In my previous editorial, I made reference to what Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry call ‘literacy brokering’ amongst non-native speakers of English who seek to publish in anglophone academic journals. The term ‘literacy’ makes sense in the context, and, as I noted, the practice is hardly exclusive to those whose first language is not English. However, as Aoife Monks of Contemporary Theatre Review and I planned a New Scholars session on academic publishing for this year's annual conference of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR, with which this journal is affiliated), a supplementary way of thinking about academic knowledge production came to mind: as conversation. And it is a conversational mode that wends its way through the articles presented in this issue of Theatre Research International.