Transcript
Speaker 1:
Okay. Welcome everyone, to this session on women in publishing. My name is Andrea Jan, and I serve on the publications' committee of the American Academy of Religion. I'm also the editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. We're here today to talk about women in publishing, and we've asked a few different women who have served as authors and, in some cases, as editors, to talk about some of the unique challenges that women might face with regard to publishing.
Speaker 1:
Is this too loud? Should I move it back a little bit? It's echoing a little bit, isn't it? I'm kind of loud as it is. Okay. There we go.
Speaker 1:
I want to start with a funny anecdote. When I was ... It was 2014 and I had submitted an article submission to the JAAR. This was obviously well before I was editor, and I was in the delivery room. Literally in labor with my first child. It had been a year since I had submitted that manuscript, and I had not heard from that editor, and I was about to have my first baby. So, I literally emailed the editor of the JAAR from the delivery room to find out the status of my submission, because I was like, "I got to get published, I'm about to have this baby that's going to feed on me for who knows how long." That was .... that's just a funny story. Luckily, he was an extraordinary editor, and he got back to me very quickly, and luckily we did see that manuscript to publication eventually.
Speaker 1:
I tell that story just because it's kind of fun and funny at my expense. It's also captures the real palpable challenges that women sometimes face. Not just because some of us are mothers, because not all of us are mothers, but because we're women, and women have all sorts of different unique situations that our male counterparts and other counterparts don't necessarily face in the world of publishing.
Speaker 1:
We're here to talk about some of those struggles from taking maternity leaves, to dealing with being underrepresented in the Academy, and having fewer options when it comes to mentoring. A whole wide range of challenges we may or may not face as women when it comes to publishing, and I think we've invited a broad range of excellent scholars here to address some of the questions you might have. We'll save plenty of room for those at the end and hopefully have a fruitful discussion.
Speaker 1:
We're going to start with Zayn Kassam. Zane is professor and chair of religious studies at Pomona College. She sits on the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Feminist Studies and Religion, and is an associate editor for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. She regularly reviews book manuscripts for a number of book publishers, and has herself edited two volumes of essays, served on the editorial board of the Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, and has published an introductory volume on Islam. So, we'll start with Zayn. Each one of our panelists will have 10 to 15 minutes to address some issues that they deem particularly important, and then we'll open it up at the end for Q and A. So Zayn, do you have a microphone close enough?
Speaker 2:
I believe I do, can you all hear me? Okay, let me know if I'm not projecting my voice sufficiently.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to all of you, and I hope what I have to say is not too elementary. You're all seasoned people, but I want to pick up on references that Andrea made to thinking about impediments to women in publishing. As you probably have experienced, one of the first impediments actually is where you are in your life stage. For instance, quite often as we're entering the Academy with respect to a teaching career, we find that that's also the time when we're either having children, or elder care becomes an issue, and we have to attend to that.
Speaker 2:
In other words there are care and nurturing responsibilities that we have at the same time as we're building our careers. That can make it very difficult, especially if you're teaching courses, you're prepping for courses, you're creating new courses, you're also being set on all kinds of committees at your institutions. There are maybe committees that you belong to in your communities that you are also participating in. If you're a mom, then you probably own a mommy van, and you're driving your kids to all kinds of afterschool activities. Maintaining that work/life balance can be really, really difficult. Where there's enough to get done in a day, in a week, in a month, which leaves, then, very little time for actually doing research and writing.
Speaker 2:
Then the other thing is career demands. We do know that women in the Academy do tend to carry a larger share of committee work, but also what is sometimes not on a formal ... not formalized as committee work, which is the advising that we do for students, for other faculty, or mentoring. Where students will come and talk to you because you're a female, and they want to talk through their issues, say with sexuality, or their issues with the other professors, because they feel that you're somebody that they can open up to.
Speaker 2:
There's also the thing that as our institutions seek to diversify more, they want more female voices on their committees, and if you, especially, happen to be a person of color who also presents as female, then you're likely to be asked to serve on those committees as well. Anything with the word diversity is first going to be women, and then it's going to be persons of color. That becomes again, another, heavier, load. There's also the fact that if you are entering the Academy, then the pressure to create a slate of courses, so that in the first few years you're inventing and reinventing your courses so that you have what is known as a stable of courses, that then you would then offer on a cycle.
Speaker 2:
I remember when I first entered Pomona College, one of the more seasoned faculty women said to me that it takes about 10 years to perfect a course so that you can then teach it without having to think about it. And it's true, because did I not reinvent the same course over, and over again until I felt somewhat satisfied, but never fully satisfied with it. That's one ... that's a second impediment to spending dedicated time on research and writing, and then looking for publishers who want to publish your work.
