For more than twenty years, the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal has featured “special issues” as part of its quarterly publication schedule. These issues are topical, often involve special guest editors, and, viewed serially, provide a fascinating glimpse of the evolving focus of bioethics as a discipline. (Head to the KIEJ website for a complete listing of past special issue topics.)

Early special issues centered on in biomedical ethics, health policy, and federal regulation; contemporary special issues have included a series of topics in emerging biotechnology, commodification, and—coming up in 2013—the ethics of food. This year’s special issue, due out in June 2012, features a series of articles on scientific expertise and democratic decision-making.

Guest editors Justin Weinberg and Kevin Elliot, together with KIEJ co-Editor-in-Chief Rebecca Kukla, invited submissions growing out of the recent TRiP Conference on Science, Knowledge, and Democracy. The call for papers drew a record number of submissions from scholars across the discipline, including many whose primary area of research is not biomedical ethics. The Journal is proud to continue to press the frontiers of interdisciplinarity in bioethics, including philosophers of science, public health researchers, political scholars, and environmental scientists in important conversations about our collective future.