Welcome to today’s Reconcile Journal edition. We are glad you are here.

Back in the very first week of launching, we shared some insights into our visual approach to research. As you might have noticed, our research doesn’t look the same as the traditional academic papers we translate for your reading pleasure.

So here is an update to one of the first editions of the journal (dated November 2nd 2025), which we sent to the 40 people that signed up in our first week! Now, we have over triple that number, so this feels like a good time to remind ourselves of why our research is so visually led.

It takes you through a brief visual tour of our sketchbook (starting at the top ↑), explaining our approach. The venn diagram in our logo is a data visualisation of my professional expertise which inspires the themes in our research journal, and speaks to the multidisciplinarity of both the research and the readers. The vessel (similar to a ceramic clay pot) represents the wider knowledge context we sit in: a collective imagining of social justice. It holds all of the research expertise within it.

You will also see below (↓) that we share how we use these design principles when translating each research paper. In the future, this might form part of our contributing guidelines - we already have lots of wonderful requests to contribute research to our journal, which we are slowly working our way through.

Part of this project is undoing anything that was previously assumed as the ‘norm’ - this is a fundamental part of the ‘decolonisation’ work institutions have been threatening to do over the past 10 years. We have to build new ways of doing things. So here, research design and visual design are closely related. The cultural context you have becomes cultural capital, so research can be digested with ease. The research translated is the start, not the end, of our conversations (which is the part I am most excited by).