Speaker 2:
The third issue that some of you may have experienced, I know that I certainly did and continue to in some ways, is the imposter syndrome. Where, somehow, we're socialized that the work is never quite good enough or excellent enough. The bar is always just out of reach. And then, there's on the other side, the desire for perfection that you want what you've written to be so good that no journal dare turn it down. Both of those are traps, in a way, because you know the imposter syndrome actually doesn't go away, ever. Except when somebody accepts your work, and then it just goes away temporarily. It's, like, the fake it till you make it, that has to come into effect.
Speaker 2:
The desire for perfection, I think that that's something that we need to understand that all academic work is constantly work in progress anyway, and things that you could have written 10 years ago that you thought were really good then, 10 years later when you look at it again, you think, "The field's moved, there's better language now. There's more theoretical framing, the different theoretical framing that has occurred. The political situation has changed and social situation has changed." Those are the things to also bear in mind. That the desire for perfection and imposter syndrome can also work in their own, ineluctable ways to stop us from publishing what we have, in fact, written and could be ready to be sent out.
Speaker 2:
What I want to mention very briefly in the 15 minutes allotted to me is: what are some of the strategies that we can draw upon to address some or all of these questions? They do say that if you want something done, ask a busy person. How does a busy person organize their time? They simply calendar in what they want to give their time to.
Speaker 2:
So, it's kind of counterintuitive, because spending time on anything that enriches self is sometimes considered to be selfish. And, generous souls that we are, we don't want to take the time to go get that massage, or go for that walk in the woods, or to actually spend an hour thinking, reading, writing, outlining, coming up with ideas, brainstorming, because there's this committee work that has to be attended to, that student's paper that has to be read, this class that has to be organized, the field trip put underway. But, calendaring in regular writing time, whether it's every Friday morning, or whether it's every Sunday afternoon, or whether it's one hour a day in the morning. I've asked people, several faculty men and women and everything in between, how they get so much writing done, and I've heard the most interesting things. "Well, I set the clock at 5:00 AM, and I go for a run, and then I come back, and I make a cup of tea, and then I write for an hour, and then my day begins," and others would say, "Well, I have a block of time Friday morning. So, that's my time to do it." Others say, "Well, the kids go to bed, and the kitchen floor is swept, and it's all done by 10:00 PM, so that's when I sit down and I write." So, figure out a place and put it on your calendar as your regular writing check-in time.
Speaker 2:
And one thing that I, personally, found really helpful, is that a group of women got together and established a writing group. We were all different fields, but within the humanities, broadly written, one in English, one in anthropology, one in medical humanities, and myself in religious studies. And so, we would meet regularly, once a month, at someone's place and essentially workshop work in progress that one of us was writing. And we set up a schedule as to, "Okay, it's Zayn's turn in March." So, I knew that I had till March, say we were now in November, that I had till March to get something ready for that group.
Speaker 2:
That sense of accountability to the group... And then, of course, they read the work, gave me phenomenally good feedback. Not just on grammatical issues, but also the logic of the essay. What was missing for a general reader, general educated reader. Those monthly meetings really, really did help me, despite the fact that I was a single mom., I was in every committee imaginable, I was teaching courses, there were national committees. Finding time to write was difficult, but that kind of accountability helped me not only get tenure, but then get to the rank of full professor. Both of which, as you all know, do depend on showing a steady stream of publishing something.
Speaker 2:
Your institution can sometimes support you, as well. We... When I was coordinating or chairing gender and women's studies, we brought the OpEd Project in to do a workshop with gender and women's studies faculty. Precisely because the OpEd Project was really concerned about the fact that very few op-eds are actually written by women when you take a survey of all the major newspapers in this country. And they were saying, "Well, why is that the case?" Because women, each one of us has expertise in our particular fields. So, how do you mobilize that expertise to speak to a current issue where you need to... All you need to do is write a 750 word op-ed? What remained with all the women is that they needed to hear that we are actually, each one of us, experts in something. Right?
Speaker 2:
Which in a sense addresses that imposter syndrome issue, but also addresses the drive for perfection that sometimes... It's not a question of being perfect as much as it's a question of: "Do you have something that can make an intervention at a particular point, at a particular historical moment?" And if so, then write about it. Right? And then maybe a few days, a few months later, somebody else would come up and have... Add to it or contest it. But that's okay, that's part of an ongoing conversation, and we don't need to feel threatened or diminished. Okay.
