Today is my last day working for openDemocracy, after three and a bit years as the co-editor of the Transformation section.
By far the highlight has been collaborating with some incredibly talented writers and activists. I've tried to use the platform to publish people with marginalised identities who don't always get voices in more mainstream papers, or who have to struggle to get into the mainstream, despite having more to say than most established journalists.
I've learned that good editing is 10% editorial skill and 90% diplomacy. Sending polite to passive-aggressive chaser emails is perhaps the key skill in the editor's toolbox (sorry to everyone who received them). I've also become a far better journalist and editor through working so closely and intensively with other peoples' writing. If you wrote for me, thank you for your time and effort.
Here are the 12 articles I'm most proud of, for various reasons, not in any order:
1. I was arrested 75 times: how violent policing destroys mental health, by Emily Apple
2. Science fiction and social justice: giving up on utopias, by Adrienne Maree Brown
3. Time does not always heal: state violence and psychic damage, by Nina Power
4. Dylann Roof is not an extremist, by Zoé Samudzi
5. Why I glued myself to a ticket barrier and shut down the Eurostar, by Tatiana Garavito
6. Enough talk about intersectionality, let's get on with it, by Chitra Nagarajan
7. I am a fat dancer but I am not your inspiration porn, by Charlotte Cooper
8. Black to the future: afrofuturism and tech power, by Florence Okoye
9. How should we remember Auschwitz? by Anna Hajkova
10. There is no such thing as prison reform: an interview with CeCe McDonald, by Andrea Abi-Karam
11. On superheroes: who will save us now? by Zia X
12. When resting is resistance, by Janey Stephenson
