contributions that advance research in any of the following interdisciplinary research nodes:

• Food Security: analyzing issues related to access to food, nutrition, and food banks;
• Energy Poverty: analyzing low-income energy burden, access, efficiency, and assistance;
• Poverty and Place: analyzing the geography of poverty, or the relationship between poverty and place;
• Social Enterprise: analyzing the use of social enterprise as a means of reducing poverty;
• Financial Exclusion: analyzing debt, assets, and low-income access to financial products and services;
• Poverty and Education: analyzing the connection between poverty and education;
• Poverty and Health: analyzing the connection between poverty and health;
• Poverty and Public Policy: analyzing how governments handle poverty as an issue of public policy; and
• Comparative Poverty Research: analyzing other provincial, national, and global conditions and responses that can offer perspective on poverty in Ontario.

JOURNAL COMPONENTS

The journal will have four sections that offer different perspectives on the research nodes:

Commentary.  The 1,000 word commentary article from the project’s sponsor will offer a unique perspective, addressing large questions, and providing insight into social and economic issues.

Invited Contributions.  Short articles from community members working and/or living at the front line of hunger and poverty will help put theory and policy into the context of an individual’s life experience.

Featured Article.  Members of our editorial board will interview high-profile academics and leaders from community organizations to write articles that draw broader public interest to the journal.  An innovative feature of these articles will place the perspectives of those interviewed in a dialogue with students and experts who deal with hunger and poverty through their own personal experience, their community involvement or their research.  For example, the first issue will feature Professor Richard Florida, Director & Professor of Business and Creativity, Martin Prosperity Institute. Florida is author of the global best-seller The Rise of the Creative Class, Who's Your City? and The Flight of the Creative Class. Florida is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals whose ideas on the “creative class,” commercial innovation, and regional development are being used globally to change the way regions and nations do business and transform their economies.

Peer Reviewed Articles.  Four to five articles will be published in each issue, featuring the work of young academics.  The articles will include author bio/photo and be supplemented by innovative online features that allow for commentary from reviewers, editors, and readers.
 

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