Speaker 2:
There is also the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. You may have all heard of it, and see FDD. A bunch of us convinced our college that the money was well spent, and the college went for it, and so they sent a bunch of us are off on their workshops. Now, I think that they were primarily with development and diversity, so it meant that it was women of color that they sent. But still, their workshops are really helpful in doing some of the things that I've already talked about. Calendaring time in, setting up small steps, devising a lot larger project, but breaking it down into doable small pieces. There's some good lessons to be learned from them, and you could just look them up because their strategies are useful and a lot of their material is public and can be accessed whether your institution pays for you to go there or not, or participate in a workshop or not.
Speaker 2:
Another thing is that once dissertation is actually... Can be much more easily turned into publishable material, whether you take articles out of it or you publish the whole thing as a book. My dissertation has never been published, simply because once I was hired at Pomona College, which is a very high intensity place, there just never was time to go back and devise it, and I thought it needed revision. Now, I'm at the stage where I can counsel people, just say that, "Make just very few changes on your dissertation, but send it out to publishers because they will send it to reviewers, who will then come back to you with feedback about "this is what needs to be done to make it publishable." So that when you revising it, you have nuts and bolts, things upon which to.... That you need to focus on in order to revise it to the point where a publisher will take it and publish it." Right? So that's one thing that you know, one shouldn't forget about doing.
Speaker 2:
Another strategy that I found really, really helpful is that... Somebody said to me, and this is when I was asking faculty, "Well, how do you manage to write so many books? I mean, you're on your fourth book now, and how do you do it? Because I'm busy, you're busy, and yet somehow you do it and I don't." And this person shared with me the idea... Actually, several people shared similar ideas and I'm distilling for you here, is that, "Work out your next work. Work out the architecture of your next work." Say it's going to have six chapters. Then, present at conferences, one of those chapters. Because conferences are wonderful places in which to get feedback on how to really address some of the issues that are pertinent to that topic that you did not address as well as you might have. Or questions are asked that made you think, "Oh, I should definitely have a section on that."
Speaker 2:
If you present at a regional, as well as at a national conference, before you know it, in two or three years, which is the time it takes to write a book, at least minimum. Yeah, I think. You've gotten feedback, and you're able to actually then get a work out, because you've been working on it in order to meet the deadlines for the conference presentation. Right? What another person does, is that they test each chapter out in one of their classes. So, students will discuss the chapter, they will get feedback on it, a deeper level of engagement. So, that's another strategy that you could have used.
Speaker 2:
And then, also remember that sometimes you can float about 10% of the material of your next work in journal articles. Most publishers will allow at least 10% to be published elsewhere. So, it's not 100% new material. That's a way of getting a publication out while the book is being written. Right? Especially because the tenure clock, the promotion clock, doesn't necessarily wait for the work to be done before the clock [inaudible 00:18:12] So, I'll stop there and if there's more conversation we can certainly have it.
Speaker 1:
That was perfect timing. Thank you, Zayn. All right, so next up, we have Elaine Maisner, executive editor at UNC Press, and she has worked in scholarly book publishing since 1985, including editorial positions at Yale University Press, and the University of Tokyo Press, and at UNC Press since 1992. She acquires books in the areas of religious studies, Latin American and Caribbean studies, and regional and general trade. Her article, getting published by university press, which might be very useful for all of us, is available in Perspectives, the magazine of the American Historical Association. Elaine originated in sponsors to UNC Press series and religious studies, Islamic civilization, and Muslim networks, and where religion lives. She served on the membership committee, diversity committee, and currently on the advocacy committee of the Association of University Presses, and since 1997 has been a member of the UNC Duke Consortium in Latin American studies, editorial committee for the Latin America and translation series. So, I will hand it now over to Elaine. And here you go.
Speaker 3:
Right. I want to thank you for being here, and also to say that I really appreciated Zany's wonderful ideas about how to be efficient in terms of publishing your manuscript. Because as an editor I'm always like, "When do you think you can get this done? When do you think you can get this done?" I try to be very supportive in that way, because I find that it helps my authors to focus and to realize that there is a deadline. Of course, we will extend it if need be.
Speaker 3:
I'm trying to present the... Is there too much feedback? Yeah. Thanks. I'm trying to present...Oh, yeah. Is that okay? The editorial... The university press... Whatever Help I can be from the university press point of view, or academic press, or any publisher, really. Because I can see, and I've talked to a lot of people in preparation for this, about things that are particular to women with regard to being able to produce publications. I want to talk about it of from the angle of working with a press. The first important thing to know is that university press publishing is an ecosystem. It's made up of networks, and all of these things bear on your connections with other people. For example, and as Zayn put it, building your careers is really encompassed in this ecosystem. There are referrals to editors that people make, and that's very good. It doesn't mean your books are going to get published. Even sometimes when it's referred by with some of the [inaudible 00:21:34] people in the world, and that's because it doesn't necessarily mean there's anything wrong with the work, but each publisher has its own list building needs at any given time. So, I'll come to another point related to that, but that's a place to start. If you're... If you had advisors who have relationships with publishers, it's fine for them. In fact, editors like to hear from their friends and people.
