Publishing diverse voices: feminism, social justice and academic publishing – CRADLE Seminar Series
7 October 2020
An engaged audience from far and wide joined us for a thought-provoking online seminar from Prof. Laura Czerniewicz (University of Cape Town) and Dr Sarah Lambert (CRADLE), as they discussed the need to diversify academic publishing. Here, CRADLE doctoral student Habiba Fadel reflects on Laura and Sarah’s conversation and their call to action. Plus, you can catch up with the seminar recording and check out the presentation slides.
On 29 September, we were delighted to hear from Prof. Laura Czerniewicz and Dr Sarah Lambert about their experience of putting together a special collection for the Journal of Interactive Media in Education (JIME) with a social justice focus. The seminar provided a close insight into the processes and approaches that Laura and Sarah took to ensure that their special edition included diverse voices.
Laura began with an overview of the politics of publishing, in particular the Northern/Southern divide, which she illustrated with a map of the world in which the global north clearly predominates, while the global south does not.
@Czernie showing the north and south divide in publishing inequalities – gatekeeping, knowledge hegemony, what forms count and get rewarded. Glboal north. Powerful image https://t.co/RIJp8vL7zT @CRADLEdeakin #seminar #participatoryparity
— Rola Ajjawi (@r_ajjawi) September 29, 2020
This helps to illustrate that the number of Africa-based authors has declined and that Africa-based authors have been less frequently cited, despite having a growing number of journal submissions. Many factors have led to publishing inequalities, including the cost of dissemination and what Laura describes as the ‘gatekeeping about hegemonies of knowledge’.
Laura and Sarah then turned to discuss their special edition of JIME, which featured 12 papers written by authors from different global contexts and cited a broad range of authors. The papers discussed new theoretical perspectives and developed new frameworks for social justice.
Laura and Sarah explained that they had to think closely about representation and ask questions such as ‘who is invited to collaborate on these research projects?’, ‘who writes?’, ‘who publishes?’ and ‘who is cited?’. Instead of coming up with a set of criteria for eligibility, Laura and Sarah asked authors how they consider themselves to be peripheral, a process that helped them to ensure a diverse range of voices for the special edition, such as remote locations or marginalised identities which are usually peripheral within institutions.
Mentoring was another special feature of this editing process that Laura and Sarah outlined. They aimed to ensure that power imbalances common in traditional mentor-mentee relationships were mitigated throughout the process. During this segment of the seminar, Laura talked about some of the challenges they faced as mentors, such as different time zones and contexts. Laura also shared some of the many positive comments they received from mentees about how enriching they found the process.
Sarah then discussed the academic journey she is currently embarking on in feminist methodology in educational research, seeking to bridge scholarship between feminism, social justice and academia. She explained that, in refusing to accept ‘the usual suspects’ of who is permitted publish for their special JIME edition, she and Laura “refused to accept that widening participation in academic publishing equals a reduction in quality”.
How do you reduce publication-related inequality? @SarahLambertOz shares some principles from a feminist position, which she's developed on reflection on her special issue with @Czernie (avail here: https://t.co/iOZfE17lca) #CRADLEdeakin pic.twitter.com/YFImvEz6gx
— Dr Joanna Tai (@DrJoannaT) September 29, 2020
It was interesting that what was discussed in this seminar relates to the current project Sarah and I are working on, Australian Open Textbooks as Social Justice. Our discussions with unit chairs and students have shown a consensus that some disciplines and founding knowledges are dominated by Eurocentric male voices. However, there is an increasing sentiment that diversification of content is needed to ensure that all voices are represented.
This seminar has opened my mind even more to this discussion on the need to include diverse voices and its significance. I found out how much women in general (but particularly women of colour) and those who consider themselves peripheral, marginalised in institutions, from remote locations or from the global south, must go through in order to get their work published. This dominance of northern hegemonic discourse means that our current knowledge is only partial – we need to enrich it by including more diverse and peripheral voices.
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View Laura and Sarah’s presentation slides here.
For more of Laura’s and Sarah’s research, you can follow them on Twitter: Laura @Czernie, and Sarah @SarahLambertOz. You can also follow Habiba @habiba_fadel.
