About the Journal
Since 1997, the Gesellschaft für Ethnographie, together with the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, has been publishing the Berliner Blätter. Ethnographische und ethnologische Beiträge. As an established journal, the Berliner Blätter offers a platform for current academic and sociopolitical debates in the German-speaking disciplines of (European) ethnology, cultural and social anthropology, and empirical cultural studies. It serves as a forum for ethnographically informed scholarly reflections and discussions on current theoretical, methodological, and sociopolitical issues. Thematically focused, the journal publishes lectures, ethnographic sketches, research results, essays, interviews, and conference reports.
Read by scholars in the cultural and social sciences, cultural practitioners, and those interested in ethnography, and edited by professors, early-career researchers, and students, the Berliner Blätter not only furthers internal academic debates but also engages with professional and student everyday life.
The Berliner Blätter is published at least twice a year as special issues under varying editorial leadership. Those interested in guest-editing are encouraged to submit an abstract to the editorial board.
Quality Assurance & Review Process
Individual special issues of the Berliner Blätter are typically developed by an editorial team, which works closely with the Editorial Board. Topics are sometimes based on workshops (e.g., Volume 86, 'Food lokal/global'), conferences (e.g., Volume 72, 'Wie plant die Planung?'), formats of research-based learning in the Master's program, known as study projects (e.g., Volume 66, 'Alltag der Psychiatrie im Wandel' or Volume 76, 'Transparenz'), or they address current disciplinary discussions (e.g., Volumes 82-85). The Editorial Board selects proposals based on the following criteria:
- Relevance/originality of the topic
- Importance for the current academic discourse
- Quality of the concept (substantive qualification of the topic)
- Composition of contributions planned for the special issue
The editorial team is supported and advised throughout the conception and realization of the issue. This includes suggestions for refining the title and/or conceptual framework or assistance in finding contributors (e.g., via open calls or targeted invitations to potential authors working on the issue’s topic). The development process is continuously guided by two members of the Editorial Board to ensure compliance with formal, content-related, ethical, and technical standards.
The organization of the review process is the responsibility of the issue editors. Both editorial review and/or peer review are standard and supported technically and organizationally. This means that the editors either review individual contributions in a multi-step process, potentially with the involvement of authors of other contributions, or a double-blind peer review with external reviewers is conducted.
Ultimately, the content responsibility for the individual issues lies with the editors. The Editorial Board is available to editors for questions (content-related, technical, formal). In case of doubts about the scholarly quality of contributions, the Editorial Board reserves the right to veto. The final review—both substantive and formal—rests with the Editorial Board.
Open Access Policy
The Berliner Blätter is committed to the open-access principle. All contributions published here are freely accessible immediately and without restrictions under the Creative Commons License 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0).
The Berliner Blätter does not charge fees for submission, review, editing, or reading the journal articles. Downloads of publications are free of charge and do not require registration or login. The contributions may be shared and edited under the condition of proper attribution.
Our authors retain full and unrestricted rights to the use of their contributions.