Speaker 4:
... here from their friends and people they respect saying, "Oh, I have this really wonderful project. So would you like to know more about it?" And we'll say, "Yes." Again, it doesn't mean we'll necessarily accept it but we definitely want to know about it.
Speaker 4:
On the other hand, we don't need to hear about it from anyone either. So we want to have direct submissions from you, whether or not anyone is telling us about it separately.
Speaker 4:
I guess you want a supportive editor. Someone who's responsive, unlike... That person, originally. Don't stop bugging people for response. Okay? It is fine and if this person is not professional enough to give you a response in time. I say that... Being more and more swamped and getting later and later with answering people. But you have every right to ask.
Speaker 4:
Another part of this network or ecosystem are reviewers, reviewer pools. We want to know when the manuscript is ready to go out... And I do try to develop my manuscripts or sometimes just a proposal in one chapter, if I think I want to try for an... Get an advanced contract. I'll talk more about that. But there are many people who are supervising their own graduate students' dissertations. So I don't want to burden them. I do want to feel like the project is really well-conceived and at least has a plan for revision in place. I wouldn't want to send the raw dissertation out to somebody. They would stop respecting, probably, what I do. I think, if I did that.
Speaker 4:
Sometimes I'll send kind of a cosmetically revised manuscript out with a plan for revision that the author has created, and I'll go over that plan with them. And that's also a possibility.
Speaker 4:
I think that the... What I really want is for the author to have a vision for their book. I want you to feel like you know what you're saying. I want you to feel like you know what's new and so what... Why does that matter. Okay? That doesn't mean you finished it or you're completed. I want you to really have a voice. I really want you to have a voice. And in a dissertation, it's going to become a book. It's no longer dissertation. You're taking your place as an expert in the field. You'll probably know more about whatever topic you wrote your dissertation on than anybody else, actually. So I always try to get you to be very assertive, passionate in your voice. You're not overstepping the bounds of your evidence, obviously. That would be a disaster. But you are trying to say, "Hey, I've really discovered something and you should know about it."
Speaker 4:
And then there's also, later on, with a promotion of the book. If it gets published, you need to be out there, to have contacts. We want to know about your contacts. That all goes into help publicizing your book.
Speaker 4:
One other thing in the network is grant applications. If you get to the more senior level, when you review other people's proposals or grant applications or panels, you have every right to say, "This doesn't include a woman. This doesn't include a person of color. This doesn't include a non-binary gender person." You need to speak up. I feel like we're in a really gigantic moment of change, but it's not going to happen unless people persistent, speak up very clearly. Of course, you can be polite, but you have to speak up. It may be out of your hands at that point, but with everyone's voices being heard, it's going to make a change in the ecosystem.
Speaker 4:
I think that one thing that I see a lot of my authors doing is having really nice networks of friends around them, scholarly friends. The reading group that Zane mentioned is very good. But just having people out there supporting each other is good. So if you can cultivate that kind of thing.
Speaker 4:
I know that intellectually there's... Does somebody want to always feel like they're doing a woman's project? What I mean is, do you need to identify with a gender in order to be heard? So I think that actually it can help. It doesn't mean that you're ignoring all the other multitudinous things that involved in being human. And males are human too and a lot of them are great. But you need to have some kind of support because, from what I understand, women take rejection... Many women may take rejection in a different way than men do. Some people I think are the most confident people have told me that if they get a rejection, they basically just take it so personally and it takes them a long time to bounce back and send it out. And that's one things you have to do in publishing because, like I said, your book may not get accepted. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because your number one press just doesn't have room to publish everything that they want to publish.
Speaker 4:
So you have to keep... Send it out again. Have a good list of publishers, have... Think about the people who are publishing at places where you'd like your book to be in conversation. With the list. And I'm sure there are many really, really good publishers out there for your topic.
Speaker 4:
And that's another thing though. You need to know what publishers' profiles are. You need to think about whether it's an appropriate press that will do right by your book and your topic.
Speaker 4:
But coming back to... I'm trying to think about your... One of the most important things about getting published is your... Number one, the very first thing you do is to choose a topic. A lot will flow from that later down the line. So think about how... As a dissertation, you have to focus on making it really concrete case, obviously. But think about how, especially in revisions, you can connect it to larger issues. And show how your particular topic relates to bigger trends in a field, whether it's theoretical, historical, social, culturally... You know, methods and ethnography, forwarding the field of ethnography. Think about how you can make the case later on. Frame your project in a bigger way and say, "See, this is what my particular topic can contribute to." Some big questions.
