In addition, this annual journal has as one of its primary concerns the publishing process. Not only do we wish to exchange ideas, we hope to assist others who want to participate and learn about the process of publishing. We embrace all students wishing to be involved in the learning process and hope that we may, together, gain from one another to create an important scholarly text. This community building endeavor we view as an important step not only in furthering scholarly work but also in building a collective space from which to integrate complex and divergent views about the social world.
 

Beginnings never occur without something coming before, and this first edition of Social Moments is no exception. As a group of graduate students in the Sociology Department at Boston College, we have been graciously invited by our faculty to take a small departmental publication called Social Report and transform it into a student run and written journal. For this, we thank the entire Sociology faculty, especially Severyn Bruyn. Dr. Bruyn's fifteen year commitment to the Social Report and his willing encouragement has made it possible for us now to produce a document expressing the thoughts, concerns, possibilities, and positions from which a graduate student community experiences and views the social world. Social Moments does not, however, express a single perspective, but attempts to cross various boundaries and display multiple voices.

In this volume, the reader will find a complex interweaving of different thinkers and topics. No central theme organizes this issue except "a concern for justice." The decision not to thematically structure our first issue was a difficult one, but one which arose from the very fact that this is only a beginning, an essay, if you will. Getting our feet wet in this process has taught us much about the difficulties of producing a journal, and as we learn more, we hope to make our future volumes reflect the knowledge we have gained. As it is, we offer this collection of work from Sociology Graduate students in the spirit of furthering your knowledge as well. The textual variety housed in this compilation elucidates how knowledge itself moves through multiple fields of inquiry and how an understanding of the world must not reside in either the particular or the general, but somewhere in between. Social Moments seeks the in between.

By grappling with issues individually, each contributor to this journal has come to a particular understanding, but this is not all that went into the production of Social Moments. We have grappled with issues collectively as well, we have argued with one another, we have listened and changed, we have been stubborn and angry, we have traversed large divides amongst ourselves in order to get to a point in which this journal could exist and a point at which most of us are satisfied. The process seemed at times like birth and other times like death with an even mixture of pleasure, pain, conflict and agreement. Yet somehow we survived, somehow a journal now speaks, and somehow friendships were strengthened. So even while this text resides in a concern for a larger social justice, it simultaneously tells a rather intimate story about a group of people working through political, ideological, and personal differences and coming out the other side better off and with something to show for it.