Abstract
As editors of Affilia: Feminist Inquiry in Social Work since December 2020, we have been caught up in the whirlwind of political uprisings, cataclysmic weather events, global pandemic(s), and technological changes in the very act of writing that alter the conditions of academic scholarship at a temporal pace not meant for the bounds of human perception. We have also been subject to the clash between our commitment to political integrity and the capitalist logic of commercial publishing in an era of tectonic shifts in the publishing industry.
These worlds intersect with our roles as workers in our respective institutions of higher education—also subject to these same external events and structural changes. Indeed, the neoliberal university has been a reality for decades (Hanesworth, 2017). Occupational precarity, especially for contract employees who increasingly make up the academic workforce; increased expectations for teaching, service, and research; and both flexibility and speed-up in teaching through a new mix of online, in-person, and hybrid teaching options had already been a core part of our experience in the academic world before March 2020. One's vulnerability to hazardous conditions had already been shaped by race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, first language, and immigration status. Yet this historical moment seems to have intensified dynamics driven into overdrive by a knotty web of white supremacy, neoliberal capitalism, and patriarchy.
Heightened vulnerabilities and an eroding capacity to withstand unrelenting changes and acceleration have occupied many pages of journals, including ours (Kim et al., 2021). Critical feminist research showed us how the pandemic disproportionately threatened the lives and well-being of Latinx immigrants (Cross & Gonzalez Benson, 2021), Latina immigrants (Cleaveland & Waslin, 2021), sex workers (Bromfield et al., 2021), intimate partner violence survivors (Heward-Belle et al., 2022), student mothers (LaBrenz et al., 2023), trafficking survivors (Namy et al., 2023), and anti-violence workers (Welch & Schwarz, 2023). Social work scholars like Stephanie Lechuga-Peña (2022) showed us how pandemic conditions disproportionately impacted the “productivity” of pre-tenure BIPOC junior women faculty. And scholars like Ahluwalia-Cameron (2022) and Liegghio and Caragata (2021) showed us how they were adapting to these unprecedented times. These are not siloed experiences. Many of us, including those who are academic scholars, teachers, social work practitioners, students, and service users have faced the squeeze on our life force and have suffered real casualties from these many-sided assaults.
Within the social work academy, we have witnessed the ongoing tension between pressure to seek legitimacy through post-positivist, “scientific” epistemologies and methodologies and our ethical commitments to research that questions dominant paradigms and aims to dismantle systems of oppression. We are troubled by determinations for annual reviews, tenure, and promotion driven by a notion of “productivity” aligned with systems of capitalism that value and reward quantity over quality, impact factors over meaningful impact, and grant-seeking over knowledge-seeking that makes a meaningful impact in people's lives. Specifically, in our roles as editors, scholars, and mentors, we see the mounting pressure placed on doctoral students and junior faculty to churn out publications with little regard for any contribution they might make.
The quantification of impact by simply counting the ever-increasing number of articles that are expected for tenure and promotion in schools of social work and more broadly across the academy leads us to wonder: Who does this benefit? Certainly not scholars, since, for most of us, this focus creates angst and requires never-ending labor in writing, reviewing, and editing. It also does not help the marginalized communities we belong to and/or joined social work to support. And it appears to contradict the stated goal of our publisher, whose founder Sara Miller McCune once said: “I’m proud to say that Sage is a company that advocates for policy that will enable science, especially social and behavioral science, which is often underfunded, to make real-world impact” (Sage Publications, 2023). What would it look like to recenter this mission?
As academics of the Affilia community and employees of our own institutions, we focus our attention on the combined pressures of requirements to publish, the constraints of a capitalist publishing industry, and a neoliberal university environment constantly pushing to get more for less. As a feminist journal, we have witnessed a decline in submitted publications as the pandemic has led to faltering productivity, particularly among caregivers; manuscript submissions that have little to do with the mission and scope of our journal (perhaps due to pressures to publish); real challenges in finding willing (or able) reviewers (since reviewing is now considered volunteer work at our paid jobs, Publons notwithstanding); decreasing funds from our publisher (who also faces threats from university budget cuts, open access agreements, online first erosion of the concept of journal issues/volumes, and the omnipresence of AI); and the ever-present threat of closing libraries (the first to tighten belts in times of recession only never to gain back resources when budgets improve).
This neoliberal environment, coupled with the frightening onslaught of academic censorship targeting the very tenets of critical feminism and the ability to mention words central to our scholarship (Zelnick et al., 2023), leave us weary but also with the understanding that our work is more needed than ever. We write this on the heels of our first in-person editorial board meeting since the pandemic and with the high spirits and sense of community that we have been fostering over Zoom and emails. We can verify that the brilliance of critical feminism and its proponents has never shown brighter. We have witnessed how our collective energies and the collaboration and critical dialogue that undergird the legacy of feminist scholarship have only been heightened by the conditions that have led us here. Even those of us overcome by unrelenting exhaustion felt re-energized by the presence of like-minded others.
