Scholarly Communication

Paul A. Djupe, Anand Edward Sokhey, and Amy Erica Smith, The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences (Oxford UP, 2022) explores a more holistic understanding of knowledge production in the social sciences, moving beyond the publication process often required by those in tenure/tenure-track positions to thinking about the role of community in the construction of knowledge. Political Scientists Paul A. Djupe (Denison University), Anand Edward Sokhey (University of Colorado-Boulder), and Amy Erica Smith (Iowa State University) emphasize the idea of academics as citizens in communities and institutions, endowed with certain rights and responsibilities with regard to knowledge production, exchange, and promotion. These actions go beyond simply research; knowledge production incorporates teaching, reviewing, blogging, podcasting, commenting, mentoring, and other similar actions, all of which inherently depend on collaboration and community.Djupe, Smith, and Sokhey all have first-hand experience in the “publication pipeline” process. They accurately and intricately detail aspects of community that are overlooked within the academia. The collaborative nature of The Knowledge Polity speaks to the power of co-authorship in political science and sociology. The research indicates that building relationships with peers and mentors alike provides scholars with access to people whose advice is trusted, people who they consider friends, and people who know other scholars whose advice can also be trusted and valued. Similar to co-authorship, peer review is another dimension of knowledge exchange, collaboration, and the rights and responsibilities of the knowledge polity. The review process is reciprocal, and there is an innate sense that it is a duty, especially when the authors discuss “reviewer debt” (reviewing fewer papers than one is submitting) and how it is usually “paid off” when scholars reach tenure and have more time and capacity to give back to the community. Most academics would like to do more reviews, proving there is a powerful desire to participate in this important act of knowledge production.The authors use data from an extensive Professional Activity in the Social Sciences (PASS) study, which sampled responses from 1,700 sociology and political science faculty about their publications, and experiences with regard to the process. They integrate different aspects of all of these findings in each chapter, examining for differences across disciplines, methodology, gender, race, and age, among other variables. The Knowledge Polity: Teaching and Research in the Social Sciences integrates a diversity of empirical research, qualitative inputs, and sophisticated analysis to better understand knowledge production within the social sciences. It becomes clear that the idea of the solitary scholar, alone in his/her office, creating knowledge is much more of a myth, since the reality is that knowledge production is much more of a collective undertaking and experience.Emma R. Handschke assisted in the production of this podcast.Lilly J. Goren is a professor of political science at Carroll University in Waukesha, WI. She is co-editor of the award winning book, Women and the White House: Gender, Popular Culture, and Presidential Politics (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), as well as co-editor of Mad Men and Politics: Nostalgia and the Remaking of Modern America (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Email her comments at lgoren@carrollu.edu or tweet to @gorenlj. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen to this interview of Vivian Kao, Associate Professor of Composition and Coordinator of the First-Year Writing Program, and Julia Kiernan, Assistant Professor of Communication and Coordinator of Technical and Professional Communication — both at Lawrence Technological University, Michigan. It's more than just hot air — we talk about their STEAM, and their book Writing STEAM: Composition, STEM, and a New Humanities (Routledge, 2022).Vivian Kao : "Writing is really central to the project of STEM. And I'm talking about writing very capaciously, so that is, composing in multiple modes, in multiple media — that is, learning how to communicate to many different audiences and how to utilize many different genres. Because writing is a way of thinking and a way of understanding your place in the world."Contact Daniel at writeyourresearch@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The International Association of Genocide Scholars is a global, interdisciplinary, non-partisan organization that seeks to further research and teaching about the nature, causes, and consequences of genocide, and advance policy studies on genocide prevention. The Association, founded in 1994, meets regularly to consider comparative research, important new work, case studies, the links between genocide and other human rights violations, and prevention and punishment of genocide. The Association holds biennial conferences and co-publishes the scholarly journal Genocide Studies and Prevention.Melanie O’Brien is Associate Professor of International Law at the UWA Law School, University of Western Australia. Dr. O'Brien's work on forced marriage has been cited by the International Criminal Court, and she has been an amicus curiae before the ICC. She has been an expert consultant for multiple UN bodies, and is widely consulted by global media for her expertise on international criminal law. She has conducted fieldwork and research across six continents.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer’s own experience getting her first two academic books published. An overview of different kinds of editors who will be part of shepherding your book to publication. What a developmental editor does. Why might you need to hire one. Her advice to book editors and their clients. Our guest is: Dr. Laura Portwood-Stacer, who is a scholar and academic. She wrote a book based on her dissertation and many scholarly journal articles, including “How To Email Your Professor (Without Being Annoying AF).” She earned a PhD in Communication, with a certificate in gender studies, from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles and, in 2021, I became a two-time Jeopardy champion. She is the author of The Book Proposal Book, and runs her own consulting business for authors.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who holds a PhD in American history.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: Stylish Academic Writing, by Helen Sword What Editors Do, by Peter Ginna This podcast about the peer review process This podcast about book proposals, by Laura Portwood-Stacer Information about developmental editing and academic book publishing in general:  These online programs, including a free webinar for scholarly authors on How to Work With a Developmental Editor Information about The Book Proposal Book including free downloads and worksheets Laura’s weekly newsletter with timely tips and resources for scholarly authors You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