Speaker 4:
I just spoke with someone who told me that she was trying to choose, she's in Islamic studies, on the topic. And her advisor told her it was... She was interested... Oh, and women's history and where women studies extremely important. Cathy Brekus says, "When you bring women into the story of American religious history, it changes the history." So a lot of people I work with, they're really interested in women's studies, women's history. Do it. Do it if you want to. But you have to be strategic too. Because at least in some fields it can be hard. They may be more male led, male driven.
Speaker 4:
One... Or what profile do you want to use to step out with your very first project. I guess there's some strategy that you have to think about. So this advisor told this woman... One of her projects had to do with women and the other one did not. And he said, "Gee, I really think you should do the woman one later and do this other one. Because if you do the women one now, you're going to be identified always with women's issues, women's studies." And, of course, that's insulting. But on the other hand, in the fields she was in, she felt like it was good advice and she took it. And she was glad she did. And now she's going to the women's studies project. I don't know. You have to be strategic. Of course, it depends on what your fundamental interests are. And the main thing is to think it through on that larger level and be engaged with it, because this is a project you're going to be working on for a long time. And hopefully you're going to have some passion for it.
Speaker 4:
So your choice of topic is key from the beginning. I think that whatever project it is, you should bring gender into it in some way. Even if it's to say, "I'm not really addressing gender." Because people now... At least in at our press, we're always thinking about gender. We're always thinking about race. We need to think. We need to know that you haven't just ignored it or mistakenly set it aside. So it's a crucial thing.
Speaker 4:
And another thing about writing is to think about your language, inclusive language. I saw a question come up on Twitter recently, say, "How should I treat women's names? With their status through time and their life story, their name has changed. Should I just pick one name and stick with it?" And somebody else said and I agree with this 100%, "No, of course not." Talk about... Be very transparent. Say, "This one was born blah, blah and then when she gets married, so her name changed to this." And if you want you can just say, "I'm going to refer to him by her married name from on. Then when she got divorced..." So be very open about that and show how women's lives are reflected in your... Reflect women's lives in your work.
Speaker 4:
I think that passion and persistence are really important. How you deal with rejection. You have to... This idea of the imposters is an interesting way to think about it. Women who are helping you or a support group of some type. It doesn't have to be all women, but it could be. To give you confidence. If you get rejected, don't stop. Keep going. Okay? Yes, I think it's a great idea to get advice on your work at an early stage. I think if you can develop a relationship with an editor who thinks that it has potential for their list, you could talk with them a lot about it. They will have really good ideas. You should also read papers, give talks, ask friends to read something that you've written. Those are very good ideas to do in advance. And don't be afraid to tear your dissertation apart and turn it into a book [inaudible 00:10:56].
Speaker 4:
We're having a panel on how to get published tomorrow. No, Monday. So we'll have more ideas about what you need to do for that, if you want to go to that. I think it's Monday afternoon.
Speaker 4:
I just wanted to end with... I promised some hard data. Hard data and I did account of it at UNC Press. Since... Let's see. Since 2010, so nine years ago. In my religious studies list, counting people by gender so far as I know them, which is mainly all identified as women or men. 48% of our religious studies list has been women. Okay? Published authors. And since spring of 2017, 50% women. So I think that's really good compared to... Apparently, I don't know what the jar statistics are, but I'd be really interested about that.
Speaker 4:
And I don't... And I personally, I'm not going out... I really want to publish women. That's true. But I'm competing with a lot of different editors for the best work. So I try to think about it like I'm just looking for the best work. Okay? I don't care who wrote it. But maybe there's a combination being aware of wanting to publish women and looking for the best work, and then finding a way to bring that together. And I hope you find a publisher who also respects that.
Speaker 4:
I think respect is really important. Hopefully you'll find respect within. I've heard tales about publishers who may not. Especially if it's a denominational publisher in certain areas, they may not relate to women the same way they do to men because they're male led fields. That's something to think about.
Speaker 4:
But let me end with a little story that will illustrate this idea of make your voice heard and persistence.
Speaker 4:
I have a very good friend named Mary who's a birdwatcher and she's out in the field. In the field, not our kind of field. But she's out in the field all the time. And she told me that a couple of months ago she was standing, I think... Let's see. On the edge of a path. There was a field. And there was a woman with two little kids who were standing on the path. But just a couple of feet in front of the kids was a copperhead snake, which are very dangerous. And she said, "Kids, I think you should move back. There's a copperhead right there." And she said, "Ma'am, your kids are... There's copperhead there." And they didn't respond. Then a man came along. He said, probably a deeper voice, "There's a copperhead right there." And she said, "Oh, kids, get away." And she said, "Oh, thank you for telling me," to the man. And Mary knew she had heard them, she had heard the voice. So I'm sure the woman wasn't doing it... Wasn't ignoring her because she would've wanted to protect her kids. But there's... I don't know. That's what happened. And so if that happens... I said, "Did you say something to the woman? Like, I just told you that a minute ago." She said, "No, no. It's hopeless." But I don't think...
