Reflecting on Recent History, Challenges and Scholarship Opportunities

This Editorial is not our regular overview of the year (it would be odd to do it so early in the year) but it accompanies a less ordinary issue of the Social and Environmental Accountability Journal (SEAJ). In the first issue of 2024, we feel privileged to have had the opportunity to curate a collection of polemic essays that comment, reflect on and critique recent events and developments of problematic nature: inopportune institutional associations with fossil fuels supporters (AAA collaboration with a Saudi Arabian petroleum and minerals university for the organization of a sustainability conference; the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP28 organized in a Middle East setting) and academic bigotry perpetuating in the new wave of CSR-related research in North America. In this brief Editorial, we first reflect ourselves on the SEAJ history and long-standing tradition to experiment with alternative publishing formats to provide space for engagement with emerging issues that matter for society and our community. We then introduce the collection of articles that form this issue, after which we end by discussing implications of our reflections for the future of social and environmental accounting (SEA)research.