It may come as no surprise that Refract's third volume emerges out of incredibly difficult circumstances in Santa Cruz, California, and beyond. As we were sending out the Call for Papers for this issue titled "Hauntings and Traces," a group of graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz began calling for a Cost of Living Adjustment to offset the egregiously low income we are paid as Academic Student Employees, which does not cover the minimal cost of living in an increasingly

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... naffordable Santa Cruz and San Francisco Bay area. The campaign was not without its problems, creating schisms within the graduate student body and even within Refract's editorial board. Much of this tension remains unresolved, and one reason is that the COVID-19 pandemic forced the UCSC campus to close for the Spring 2020 quarter. As the Refract team was beginning to receive submissions for volume 3, we had to move toward meeting remotely. We no longer had the luxury of checking in with each other as people tend to do when they, for instance, arrive early for a meeting, casually greeting each other and asking "how's it going?" These small, seemingly benign moments are a crucial way the Refract board functions. We are editors, students, and scholars, yes. But we are also people. We are stressed, we are often hungry and tired, we have fun weekends that we can't wait to tell each other about, we have pictures of our family that are worth sharing. It is these small moments of humanity, of kindness, of support in all the ways that go unnamed that are missing from Refract's day-to-day operations in the time of . And yet, we kept pushing to continue our work, to contribute to the field of visual studies with critical, robust scholarship. The peer review process was complete and we had begun the stage of revisions and editing when George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020. Along with