Speaker 4:
I think you should go the extra step if you're not being heard. Just say, "Hello. By the way, I just did this, or I just submitted this or..." Be heard. Don't stop.
Speaker 4:
That's my story.
Speaker 5:
That was great. Thank you, Eileen. I'm going to reach over. Excuse me. Grab that. I just want to make sure everybody can hear me.
Speaker 5:
So next up is Lisa Sideris. Lisa is professor of religious studies at Indiana University, with interest in environmental issues at the intersection of science and religion. Her most recent book is Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World, with University of California Press, which was published in 2017. She serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, Trumpeter: Journal of...
Lisa Sideris:
Ecosophy.
Speaker 5:
Ecosophy. I want to make sure I'm saying that right. And Religions and the Immanent Frame. So thank you, Lisa, for being here and I'll pass it off to you.
Lisa Sideris:
How's the sound? Is this on, actually? Okay. I can't really tell. Thanks. Thanks for having me. I'm not really sure why I'm here. I'm just... That imposter syndrome, I guess. Thanks for putting this together. You've already heard a lot of really great advice. I wish I had gotten some of this advice when I was younger. And so I'm reading my comments off my computer in part because I have sort of rewritten them so much. Trying to figure out what I have to say that's sort of useful. So sorry about having the screen in front of me. But I've ended up with some sort of anecdotal things which are not maybe funny anecdotes exactly, but maybe more like cautionary tales.
Lisa Sideris:
In politics, the presence of multiple women in a given race, say the presidential race, does not necessarily mean the playing field has been leveled. The same is true in academia. Well, academics is now considered to be a coed sport. There are often tacit expectations that women conduct themselves differently, in terms of things like promoting or not promoting themselves, for example. And there's often a general unspoken assumption that women will or should sacrifice more time for service, as you've heard. We're more collaborative sort of endeavors. Add to these professional expectations the fact that, as one recent headline in the Atlantic put it, quote, "Even breadwinning wives don't get equality at home." "Breadwinning wives" is how they put it. And you've got a recipe for resentment and burnout, and possibly professional failure.
Lisa Sideris:
Fortunately, this headline doesn't apply to me, though I am the chief breadwinner in my family. But like all women in the academy, I've encountered some expectations that don't always seem to apply to my male counterparts. It can take the form, for example, of pressure to participate in a job search when you are officially on sabbatical, which has happened to me. Or expectations that women consistently support one another, where supporting each other means not critiquing their work. It's also happened to me. So I don't edit a journal or work at a press so I don't have the data that you're hearing here. So what I have, mostly, are sort of my impressions from 20 years on the job, in a subfield science and religion. I guess you could also say environmental ethics. I think both of which are more male dominated still, perhaps, than the field of religious studies as a whole. At least that's my impression.
Lisa Sideris:
So I want to focus my comments on two particular areas. First is the inherited legacies of gender disparity, I think. In science and religion scholarship. And second, the sort of double standards that can lead to condemning the tone of women's scholarship. So I think virtually any field or subfield that exists in close proximity to science still reflects the ongoing underrepresentation of women.
Lisa Sideris:
So here's a couple of reference points from science and religion. One of the longest running boys clubs in the Western world is The Gifford Lectures. This remained an all male event for nearly a century, until 1973 when Hannah Arendt was the first to break into its ranks. And actually Hannah Arendt suffered a heart attack while she was delivering. I mean, not while she was on stage, but while she was in Scotland, in the midst of completing her Gifford Lectures, and ended up not completing them, which is an interesting story just in the sense of... Perhaps it was a bit of a curse for her, actually. And even then, another decade passed before a second female Gifford lecturer appeared. So another 10 years went by. That was Iris Murdoch, by the way.
Lisa Sideris:
And the situation's even more desperate with The Boyle Lectures, which is another prestigious science and religion affair. Since its inception in 1692... So good year for witch hunts, by the way. The real witch hunts, I mean. The Boyle Lectures have since 1692 featured a total of two female lecturers. And the first of those occurred in 2012. Of course, much the same could probably be said of many prestigious lectures, or other lofty sort of honors.
