Abstract
In our first editorial, published in the February issue of 2017, we explained our hope for the journal to become a space in which innovative thinking and boundary-pushing scholarship could be voiced and shared. As we, the new editorial team, learned the day-to-day tasks of running a journal in the months that have followed, we have also been pondering how to actualize those aspirations. The dilemma, to put it bluntly, is this: We aspire to be a journal that publishes radical scholarship that pushes the edges of received knowledge in social work, but the social work academe that generates the authors—and of which we and the journal are a part—does not promote or support such scholarship.
Notwithstanding the Hollywood trope of the ardent scholar driven by the pursuit of pure knowledge unimpeded by distractions and detractors, the reality of the academe is that we write and publish not only to follow our scholarly vision and ideals, but because it is a necessity for the particular type of public recognition required for job security and career advancement. Putting aside the issue of the enormous privilege inherent in tenure-track faculty jobs, sustained by the labor of an army of poorly compensated contingent faculty, it must be acknowledged that the system of in-or-out tenure is structured so that job security requires career advancement, and career advancement is measured most often by a narrow definition of productivity. Social work academics know that productivity means that numbers—of published manuscripts, of journal rankings by impact factor, and of funded grants and dollars granted—are what matter most, most often. We are also aware that impact factor, H-index, and other such quantitative metrics used to account for productivity have been repeatedly critiqued as biased measures that clearly valorize only particular types of scholarship. Social work scholarship, in other words, is bound within and delimited by the business models that govern the institutions in which we work. The business model of the increasingly corporatized universities is one in which funding directs scholarship, and metrics designed for and about such fundable scholarship shape the viability of its faculty and the form, content, and tenor of their scholarship.
Ideas such as slow scholarship argue against such academic business models (http://web.uvic.ca/∼hist66/slowScholarship/). The slow scholarship movement critiques pressures for high productivity and its embodied effects as a symptom of the neoliberal university (Mountz et al., 2015). Mountz and colleagues argue that the productivity pressures of academic business model that rewards numbers (and dollars) over the quality of scholarship erode academic working conditions undermine intellectual growth and personal freedom. Collectively, the authors argue for a feminist politics of resistance that foregrounds an ethic of care and commitment to good scholarship. In a 2016 call for contributors for an edited volume, two assistant professors, education scholar Manya Whitaker and Eric Sociologist Anthony Grollman, called for “academic bravery” in an academe in which, despite rewards for productivity, creativity, and innovation, scholars are implicitly rewarded to a far greater extent for “playing it safe,” remaining “objective,” detached and apolitical in their work, and refusing to challenge the status quo in academia and beyond. These conservative norms pose constraints on marginalized scholars, namely women of color, who pursue academic careers to liberate themselves and their communities. Despite the stereotype that college campuses are liberal, social justice utopias, the academy has increasingly become a risk-averse and conservative profession. (https://networks.h-net.org/node/4189/discussions/128439/cfp-academic-bravery)
Such structures are antithetical to the ideals and passions that brought so many of us to academic social work. So many of us turned to academia from the field because we encountered questions about our work—its rationale, its purpose, its borders, and its ethics—that we did not find answer for or only found troubling answers for. This is not to say, to be clear, that only radical ideas, methods, and critiques can answer such questions. There is immense merit in, and great need for, well-conceived and executed scholarship that replicates, confirms, extends, or refutes that which we know. But so many of us turned not only to academia but to academic social work, specifically, because we wanted not only to create more knowledge but to disrupt the usual, the accepted, and the already legitimated forms of knowledge that limited and silenced other types of voices and ways of knowing. The social justice values claimed by social work seemed to hold out a promise of access that would allow for scholarship that challenges what our students trenchantly identify as the Anglo-heteropatriarchal norm. Such ideals demand radical scholarship that not only refines that which is already known but reaches to decenter, dismantle that which is already known in order to open new possibilities.
Given that the mission of Affilia, and indeed the point of feminism in general, is entirely congruent with these ideals that attracted so many of us to academic social work, the journal sits uneasily within these constrained academic structures that supply its potential authors.
As we have become more familiar with the day-to-day tasks of running an academic journal, we have realized ever more clearly that in making each of the quotidian decisions required in that work, we are determining the borders of allowable scholarship: Page or word limits we impose signal the types of methodologies we have predetermined as acceptable or unacceptable and the types of manuscripts (e.g., empirical vs. conceptual) we list—or omit to list—as acceptable submissions, validate, or invalidate different kinds of knowledge production. The contents of our reviews and the processes of our editorial decision-making are, in other words, a forms of gatekeeping. We, reviewers and editors both, do not simply assess for quality but in our assessment, enact the legitimation or delegitimation of certain forms and means of knowledge transmission. We are adjudicating what subjects and what manner of their delivery count as knowledge.
While these last problematics may appear specific to the work of journal production, the underlying issues of what becomes counted as scholarship and rewarded as worthy scholarship are issues of concern for academic social work as a whole. How can we build an academe that validates, supports, encourages, and rewards thinking out-of-the-box? How can we encourage scholarship that dares greatly, and doing so dares also to fail?
Here are some ideas we are deliberating: Can we, should we, break out of the bounds of the usual peer-review process and offer more guidance, mentorship than is usual? If a truly new topic comes along, a type of voice, and an approach that we have not seen before or see rarely, should we/can we forge a different kind of a relationship with the author(s), beyond the usual review and rereview? What might such a relationship mean for a peer-review process? Given the pressures for metricized performances the academe imposes upon scholars—especially untenured scholars whose job security is, by definition, uncertain—to show productivity in particular ways, is it ethical, responsible for us to encourage the production of brave scholarship? Can tenured faculty lead the way—dust off and pursue cherished topics, ideas, curiosities, and queries put aside during their paths through tenure and promotion because they did not quite fit within the borders of accepted productivity? Can we develop a different kind of metric for productivity? Instead of relying solely on citation measures that best reward multiauthored, short form research reports, is there a way to track a study’s impact on the practice or on the education of practitioners? Is there a way to measure what articles are used in classes or read by practitioners? What articles change the field’s views, experiences, and attitudes? Can we track the most daring, most courageous pieces of scholarship? Should we, as a journal, develop a forum for the discussion of these ideas? Could we put together a boot camp to discuss, teach, and generate ideas about brave scholarship? How might social work scholars use what we know about community organizing to create brave academic spaces and scholarship? How might we learn from brave feminist scholars who have navigated these spaces?
We invite you—readers, scholars, educators, and journal reviewers and editors—to share our views. Do these issues resonate with you? What are your ideas? We would love to hear from you.