Editorial

You will notice that this is a slim issue, which is because we needed to tighten our belts for the last issue of this volume, after producing two larger than usual issues earlier in the year. This issue is particular in that it is made up of two collections of papers. We have three papers that were originally given at the 2021 ACP conference on ‘Modern families: working with and thinking about neglected and vulnerable children, parents and families’, and we have four short papers that were originally given at a symposium on the challenges of ethical publishing in the digital age, held in March of this year.

The 2021 ACP Conference was also a very particular conference. It was the first to be held online, and had been postponed from 2020. At that time, we had hoped in vain that the conference might be held in person, if we waited until 2021, but the pandemic kept its hold and it became clear that would not be possible. There were concerns about the loss of an experience of coming together, in the same physical space, to process our shared experience of exploring the theme in relation to one another. Diana Cant and Alison Roy harnessed their tremendous liveliness and creativity to write poetry, in real time, in response to the presentations, performing it for delegates before the ink was dry on the page, as it were. This offered delegates one way to enliven our emotional connection with what we were all remotely engaged with. (ACP members can access some of that poetry presented at the 2021 Conference, here at: ).

The first two of the three papers from that conference in this issue are about children who are not cared for by their birth parents. The first is ‘Kinship care: Uncannily close for comfort?’ by Deirdre Ingham and Julia Mikardo. Using clinical vignettes, the authors offer a critical evaluation of the policy of placing children in kinship care, which tends to be preferred whenever possible. Whil