Abstract
We can only understand the present by continually referring to and studying the past; when there arises religious problems, political problems, race problems, we must always remember that while solutions lie in the present, their cause and their explanation lie in the past.
W.E.B. Du Bois and values we’re bringing to the job of editing ASR
Ever since former ASR Editor (1994 to 1996) Paula England selected a saguaro cactus silhouette to represent Tucson (she was then at University of Arizona) and placed it on the spine of the issues she edited, every editor or editorial team has selected a silhouette for the ASR spine to represent their location. The team here in Amherst, at the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts, has chosen a silhouette of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois. The journal spine is pictured above (center) for those reading this online. For those reading it in print, just turn over your copy to see the image on the spine.
Du Bois’s image is a meaningful choice for multiple reasons. It represents our spatial location in Western Massachusetts—we are about 1.5 hours’ drive west of Boston, and a bit further west from here is Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where Du Bois was born and raised and where you can find his homestead marked by a National Historic Site designation. UMass-Amherst is the proud home of the tallest academic library in the nation (26 floors, pictured above on right), which is named in honor of W.E.B. Du Bois and houses the world-renowned W.E.B. Du Bois Center. We thank our librarians and the Du Bois Center for their support in finding a recognizable image of Du Bois (photo by James E. Purdy, 1904, pictured on left) from which the publishers created the silhouette.
We also like Du Bois’s image as a representation of our discipline’s current place in history, where many colleagues (including some in our department at UMass) have forged a Du Boisian turn in sociology (e.g., de Leon and Rodríguez-Muñiz 2022; Góes 2022; Morris 2015; Vásquez 2023). In 1993, considerably prior to the current resurgence of interest in Du Bois, UMass sociology faculty member Edwin Driver—hired in 1948 as the first African American professor on our campus—with Dan. S. Green (Kentucky State University) published W.E.B. Du Bois: On Sociology and the Black Community (University of Chicago Press).
ASR Editorships over Time
Du Bois’s work also reminds us that efforts at emancipatory knowledge production happen in a particular temporal context. As he put it, “conditions and action vary and change from group to group from time to time and from place to place” (Du Bois, as cited in Itzigsohn and Brown 2020:103). Following Jacobs’s (2004) table of ASR editors from 1936 to 2005 in his initial Editor’s note, we list past editors in Table 1. There have been 39 editors of ASR. Prior to 2006, in all but two cases these were single editors, working solo. After 2006, all ASR editorial teams have had at least two editors. There were only two women editors of ASR prior to 2010, but each editorial team since then has had both men and women in the role. Reflecting our field, ASR recent editorial teams have increasingly greater racial/ethnic diversity as well.
Past Editors of the American Sociological Review
Note: Based on Jacobs (2004).
Global Reach
We have a deep appreciation for Du Bois’s approach to social analysis, which in addition to using cutting-edge methods and visualization (Rusert and Battle-Baptiste 2018), consistently embedded the understanding of racialized inequalities in historical, geographic, and relational contexts. He also developed over time as a scholar—turning to a more globalized vision of sociological analysis later in life. While Du Bois may have begun in places like Western Mass and Philadelphia, his development as a scholar led him to a deep engagement with the Global South, and Ghana in particular, where he is buried.
One of the important goals for our editorship term is to follow Du Bois’s engagement with the Global South as inspiration to increase the global and transnational reach of the journal. But what does it mean for the flagship journal of the ASA to be more global and transnational, given that ASR already routinely publishes cross-national comparative work? We hope to begin to address this question by taking three concrete steps toward broadening the global reach of ASR.
First, we are increasing the number of internationally based scholars, particularly from the Global South, on the editorial board. Second, we hope to increase the number of peer reviewers from the Global South. And finally, we intend to hold annual virtual panels about writing and publishing hosted by universities in the Global South. We hope these three initiatives will begin to increase the journal’s engagement with scholars in the Global South. We also welcome conversation and further suggestions for how we might extend ASR’s global reach. If you are an ASR reader who identifies as a sociologist from the Global South, at the postdoc or faculty level, we invite you to send us your CV and volunteer to review an ASR paper submission in your area of expertise. We would also love to see paper submissions from teams of authors that span the Global North and South, and we look forward to seeing the results of these collaborations.
