Layout 1 [Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2019; 3:8254] [page I] I open this first issue of 2019 on a joyous note, which speaks about work that is rarely acknowledged, as well as why this work is so important to me and to our authors. It was sent to me as an e-mail from Israeli researcher and bioethicist Baruch Velan, whose article appears in the issue, shortly after we corresponded about the second round of revisions that produced his final draft. He has, of course, given me permission to reprint this: Dear Mariaelena, I have been around for a while (I am 72 years old) and have had various experiences with publishing. The interaction with you was by far the best I had. You are probably aware of the notable criticism that is being directed nowadays toward the institution of peer re- viewed publishing (rightfully). In your work as an editor, you are reinstituting trust in the scientific publishing system. You have demon- strated that the real aim here to create a fruitful interaction between authors editors and re- viewers for the advent of science. For me per- sonally, this was a new learning experience in a field that I am new to (not trivial at my age) and I am grateful for this. I will be glad to assist the Journal in the future, my real expertise is in the field of vaccinol- ogy (public-authority interactions). Baruch Thank you, Baruch. And thank you to the authors who continue to submit work to QRMH, and who work so pa- tiently to attend to reviewers’ careful and often feedback and to my additional requests for revisions. Sometimes, if we are lucky, this opens up conversations (on Skype and phone!) that editors of more established journals would not have the luxury to have. In contemplating the connections between the five studies in this issue, and especially in considering the mul- timodal approach taken by Johnson et al.,1 I cannot but attend to the fact that communication is mediation. This means that identities, health, healthcare, experiences, learning, stigma, practices (some of the subject matter taken up by the scholars in this issue) are accomplish- ments of language, voices, writing, bodies, gestures, in space/time continuums, and technologies in much the same way as telephones, Twitter, and the computers from which we type our comments in support communities. They are resources for doing things together.2 For making, unmaking, remaking the universe we inhabit. Our theoretical approaches are also mediation, for there is no view from nowhere,3 no pure seeing, and there- fore we are not free from interpreting our data and making other speakers into subjects of study and what they tell us into data and those data into written texts to be circulated in conversation (or at least we hope). This is but brief introduction to five excellent pieces that deal with diverse topics: how Instagram connects and thus pragmatically constitutes the experiences of women who undergo in-vitro fertilization; how the experiential learning model is involved in students’ understanding of coursework in ethics;4 the stigma and marginalization that low-income women in rural communities in the MidWest endure with respect to their weight;5 the collaboration be- tween researchers and practitioners recommended by Britt and Englebert6 to overcome stigma experienced by patients suffering from IBD and finally, Velan and Pinchas- Mizrachi’s7 phenomenologically informed examination of the psychological challenges of transition from the Ortho- dox Jewish community into a novel social context. I invite our readers as much as the authors to consider how the ex- periences (including their own as researchers) are always mediated by communication, and how this consideration may allow for technologies of metacommunication and new spaces for conversation. Perhaps this brief commen- tary is a start. Editor’s introduction: research as mediation Mariaelena Bartesaghi Department of Communication, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA Correspondence: Mariaelena Bartesaghi, Department of Commu- nication, University of South Florida, CIS 1040, 4202 E. Fowler Ave, Tampa, 33620 FL, USA Tel.: +1.813.974.2145 - Fax: +1.813.974.6817. E-mail: mbartesaghi@usf.edu Received for publication: 26 April 2019. Accepted for publication: 29 April 2019. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non- Commercial 4.0 License (CC BY-NC 4.0). ©Copyright M. Bartesaghi, 2019 Licensee PAGEPress, Italy Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2019; 3:I-II doi:10.4081/qrmh.2019.8254 Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2019; volume 3:I-II No n- co mm er cia l u se on ly References 1. Johnson B, Quinlan MM, Pope N. #ttc on Instagram: a mul- timodal discourse analysis of the treatment experience of pa- tients pursuing in vitro fertilization. Qual Res Med Healthc 2019;3:7875. 2. Jones R. Spoken discourse. London: Bloomsbury; 2016. 3. Nagel T. The view from nowhere. New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press; 1986. 4. Behar-Horenstein LS, Zhang H. Clinical translational stu- dents’ perceptions of research ethics coursework: a case study. Qual Res Med Healthc 2019;3:7943. 5. Hughes K, Bombak AE, Ankomah S. Experiences of weight-related stigma among low-income rural women of higher weights from the midwestern United States. Qual Res Med Healthc 2019;3:7832. 6. Britt RK, Englebert A. Experiences of patients living with inflammatory bowel disease in rural communities. Qual Res Med Healthc 2019;3:7962. 7. Velan B, Pinchas-Mizrachi. Health concerns of young Is- raelis moving from the ultra-orthodox to the secular com- munity: vulnerabilities associated with transition. Qual Res Med Healthc 2019;3:8051. [page II] [Qualitative Research in Medicine & Healthcare 2019; 3:8254] Editorial No n- co mm er cia l u se on ly