Lisa Sideris:
But conversations in science and religion retain a distinctly masculine vibe. In the past couple of years, as I've looked around some rather large seminar tables with invited scholars discussing, say, religion and astrobiology, or religion and the Anthropocene, I've been a little shocked to realize that I'm often the only woman or one of only two women in the room. So gender is not something that I often speak or write about professionally. And I don't approach my work necessarily in ways that are intentionally feminist, although that may be the outcome, the effect. But did get more personal for a moment. Going through one's professional life, not only as female but as a woman who is under five feet tall, I think you can expect that most people will not take you seriously. At least not initially.
Lisa Sideris:
So my general attitude towards issues of gender... At least just as they applied to me, but not in general. Is much like my response to being 4'10", which is something I just wish I didn't have to think about. But other people don't let you forget. Even when you want to not think about it. So a sort of funny story, maybe funny, that my husband always sort of reminds me of was that I was at a reception where I said hello to a very tall colleague that I hadn't seen for a long time. And sort of looking down at me from this great height, he said, "Oh, I didn't see you." And then he said, helpfully, "I mean, literally, I didn't see you."
Lisa Sideris:
So for me, the act of writing and publishing as opposed to speaking, it's something that feels pretty liberating because, literally, people can't see me. Rachel Carson, who is someone... Who's an important figure in my work, often remarked on her readers inability to believe that a woman could have written so many bestselling books about science in the ocean. And one of my favorite quotes from her, she says, quote, "People often seem to be surprised that a woman should have written a book about the sea. This is especially true, I find, of men." She goes on to say, "And even then, even if they accept my sex, some people are further surprised to find that I am not a tall, oversized Amazon..."
Lisa Sideris:
"To find that I am not a tall, oversize Amazon-type female," she says. I can offer no defense for not being what people expect. So it may be that in my own publications I compensate for not being an Amazon-style woman by taking positions that are consistently critical and adopting a style that is one that's sort of assertive descent.
Lisa Sideris:
While I wouldn't say that this writing persona is an alter ego, it is a somewhat exaggerated version of my true personality. This brings me to the issue of tone. Tone policing hasn't really changed much since Rachel Carson, who was a scientist without a Ph.D. or a Y chromosome, was chastised for her stridence and emotional tone. A review of Carson's book, "Silent Spring", authored by one William J. Darby, Professor and Department Chair of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt, infamously bears the title, "Silence, Miss Carson." Yeah.
Lisa Sideris:
Darby depicts Carson's writing style as overwrought and tiresome. He straightforwardly accuses her of padding her bibliography so as to appear authoritative. He mocks her concerns."It is doubtful," he writes, "That many readers can bear to wade through the book's high-pitched sequences of anxieties. This book," the insufferable Darby concludes, "Should be ignored."
Lisa Sideris:
Along with current debates about civility, tone policing has become a popular topic of discussion in the Me Too era. As you probably know, tone policing occurs when one scholar thwarts another's arguments or opinions by reacting to the perceived mode of delivery, rather than the content or more than the content. It allows the detractor to establish typically, his power in the conversation.
Lisa Sideris:
It's a well known fact that women of color are especially likely to encounter these pseudo-critiques in both their written work and their public presentations, and in general, what looks like passion, conviction or courage coming from a male scholar may be dismissed as sheer hormonal display if the writer or speaker is female.
Lisa Sideris:
A recent reviewer of my own latest book, a man a little bit older than myself, makes the following observation. "Her work can be tiring to read. It's the tone. While she raises caveats and qualifications, the reader gets the sense that Sideris angry at these thinkers. She does not let up. Nag, nag, nag."
Lisa Sideris:
Yeah. It was in "The Trumpeter", in fact. For which I serve on the editorial board.
Lisa Sideris:
I think this is the academic equivalent of being told to smile more, and it's especially frustrating because I had somewhat grudgingly gotten through my book and on the advice of my editor and toned down many places that I thought could possibly elicit that sort of criticism, but apparently to no avail.
Lisa Sideris:
So a veritable cottage industry has recently sprung up embracing women's righteous rage. Books with titles like, "Good and Mad" or "Rage Becomes Her" celebrate women's anger as superpower whose time has come. I have sort of mixed feelings about this genre and its potential impacts. Not letting up, having persistence, which was the note that was just sounded here moments ago, is not the same thing as anger. And it's one thing to validate justifiable anger, but another to confuse painstaking critique with a hostile or petulant outburst and thereby denigrate it.
Lisa Sideris:
When the aforementioned book was under review by a press that looked likely to publish it, I received one day an odd e-mail from the editor who had just pitched my book to the editorial board. This was a senior editor, a religion editor with years of successful publishing under her belt. She explained that during discussion of my project, the editorial director, a man with expertise in neurobiology, had raised some concerns. Because my book contains a sustained critique of two elder statesmen of biology, E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins, who have been criticized many, many times by many, many other people, the editorial director nevertheless felt that the book would "reflect poorly" on the press's science list.
