Focus & Scope
Focus
Common Senses: Social & Humanities Journal
Making Sense!
Common Senses is an interdisciplinary, open-access journal that explores how human beings make sense of themselves, others, society, culture, and the worlds they inhabit.
The journal takes making sense as its central intellectual orientation: the ways in which people and communities produce, interpret, share, negotiate, and transform meanings, beliefs, identities, values, and knowledge within particular social and cultural contexts. Rather than assuming a single or universal “common sense,” Common Senses recognizes that what becomes meaningful, reasonable, or taken for granted is shaped by diverse human experiences and contexts.
The journal welcomes scholarly contributions that examine these processes through five interconnected areas:
- Religion, Belief & Meaning
- Culture, Identity & Everyday Life
- Communication, Media & Technology
- Society, Community & Social Relations
- Philosophy, Ethics & Knowledge
Common Senses particularly welcomes interdisciplinary and context-sensitive scholarship that connects specific human experiences, societies, cultures, and intellectual traditions with broader scholarly conversations.
Scope
1. Religion, Belief & Meaning
Studies of religion, belief systems, spirituality, lived religion, religious experience, theology in context, and the ways religious meanings, practices, values, and identities are constructed, communicated, interpreted, and transformed.
2. Culture, Identity & Everyday Life
Studies of culture and identity as lived and negotiated experiences, including everyday life, popular culture, tradition, belonging, lifestyle, cultural identity, and cultural transformation.
3. Communication, Media & Technology
Studies of communication and mediated meaning-making, including interpersonal and public communication, media, digital culture, social media, visual communication, artificial intelligence, technology, mediated religion, discourse, and emerging communication practices.
4. Society, Community & Social Relations
Studies of social interaction, community, collective life, social relations, inclusion and exclusion, institutions, citizenship, social movements, and processes of social change.
5. Philosophy, Ethics & Knowledge
Studies addressing philosophical, ethical, and epistemological questions concerning human life and knowledge, including morality, values, critical thought, knowledge production, power, and the relationship between knowledge and society.
Interdisciplinary Orientation
Manuscripts do not need to fit exclusively within a single subject area. Common Senses encourages scholarship that brings different areas into dialogue—for example, religion and digital media, culture and communication, ethics and artificial intelligence, identity and everyday life, or knowledge and social relations.
The central consideration is not simply the discipline in which a study is located, but how it contributes to understanding the ways human beings make sense of themselves, others, society, culture, and the worlds they inhabit.