Abstract
Why do we publish and who does this knowledge benefit? Our interest in these questions was reignited with the recent publication by Hodge et al. (2019) who reported findings on their survey of social work faculty who teach in programs that offer a PhD. Respondents were asked to rank order a list of social work journals according to their sense of each journal’s quality and to assess their degree of familiarity with those journals. Using these reports, the authors created two journal rankings: quality and prestige. The latter was derived by multiplying a journal’s composite quality score by its familiarity score. These rankings were offered as an alternative to commonly used impact factor scores which have been long critiqued as limited measures affected by field-dependent dynamics and vulnerable to “journal impact factor engineering” (Reedijk & Moed, 2008).
Considering the journal’s unique mission to create a space for feminist scholarship in social work, an aim which continues to be a marginalizing endeavor in the field (Barretti, 2011), we were surprised to see Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work appear in the rankings at all. We were unsurprised, however, that it did not make it to the top tier. As Hodge and colleagues (2019) remind us, “the venues in which scholarship is published can have a significant, determinative effect on decisions regarding tenure, promotion, funding, merit increases, and professional visibility” (p. 1). The hierarchy of ranking has material consequences also for journals, including Affilia. Indeed, Affilia’s perceived value influences the number and types of submissions, who is willing to review those submissions, as well as how many individuals or institutions are willing to pay to access them. Journal rankings do matter, whatever our views of them. But should they?
Our aim here is not to evaluate the article by Hodge and colleagues or critique the methods they employed. In this editorial, we consider, instead, the politics of assessing “prestige and quality” in the context of persistent systemic inequities in the neoliberal university and global inequities in academic publishing (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014). What do the terms “quality” and “prestige” mean within the context of the U.S. academic industrial complex, a system where western-centric, positivist, universalist epistemologies continue to dominate knowledge production and dissemination? What forms of epistemic injustices accompany the construction of “quality” and “prestige”? How do we understand such terms within institutions of higher education where lack of diversity among tenured faculty (especially in research intensive universities), pay and workload inequity along gender and racial lines, and other such disparities remain entrenched?
Hoffman (2017) cautions that publishing only in the “A” list of journals limits creativity and the diversity of ideas, giving a relatively few number of journals the power to define what counts as knowledge. Epistemological diversity, however, is essential to decolonizing academic knowledge, which continues to erase and render subordinate knowledge held and produced by marginalized populations (Brown & Strega, 2005; Smith, 2006). As Kubota (2019) argues, epistemological racism includes practices that “obscure but maintain unequal relations of power between West-based and non-West based knowledge and academic practices” including forms of individual racism and institutional racism (p. 5). As Mountz and colleagues (2015) note, moreover, “the neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed timeframes” (p. 1236), thereby narrowing the range of the kinds of scholarship that will engender career success.
Accepting without critique the existing taxonomy of quality and the hierarchy of prestige, in other words, we reify the center as the only “legitimate” forms and sources of knowledge in social work, thereby problematizing the marginalized voices of those we profess to “include.” As noted in a previous editorial (Park et al., 2017), Affilia was formed by social work scholars to provide a space for scholarship “as women, about women, for women” (Meyer, 1996, p. 141), a space which the founders of the journal recognized as missing in social work. Scholarship on women and by women continues to be sidelined within social work journals (Barretti, 2011) if not outrightly delegitimized as knowledge (Park et al., 2019). Similarly, scholarship with Indigenous people, people who identify as LGBTQ+ 1 people with disabilities, or scholarship produced by and about people in the Global South, continues to be marginalized within social work publishing, relegated to specialty journals on “diverse” populations.
Especially for scholars who occupy those margins, the material effects associated with publishing in well-regarded journals are, of course, anything but trivial. Job security, career advancement, and even our internal sense of productivity and achievement are dependent upon our ability to publish requisite numbers in journals that list in the topic tiers of Hodge and colleagues’ ranking. It is, however, all the more necessary to continue to question how this constricted imperative for research productivity tallies with social work’s professional values. Drawing on the work of Paulo Freire, Indigenous scholars Waziyatawin and Yellow Bird (2005) argue that “decolonization is not passive; rather it requires…praxis,” which Freire defined as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p. 2). How can we imagine such praxis for social work journals? What would it look like to follow bell hooks (2008) to reclaim the “margins as sites of resistance,” to work toward shifting the dialogue away from quality as defined by the metric of academic promotion but toward transformative scholarship—scholarship that “touches us and changes our perceptions” (Piedra, 2020, p. 5).
Which journals and what types of scholarship would we list if we were to assess the capacity of our scholarship to foster critical reflection, decenter the center, and resist institutional pressure to maintain the status quo?