Should academic publishing intersect with social justice issues?
It’s a conversation many of us who have been mentored in our professional lives may have had, as young practitioners: Be careful about mixing the personal and the professional. Make sure there are boundaries. Try and be a bit more detached. But in more recent years, the advent of postmodern thought has given rise to what people call ‘mesearch’ (or, more academically, autoethnography) – when a researcher uses their personal experiences to tackle academic questions. I want to explore some of the issues of detachment as they relate to a publisher’s work. And, particularly in the context of ‘social justice’ issues such as race, gender, equality, diversity, and inclusion.
“These are my issues”
ARutgers University academic, Jomaira Salas Pujols, wrote in Inside Higher Ed in 2018 about her struggle with ‘detachment’ as a woman of color in teaching race, immigration and inequality. She questions whether she ‘should’ (or indeed ‘could’) be detached. To quote: “It is difficult for me to detach myself from the subjects I teach because they are my issues. Our issues.“
As publishers, or indeed as librarians, we are a step detached from the personal issues that Pujols describes. We can make collection development or portfolio development, or acceptance/rejection decisions, at a distance from the action, notwithstanding our own lived experience. We are not standing in front of a class, discussing “our issues.”
As publishers, we are schooled to select, curate, and collate material based on its intellectual rigor and closeness of fit with our publishing mission and likely market demand. So how should we respond to social justice issues in selecting and curating? Should we respond at all? Should we engage? Should we actively ‘lean in’?
Head, heart, and hands
Iwas intrigued to hear presentations in 2020 from the two largest organizations in the supply of e-books to libraries – EBSCO and Proquest – which referenced an increasing library demand for material around these social justice issues. In the UK, we call these ‘EDI’ – Equality, Diversity, Inclusion.
This suggests that librarians may be reacting to a research and study agenda in the Humanities and Social Sciences, which is driven by social movements, such as MeToo, and Black Lives Matter. This then drives a collection development strategy. They may also be seeing the need to be proactive, and ensure their library is appropriately and representatively equipped. These are not abstract issues for the publishing community, just as they are not conceptual issues for library collection development.
As publishers, our question is: Do we wait for a natural flow of material covering social justice to emerge and consider it on its merits, if and when it does? Do we anticipate, and actively solicit, and seek ways to include it, if we can, when we do find it?
Over the years, I have tried to subject my publishing strategy decisions to two tests. Do they make business sense? Secondly, do they work personally for my colleagues and me? Test 1 – the business test – is essential (but not, in my view, sufficient). Publishers need some level of market alignment to survive, and for a commercial publisher, that equates typically to profit. As the great business theorist Peter Drucker, said “Profit for a company is like oxygen for a person. If you don’t have enough of it, you are out of the game. But if you think your life is about breathing, you’re really missing something.”
Test 2 – the personal, or the philosophical test – picks up on Drucker’s ‘something,’ What are we trying to achieve with our successful business? Am I comfortable with it? Am I embarrassed to explain what I do to others? Will my staff and colleagues be embarrassed? Will they – and I – bring heads and hearts to work, as well as hands?
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
UK-based Cambridge Scholars Publishing (CSP) was featured in 2020 in a No Shelf Required (NSR) Publisher Profile piece, Doing Simple Things Well, where I answered questions about what colleagues and I are aiming to do with both the philosophy and business model. This is an extract:
CSP is a long way from a radical alternative publisher, but their business approach means they espouse some philosophies, particularly around inclusivity, marginalized voices and decolonization, that would not look out of place in some basement collective.
CSP is a broad-based publisher of primarily HSS titles with an efficient and Northern-England no-nonsense style to it. But CSP does manage to bring marginal voices to the market – as much, in a way, as would a ‘basement collective.’
Why is this? Let’s come back to the business test and the personal test.
CSP is a relatively recent arrival in scholarly publishing – 20 years old this year – and though founded in Cambridge, England (hence the name), is now based in Newcastle in the North East of England. This is a long way from publishing heartlands such as Oxford, Cambridge, or London. As such, CSP is always going to struggle to out-prestige the prestige university presses. So, the business test says – compete somewhere else. Compete on diversity (not monoculture), inclusivity (not exclusivity), acceptance (rather than the glorification of rejection rates). Accept that most tenure-track authors may pursue tenure-track publications elsewhere, and be happy that they may look to CSP to publish their early emergent works and their later works.
And the ‘personal’ test? Well, I confess to a warm feeling when I see a very decent proposal on social justice issues that looks to have been rejected by a mainstream publisher. And I think – yes, we should give this a go. Even without any charge for publication, we will probably at least make enough on this to cover costs. And when you feel able to take that kind of decision – that’s where you engage head, heart, and hands.
Exploring author diversity
CSP has looked to encourage what I call an ‘ecology of knowledge’ – the deliberate creation of a diverse gene pool of knowledge from different authors, backgrounds and geographies. This diversity directly contrasts with what I have argued is something of an academic monoculture, where we (whether unconsciously or deliberately) deploy ‘rejection rates’ and ‘quality’ to preserve a hegemony of thought. A little like a Victorian gentleman’s club, which deployed rules, written and unwritten, to exclude the ‘wrong sort’ and preserve membership for ‘people like us.’
A lot could be said on this topic, and people have said it more eloquently than I do. Suffice to say, I believe system bias is neither healthy nor morally defensible. Redressing that balance means our commissioning nets might need to be cast a little wider. Our review policies might need to be applied a little more liberally, favouring inclusion rather than exclusion. As publishers, our roles in standing guardian at the gate of published knowledge might need to be exercised a little more sympathetically and mindfully.
It also led us to think – how well do we walk what we talk on diversity of authorship? This prompted us to ask researchers at a local university, Northumbria, to work with CSP to study the experiences of a sample of CSP’s author base. Due to complete mid-2021, the study will identify and explore key EDI themes in working practices from CSP authors, editors, and contributors’ perspectives.
Dr. Rima Hussein (Senior Lecturer in Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management at Newcastle Business School and the EDI Director for the Department of Leadership and Human Resource Management) and Dr. Valerie Egdell (Associate Professor of Work and Employment) will gather views from authors to help inform future working practices concerning diversity. It is an opportunity to reflect on experiences as authors, particularly in relation to the processes and working practices encountered.
We don’t yet know what we are going to find. But that’s quite exciting!
Publishing of the heart
Istarted with Jomaira Salas Pujols’ story from Rutgers and her 2018 paper in Inside Higher Ed. The paper was titled Toward a Pedagogy of the Heart, borrowing the phrase coined by Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire in one of his last books. For any educators reading this, Salas Pujols’ short article makes valuable and moving reading. Some will agree with her approach; some will disagree.
Publishing is a step removed from classroom teaching, so the raw emotions Salas Pujols describes in addressing issues close to her own experience in a room full of students are not shared as viscerally by those of us in publishing.
But even so, should we look for ‘a publishing of the heart’? Should our decisions as to who gets through the gate into the body of published knowledge be just governed by break-even analyses and preserving reputations for quality based on exclusivity? Or by an intention to build a more inclusive and diverse body of knowledge?