What is an ASR paper and what happens when you submit your paper?
ASR papers tend to combine very strong research designs and analytic methods, general interest framing, and theory development that transcends subfields. As editors, when we are evaluating whether or not to send a paper out for review, we have these three criteria in mind—quality of methods, general appeal, and breadth.
When considering whether to develop a paper for ASR, writers might ask if their paper has the potential to appeal to a broad sociological audience. The typical ASR paper makes this point in the first one or two paragraphs. Are your data and methods of unusually high quality? How is your research design an advance on what has come before? This question is better answered by showing the advance, rather than simply claiming it. Finally, what and where is the contribution to theory? Can you make a theoretical contribution, speculation, or innovation beyond your substantive case?
After a paper is submitted to ASR, a student Editorial Assistant completes a manuscript intake process, checking that the manuscript has not been submitted previously and for any editor conflicts of interest. At this point, the Editorial Assistant notes for the Lead Editors any requests the author has made regarding potential reviewers. Upon processing the manuscript, the Editorial Assistant checks whether the author’s anonymity is preserved, the manuscript is formatted correctly, and that it does not exceed the 15,000-word limit. If these criteria are not met, the Editorial Assistant will un-submit the manuscript for the author to make the necessary revisions. To encourage graduate students to submit manuscripts to ASR and ensure the fee is not prohibitive, the journal waives the $25 submission fee for ASA student members. We also waive the fee for authors from the Global South. For student paper submissions, a part of the Editorial Assistant’s anonymizing process is to reclassify the manuscript type from “ASA Student Submission” to “Original Article” so that peer reviewers do not know whether a paper has been submitted by a student. The paper is then sent to the Lead Editors.
The first decision made by the Lead Editors is whether the paper should go out for review. This is a mini review asking if the paper might have the breadth and quality to eventually be published in ASR. Manuscripts that are not desk rejected are prepared to be sent out for review. The editors search for a balance of reviewers who have the substantive, methodological, and theoretical expertise to evaluate the paper. We try to select reviewers appropriate for the paper, but with a diversity of theoretical, methodological, demographic, and geographic perspectives. After finalizing our selection of potential reviewers, we send the list to a student Editorial Assistant, who checks for institutional overlap, reviewer conflicts of interest, and the frequency and recency of review requests for each prospective reviewer. The quality of the title and abstract are of utmost importance in securing reviewers, as this is what the potential reviewers see.
Almost no papers are accepted after the first review. ASR reviewers take their job very seriously and provide helpful advice, even in papers they believe are still a long way from publication ready. Papers that receive a revise and resubmit decision also benefit enormously from the thoughtful suggestions of reviewers. We realize that ASR fulfills an important role in developing papers through the peer review process; because of the high volume of submissions, most papers we send out for review will ultimately be rejected. Reviewers make an invaluable contribution to the development of sociological knowledge by providing useful ideas and suggestions to authors. We believe that papers rejected based on the editors’ reading and peer review reports receive some of the best developmental help an author can hope for.
As of this writing (in November) we have not yet accepted any papers. The papers in this issue were selected by the previous editors. We anticipate that our first set of R&Rs will be returned around the new year. In 2024, we will also make the decisions for any outstanding papers granted an R&R by the Indiana University editors—Art Alderson and Dina Okamoto.
Our Thanks
We close with our many thanks for the support provided to our editorial team. Thanks to the continuing and new members of the ASR editorial board and especially to the team at Indiana—Dina Okamoto, Art Alderson, Emily Ekl, Yanming Kuang, and Anne Kavalerchik—who guided our transition into this complex set of tasks. Karen Edwards at ASA has been exceedingly helpful, as has Mara Grynaviski, the ASR Managing Editor who deftly moves papers from acceptance to print. Special thanks to Sharla Alegria (University of Toronto) who wrote an excellent introduction to our editorial transition for Footnotes, and to our Department, Dean, and Provost at UMass for financial and moral support in taking on this role.
We extend our most heartfelt thanks to the reviewers, who make ASR the top Sociology journal in the world.