From Gatekeeping to Brokerage: A Collaborative Ethnography of Editorial Work in International English as a Foreign Language Journals

Editors are often cast as gatekeepers who police the boundaries of knowledge. Yet in non‐Anglophone settings, editorial practice is also translational, relational and identity‐forming. We present a collaborative ethnography by a three‐member authorship team, including two women and one man, who simultaneously served in editorial roles across international, English‐medium journals in English as a foreign language (EFL)/applied linguistics. Drawing on fieldnotes, decision letters, reviewer exchanges, platform logs and reflexive journals, we theorise editorial brokerage: the day‐to‐day mediations through which editors translate standards across epistemic traditions, mobilise networks to calibrate judgement and negotiate role/time frictions within teaching‐intensive institutions. We integrate sociocultural theory and communities of practice to propose the Editorial Brokerage Cycle: linking tensions, mediations, identity work and outcomes. Findings are organised as five ethnographic vignettes, including decision letters as pedagogical genre, epistemic translation, reviewer ecologies, temporal/role frictions and becoming an editor. Each ends with a micro‐proposition.