Abstract
This is a transition year for Affilia as one editorial teams’ term ends and a new editorial team begins. We welcome Drs. Yoosun Park, Stéphanie Wahab, and Rupalem Bhuyan as their vision, coupled with the editorial board, consulting reviewers, guest reviewers, SAGE staff, and authors, push us to learn, think, and do feminisms. This last editorial serves as the closing for us, as we return to our other academic pursuits transformed by the lessons learned from Affilia.
One of these lessons occurred, as we witnessed the interplay between and among feminist scholars who engaged with each other in a way that often reflected how they came to know feminism. Consequently, some scholars engaged in the work of Affilia through the use of any number of theories such as FemCrit, Ecofeminism, or Post Colonialism. Other scholars, often those whose history with the journal included being closely connected to the founding of the journal, are scholars who understand our social context from the lens of woman. These same scholars were protective of the fundamental reason for the existence of Affilia. Affilia developed in order to address the silencing of women scholars through the rejection of articles focused on women’s issues, the rejection of articles that used feminist critiques, and the dismissing of robust qualitative methods by major social work academic journals. Affilia was created to develop and disseminate knowledge deeply rooted in feminism. Over time, the scholars and authors who participated in Affilia brought other ideas about feminist scholarship and knowledge production to the journal. During our tenure as editors, we found ourselves encouraging and facilitating board discussions about the construction of gender, gender identity, the definition of woman, in current context, and the resulting consequences for the work of the journal. The editorial board grappled with the realization that the woman focus of Affilia was riddled with cisgenderism as a practice although not necessarily as a policy. For example, cisgender women were exclusively selected to participate in reviewing article submissions although our policies did not specifically exclude men. Transgender women were not excluded; however, we lacked intentionality about including their missing perspectives. We as an editorial board engaged in learning about the problem of cisgenderism within the context of an academic journal. For some of us, it required adding additional feminisms to our personal and professional work. For others, it required patience as new ways to think about gender discrimination challenged historical beliefs. We asked ourselves our own thorny questions, “What is the role of transgender men and women in our policies, content, and practices?” Is it legitimate for cisgendered men to utilize feminist tools to engage in the critic of feminist scholarship through the review process? and finally, if we exclude (transgendered or cisgendered) men from our policies and practices because, by virtue of their gender, they cannot do feminist work or use its perspective, can White woman scholars do research and critic articles about communities of color, or the work of scholars of color, when they also do not represent and indeed are a part of the system of oppression experienced by people of color? At the same time, several board members were concerned that by intentionally including men, we could be creating an opportunity for masculine privilege to subjugate feminist work and we could again find ourselves somehow silenced. Ironically, and simultaneously, an invited panel of journal editors was convened at a Society for Social Work and Research conference, and Affilia’s editor was not included (although this was later rectified). These two events reminded us that the battle to protect the contributions of feminists requires us to expand our knowledge about the growing edges of feminism, to occupy academic spaces that try to delegitimize the contribution of feminist scholars, and to own the responsibility of protecting our forms of scholarship by utilizing the metric employed by academic intuitions to evaluate worth, impact factor.
Impact factor, which simply put, is a calculation of the number of citations attributed to articles published in a particular journal over a defined period of time. From the perspective of the editorial leadership and the editorial board, increasing the Affilia impact factor was important to the maturation of the journal, and our authors as institutions use it to evaluate the quality of the journals in which faculty publish as a consideration for promotion and tenure. The editorial team focused on raising our visibility by sharing appropriate articles with colleagues, encouraging submissions through our networks, and being loyal to our belief that reviews are not just a critique of manuscripts but an opportunity to engage in author development. We encouraged reviewers to give authors thorough feedback regardless of the decision to publish the article. Ultimately, it required us to change the work of the editorial board in which our work expanded from reviewing manuscripts to actively transforming key aspects of the journal including the description of the journal, the addition of an annual feminist scholarship award, policy development, succession planning, and the structure of board meetings. These changes required the editorial board and leadership team to have difficult conversations and work through conflict while holding feminist values as the key principle. It reminded us that process is hard and that doing feminism is about critiquing our work, policies, and underpinning values while remaining relationally engaged through the difficult conversations. The result of this work has been a significant increase in Affilia’s impact factors, a wider dissemination of feminist works in the academy, and the ongoing health of a journal that provides a space for a variety of feminisms, methods, and perspectives.
It is not without trepidation that we conclude our terms at Affilia. We have grown as scholars. The excitement of having your perspective, beliefs, values, and practices challenged from multiple lenses refined our thinking. The editorials provided opportunities to take risks as we challenged beliefs about immigration, incarceration, sexual violence, and ultimately the insidious ways that policies and practices can dehumanize and rob people of their dignity. The real power of Affilia unquestioningly lies with the authors of each article that we have published. It is this body of work that calls us to be scholars who are attentive, thoughtful, and witnesses to inequity and that ultimately sustain us, as we grow ourselves as feminists and contribute to feminisms. Affilia’s feminists are unapologetically among the intellectual giants. Affilia’s feminists, and other feminists alike, are born to ask themselves and others thorny questions, and when we do so, it can eventually lead to phenomenal learning and growth. Although the process itself can also be incredibly challenging, we do not shy away from it. As feminists and social workers, we were/are dedicated to stand in the wake and steady ourselves. As Affilia’s editors in chief, we also came to realize, and be grateful, that we, the collective Affilia, are different from most other intellectuals and scholars because commitment and love are central to our processes. And, we are all better for it, and others learn from us because of it. Thank you. These 4 years have been a great honor.