80,000 Hours provides research and support to help students and graduates switch into careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems.Benjamin Todd is the president and co-founder of 80,000 Hours. He managed the organisation while it grew from a lecture, to a student society, to the organization it is today. He also helped to get effective altruism started in Oxford in 2011.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rebecca Colesworthy talks about the university press and how its workings should be demystified, what authors should keep in mind when they pitch their books, and what university presses do for the state of academic labor.Rebecca Colesworthy (she/her) is senior acquisitions editor at SUNY Press. Her areas ofacquisition include literary studies, women’s and gender studies, queer studies, Latin American and Iberian studies, Latinx studies, African American studies, Indigenous studies, and education. She is the author of Returning the Gift: Modernism and the Thought of Exchange (Oxford UP, 2018) and co-editor with Peter Nicholls of How Abstract Is It? Thinking Capital Now (Routledge, 2016). She is on the editorial board of MAUSS International; has taught at New York University, University at Albany, SUNY, and Skidmore College; worked for a handful of years in the nonprofit sector; and holds a PhD in English from Cornell.Image: © 2022 Saronik BosuMusic used in promotional material: ‘Nerys & Leo’ by Bloom K Trio Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The protests of summer 2020 led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors?It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022) considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles—one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech.In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Bérubé and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of academic freedom. Touching as well on contingent faculty, whose speech is often inadequately protected, It's Not Free Speech insists that we reimagine shared governance to augment both academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives on campuses. Michael Bérubé (interviewed here) is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University; Jennifer Ruth is a professor of film at Portland State University. Both have served in various roles within the American Association of University Professors, and also coauthored The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom: Three Necessary Arguments (2015).Catriona Gold is a PhD candidate in Geography at University College London, researching security and mobility in the 20-21st century United States. Her current work concerns the US Passport Office's role in the Cold War. She can be reached by email or on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can we get our articles in Asian studies published? What criteria should we use in selecting what journals to target? On what basis do journal editors make decisions on what articles to publish? How should prospective authors deal with harsh and even contradictory reviewer reports?In this special double-length summer podcast, based on an online event convened by NIAS in 2021, two editors of Asian studies journals discuss the challenges of publishing high-quality articles in the field, in a lively and wide-ranging conversation with NIAS Director Duncan McCargo.Julie Yu-Wen Chen is Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Helsinki. One of the editors of the Journal of Chinese Political Science, until recently Julie was also the editor-in-chief of Asian Ethnicity.Hyung-Gu Lynn is AECL/KEPCO Chair in Korean Research at the University of British Columbiaand the longstanding editor of Pacific Affairs.The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) based at the University of Copenhagen, along with our academic partners: the Centre for East Asian Studies at the University of Turku, and Asianettverket at the University of Oslo.We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.About NIAS: www.nias.ku.dkTranscripts of the Nordic Asia Podcasts: http://www.nias.ku.dk/nordic-asia-podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Laura Portwood-Stacer talks with Kim about book proposals.Laura is a consultant for academic authors. Her book, titled, appropriately, The Book Proposal Book (Princeton UP, 2021), is a how-to-guide for writing an outstanding book proposal.Through her business, Manuscript Works, Laura runs courses, workshops, and provides editorial assistance, to help academics navigate the world of publishing. Enrollment for her next “Book Proposal Accelerator Course” opens on Jan. 3, at 9am PST. Here’s the link: courses.manuscriptworks.comImage of several books from Wikimedia Commons.Music used in promotional material: Mozart Piano Concerto K.467 2mvt. by Cheong Lin Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Academic Life! In this episode you’ll hear about: Why Robert Ramaswamy wants to see your revised dissertation submitted for publication. What makes a revised dissertation ready to submit to a press. How to choose mentor texts to put in your proposal. Signs that you might not want to turn your dissertation into a book, and what to do instead. The editorial complexities of saying “no” to a book proposal. And a discussion about the new University of Wyoming Press imprint Our guest is: Robert Ramaswamy (he/they), who has a BA in American studies from Yale University and an MA in American studies from George Washington University, and left a PhD program in American Culture at the University of Michigan ABD. He joined UPC/University of Wyoming Press as acquisitions editor in 2022, after working as an assistant editor for the Ohio State University Press and as an editorial assistant for University of Michigan Press/Michigan Publishing. At UPC/UWyoP, Robert acquires in history, environmental humanities, public humanities, and democracy and the United States. He lives in Ann Arbor, MI with his partner, Anna, two dogs, and eight chickens.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, the co-creator of the Academic Life.Listeners to this episode might also be interested in: Association of University Presses  University of Wyoming Press  On Revision, by William Germano From Dissertation to Book, by William Germano What Editors Do: The Art, Craft and Business of Book Editing, by Peter Ginna A discussion of From Dissertation to Book, hosted by Dr. Dana Malone  A conversation with Mona Hamlin about marketing scholarly books  A conversation with acquisitions editor Rachael Levay  You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island and neither are we. We reach across our mentor network to bring you experts about everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Here on the Academic Life channel, we embrace a broad definition of what it means to be an academic and to lead an academic life. We view education as a transformative human endeavor and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Wish we’d bring on an expert about something? DMs us on Twitter: @AcademicLifeNBN. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices