Introductory paragraph: To join the ephemera collective, whether 10 or 20 years back, was to be invited into an oasis whilst wandering in the desert. In this oasis we found a community of scholars, created by the social relations between its members. To believe in ephemera, for us, is to insist that the possibility of community unmediated by instrumentalism always exists. To believe in ephemera is to be reminded of who and where you are, to be convinced that the desert can be transformed, that a human world can be created. Indeed, ephemera reminds us that the world can be different, for like Michel de Certeaus’s concept of tactics, the journal holds the promise that ‘however bad things get, they are not necessarily so’ (2000: 89). Such a promise, however, can easily lead to disappointment.