A Final Word From the RRQ Editorial Team

Before we hang up our hats as the RRQ Editorial Team, we are writing this final editorial to reflect on our experiences, to honor our Boards, and to thank readers, researchers, educators, ILA, and Wiley for their support. Reading Research Quarterly is an old journal with a revered reputation that has moved through many historical moments and certainly the past 4 years have carried its fair share of memorable moments. Reading itself is tumultuous, but it has been before and one of its loudest forums is RRQ. Reading wars have raged within the pages of RRQ and the vicissitudes of reading theory, methods, policy, and practice have played out in issues. Even since we started our roles in September 2022, reading research has moved on considerably in the face of the ever-encroaching presence of AI in our daily lives. We regard current times as exciting and that will hopefully lead to a new wave of literacy research and scholarship. As a team, we find ourselves asking some questions about our legacy, questions that have no direct answers, but we share our thinking with you, our readers, to invite a dialogue and to help prepare the ground for our successors. We like to think that we diversified the journal. We believe that the energy and care that we put into heterogeneous reading theory and methods, multi-voicedness, broadening perspectives and worldviews, and opening a space for a spectrum of reading research has paid off. It has not always been easy, and we appreciate the sting of rejected manuscripts and tough but constructive reviews. Nonetheless, we have faith in the RRQ peer review process, which is not perfect, easy, or always prompt. We committed to drawing on the expertise of not only our editorial board but also leading scholars from around the world to help ensure the rigor and integrity of publications. We believe this worked, enabling us to diversify the content over the past few years. We would be lost without our Editorial Assistants: Tatiana Becerra, Kenneth Pettersen, and Bev Enion—thank you so much for all of your work and care. We have learned to respect that reading research is a broad church and to acknowledge and honor histories, methods, researcher integrity, and being balanced and fair. In other words, we have learned how to be bigger versions of ourselves and not be blinkered about other theories, methods, and approaches to investigate literacy. The world is more precarious and more political than ever. Precarity and politics have materialized in manuscript submissions on a wide range of topics such as censorship, gun laws, and voicing immigrant stories and experiences. We feel proud to be an international team which has allowed us a space to discuss difference. We find ourselves living through a moment of profound uncertainty, with geopolitical realignments, renewed debates about the viability of democratic systems, and a troubling erosion of public commitments to education as a civic good. Add to this the powerful force of generative AI unsettling long-held assumptions about authorship, agency, originality, or authenticity. These shifts compel us as an editorial team to ask anew: What does it mean to be a reader today? And, more fundamentally, what does it mean to be literate today? AI literacy cannot be collapsed into digital literacy or an operational skill. It requires an awareness of the broader cultural, epistemological, and ethical transformations unfolding around us. Literacy studies, too, are moving toward a deeper engagement with complexity. We see that as an appreciation of the layered, often contradictory meanings that texts invite. In this view, it is not the production of rapid, definitive answers that defines us as human, but our capacity to dwell in ambiguity, to pause, to reconsider, to interpret. To slow one's reading and linger with a passage; to close one's eyes and allow meaning to settle; even to resist the expectation of an instant reply to a message—these acts are themselves literacy practices. They are signs of attentiveness and care, indices of a human pace in a technologized world. For these reasons, we remain optimistic. Literacy is evolving toward practices that affirm our humanity rather than diminish it. In recognizing and embracing this complexity, we find a path forward, which is not away from technology, but which heads toward richer, more deliberate forms of engagement with the texts that shape our lives. This editorial is in the memory of Dr. Crystal Chen, whose presence on our Editorial Board brought intelligence, care, and integrity. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. The authors have nothing to report.