Welcome to the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology. 

The journal, which had its first publication in April 2001, was an initiative of the Phenomenological Research Group (PRG) based at Edith Cowan University, South West Campus, in Western Australia and the Department of Psychology at Rhodes University in South Africa, where there had been a long-established phenomenological tradition, spanning over three decades, from the early 1970s, introduced by Professor Dreyer Kruger (Psychology), through to the early 2000s.

The PRG is a circle of postgraduate scholars who have a range of scholarly research interests which cross a broad spectrum of areas including education, health, religion, philosophy, business, tourism, counselling and psychology amongst many others. The unifying force which holds these diverse research interests together is a commitment to phenomenology as a theoretical approach and research methodology.

Arising out of this collaborative phenomenological programme (at that time supervised by Dr Patricia Sherwood) was the germination of the idea to facilitate world-wide dissemination of broadly-based phenomenological research through the vehicle of a scholarly journal.

Given the technological advances (ease and reliability) at that time in the realm of virtual connectivity, the decision was taken to pursue an ‘online’ route rather than striving to establish a hard copy / print journal with the many associated costs and logistics around content delivery. In this regard, the IPJP was amongst the first - international let alone local (Australia / South Africa, hence the derivation of its name, Indo-Pacific) - online scholarly journals.

From the outset, a ‘freely–downloadable’ approach was adopted although at that time there was no clear Open Access policy.

The journal's vision was further developed by Professor Robert Schweitzer from Queensland University of Technology and Dr Patricia Sherwood of Edith Cowan University, with Professor Christopher Stones (then Head of Psychology at Rhodes University and who later joined the faculty at the University of Johannesburg until 2013) becoming involved shortly thereafter.

The IPJP was subsequently born in 2001, with Professor Schweitzer being its first Editor-in-Chief and Dr Stuart Devenish becoming its Executive Editor. Professor Stones assumed the role of Editor-in-Chief in 2003. In 2020 Dr Gregory Swer took on the role of Editor-in-Chief.