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The purpose of this study is to understand the role of the migrant entrepreneur’s social capital and specifically their family social capital in the success of their crowdfunding ventures.

This paper develops an exploratory single case study of the Persu Bag started by a Chinese migrant entrepreneur in the USA, which was documented through in-depth interviews, email communication, social media interactions and secondary documents publicly available. This paper draws on crowdfunding and social capital literature to fulfil the purpose and adopt the perspective of the migrant entrepreneur in the study.

The study shows that the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneur’s family network contributes with their operand and operant resources from both the country of residence and country of origin. Besides having financial capacity, institutional knowledge and experience from both the host and home countries, the family network in both countries make the crowdfunding immigrant entrepreneur’s families more resourceful, providing additional benefits to the crowdfunding migrant entrepreneurs in the development of the campaign and crowdfunded venture.

This study broadens the understanding of the ways migrant entrepreneurs can rely on their family social capital for building financial capacity and starting a crowdfunded venture.

Many of today’s information and technology systems and environments facilitate inquiry, learning, consciousness-raising and knowledge-building. Such platforms include e-learning systems which have learning, education and/or training as explicit goals or objectives. They also include search engines, social media platforms, video-sharing platforms, and knowledge sharing environments deployed for work, leisure, inquiry, and personal and professional productivity. The new journal, Information and Learning Sciences, aims to advance our understanding of human inquiry, learning and knowledge-building across such information, e-learning, and socio-technical system contexts.

This article introduces the journal at its launch under new editorship in January, 2019. The article, authored by the journal co-editors and all associate editors, explores the lineage of scholarly undertakings that have contributed to the journal's new scope and mission, which includes past and ongoing scholarship in the following arenas: Digital Youth, Constructionism, Mutually Constitutive Ties in Information and Learning Sciences, and Searching-as-Learning.

The article offers examples of ways in which the two fields stand to enrich each other towards a greater holistic advancement of scholarship. The article also summarizes the inaugural special issue contents from the following contributors: Caroline Haythornthwaite; Krista Glazewski and Cindy Hmelo-Silver; Stephanie Teasley; Gary Marchionini; Caroline R. Pitt; Adam Bell, Rose Strickman and Katie Davis; Denise Agosto; Nicole Cooke; and Victor Lee.

The article, this special issue, and the journal in full, are among the first formal and ongoing publication outlets to deliberately draw together and facilitate cross-disciplinary scholarship at this integral nexus. We enthusiastically and warmly invite continued engagement along these lines in the journal’s pages, and also welcome related, and wholly contrary points of view, and points of departure that may build upon or debate some of the themes we raise in the introduction and special issue contents.