We also know that the continued nurturing of slow, relational, and meticulous work of sustaining Affilia continues to strengthen us as a journal and as a community. Despite precarity, we understand well the importance of critical scholarship. Despite the pressures to publish for the sake of numbers, thereby sacrificing quality, integrity, and the goal of social change, we have a continual flow of rigorous and innovative work from all of you that moves social work and the many worlds that social work touches forward.
This ongoing pressure for doing more with less must be resisted. It is a false demand; a condition produced under the most egregious expressions of profiteering; an overproduction of meaninglessness during a time when our most careful work is essential to our survival as an academic institutional field and perhaps as a species. We propose four recommendations to counter neoliberal tendencies with feasible and necessary steps to reground and fortify ourselves during challenging times:
Change the Conversation in Faculty Search Committees
Being part of a search committee can be a time burden, but it is also an opportunity to raise questions about what work is needed and valued in our programs and to recognize the potential of scholars who will contribute in meaningful ways. We have witnessed applicants for tenure-stream faculty positions moved immediately to the reject pile solely because their total number of publications does not meet some arbitrary threshold. While scholarship is of course an essential part of faculty work, we must consider the background and context of applicants. Some have been mentored by faculty who have provided numerous opportunities for co-authorship and others have not. Some are engaged in secondary data analyses with more expedient publishing opportunities and others are engaged in participatory or community-engaged research that benefit from “slow” scholarship (Wahab et al., 2022). These contexts matter, as do the backgrounds and experiences with which students enter doctoral programs. We should take a long view of the potential of candidates to contribute in meaningful ways to social work scholarship, rather than simply counting lines on CVs.
Revise Promotion and Tenure Guidelines
The contradiction between the missions of schools of social work and the scholarly activities valued in the neoliberal higher education setting has been evident for some time. During promotion committee meetings at teaching-focused schools whose environments have increasingly resembled those of research-intensive institutions in promotion and tenure standards, committees have tied themselves in knots developing clinical tracks, expanding the definition of scholarship, and making other efforts to promote and value faculty who train our BSW and MSW students. Meanwhile, in research-intensive settings, productivity demands can obscure the practice-embedded activities (praxis!) that have historically characterized social work and critical scholarship. Yet, we are finding examples of creative resistance. The University of Pittsburgh School of Social Work has recently rewritten its promotion and tenure policy to account for community-engaged scholarship and DEI contributions in its metrics. Specifically, the School added a section on impact that allows faculty to demonstrate impact in a range of ways (e.g., common metrics of scholarly impact like citation count, H-index, impact factor of journals, as well as measures of broader impact such as altmetrics, descriptions of policy and practice changes, and education impact [opensyllabus.org]), recognizing that it is important that our systems of evaluation account for diversity in types and formats of scholarship and contributions. We urge other schools and programs to revisit their criteria for promotion and tenure with a critical eye so that we are retaining faculty who have the skill and commitment to contribute to essential conversations in the field and to mentor the next generation of scholars to be equipped to address the urgent challenges before us.
Question Rankings
The time is past due to questions how we rank social work journals and schools/departments, and even the utility of having rankings at all (Bhuyan et al., 2020). One common metric for ranking schools is “faculty productivity,” which is simply a count of publications in a given year divided by the number of faculty. How does such a measure represent social work values, where we seek to engage in research for impact? How might journals and schools benefit from exploring “slow scholarship” that recognizes the importance of process and relationships in generating knowledge that makes a meaningful contribution to people's lives, social work practices, and our broader policy decisions (Wahab et al., 2022)? Similar to rethinking our criteria for promotion and tenure, we must ensure that we are not contradicting our ethical commitments by attempting to quantify, particularly in a hierarchical way, qualities that simply cannot be ranked. Structural racism and embedded white supremacy reveal these rankings to be self-fulfilling prophecies of merit/privilege, where those who end up at the top could have been (generally) predicted on the basis of race, gender, and socio-economic status. Building on conversations in our field around anti-oppressive, liberatory practices, as well as social work's complicity in perpetuating white supremacy culture, we cannot continue to ignore how these rankings run counter to our values.
Support Organizing for Collective Power
The irony of social workers supporting others in collective action and liberation without organizing ourselves is distressing. We must courageously support and follow the lead of current social work students advocating for paid field placements (Social Work News, 2023) and the many newer (and more seasoned) social workers organizing workplace unions, as well as broader coalitions and unions of social service workers that cut across specific workplaces and titles (Zelnick et al., 2022). We must also support faculty unionization efforts, which are expanding and intensifying to resist the mandates of the neoliberal university that have created many of the challenges on which this editorial has focused.
We feel an obligation to use our privileged role as editors and senior scholars to speak out against the pressure for increased productivity in scholarship which benefits none of us. We echo Amber Dance (2023) in their recent Nature editorial: “Stop the peer-review treadmill. I want to get off.” If we do not speak up, then we are complicit in an academic culture that limits our wisdom, creativity, and meaningful impact. We encourage our colleagues, especially those with the privilege of tenure and those in leadership positions, to join us in resisting this culture and working to reward practices aligned with our social work and social justice commitments.