Lisa Sideris:
Because my book was deemed anti-science ... that was apparently the term that he used ... I was informed that if the press were going to proceed any further I would need to secure "endorsements" of my work from scientists. I objected to my editor that this demand was akin to asking a humanities scholar to verify the conclusions of a scientific text. I pointed out that positioning scientists as the arbiters of the value of a humanities project, was in fact a case in point of precisely the kind of practices that my book critiques. She agreed with me, but she explained that as a humanities editor at a university press with a strong science reputation, there was nothing she could do.
Lisa Sideris:
My story has a happy ending. When I saw where this was going, I contacted another press and I told the editor there the whole story ... I wasn't sure if I should do that or not, but I did ... and thankfully, they were more open-minded.
Lisa Sideris:
So is this a story about gender? I have often asked myself that question. There are many dynamics involved, but the gendered nature of scientific authority is surely one of them. I don't know whether a more junior scholar, someone just starting out in her career, would have secured that happy outcome. I wonder whether such a scholar would even have felt comfortable challenging this sort of practice or relaying her frank concerns to another potential publisher. I don't know whether I would have, 20 years ago.
Lisa Sideris:
Peer review practices and especially blind peer review are designed to correct for biases like these and many other kinds, but we all know how imperfect that process can be. And even the most functional peer review process cannot address the fact that editorial boards of presses may replicate the same gender dynamics and disciplinary hierarchies that exist in the university at large. Nor can it prevent male reviewers from resorting to the sort of lazy hand grenade of tone policing.
Lisa Sideris:
What we need, obviously, is more women in high profile publishing roles like the women here, and more frank conversations like this. I won't repeat some of the excellent advice that you've heard already. I would also second all the things that you said about finding writing time, about taking care of yourself, putting yourself first, at least once in a while.
Lisa Sideris:
But in addition to that, I guess my advice to other women scholars, if that's what I'm here to be offering, is to find a handful of people, both men and women, whose judgment you trust when you need a reality check about whether the obstacles you're experiencing are unusual or unfair. It's important to have people in your life who can tell you when you're right, but also when you're wrong. I think having people who always back you up can actually create more of a feeling of resentment sometimes, because it's not always about gender. Sometimes it is. I've had lots of good advice from both men and women as far as these kinds of dilemmas when I didn't really know what to do next.
Lisa Sideris:
In my own career, I wasn't mentored by women, at all, really. There really weren't any women when I was a young scholar who gave me advice. But since I was asked to speak on this subject, let me just hereby offer my own mentoring services to any of you who might want them at any point. So, [email protected]. If I can help you, let me know. Thanks.
Speaker 6:
Thank you, Lisa. I want to share another anecdote. Since you brought up tone policing, I'll share that not too long ago we received a submission to "The Jar" a piece largely engaging Lisa's work in "Consecrating Science" and challenging her thesis there, but spent a lot of time tending also to Lisa's tone in the book. You might be glad to hear that I decided not to send the submission out for review and I wrote back to that author and said, "I think the tone of this paper is not appropriate for "The Jar" and we won't be sending it out for review."
Speaker 6:
There are some editors out there who are asking these questions about what we do and do not publish, and we need to think more about this. I do see it more in terms of the way people engage women as authors than the way they engage men as authors, and of course, being an editor I see it sometimes in the way authors and reviewers engage with me as an editor.
Lisa Sideris:
Thank you for that.
Speaker 6:
Yeah. So finally, we are going to hear from Catherine Wessinger, who is the Rev. H. James Yamauchi S.J. Professor of the History of Religions at Loyola University, New Orleans. She served as co-general editor of "Nova Religio", the journal of alternative and emergent religions published by University of California Press since 2000.
Speaker 6:
She's the editor of the Women in Religions series at New York University Press, and co-editor of The Women in The World's Religions and Spirituality Project, which is part of the online World Religions and Spirituality Project based at Virginia Commonwealth University. So thank you, Catherine, for being here.
Catherine Wessinger:
Thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I've really resonated with the stories and also the advice given here today. Just briefly, when I went to graduate school in the 1970s, I was told that if I focused on women's studies I would be unemployable. So I took that advice, but I did write my dissertation on a woman, but it contained no feminist analysis. I moved into women's studies after I finished my dissertation and started teaching.
Catherine Wessinger:
Also, I really resonate with being a mother and taking care of your young child while you're trying to write. I wrote my dissertation while my son was a baby. You start out writing when the baby's asleep, then when he's awake most of the time, you find ways ... I found a place to put him for part of the day for a few hours so I could have a few hours to write. And of course I'm familiar with not having a social life, because you're either focusing on teaching, research and writing, or you're focusing on the child. So I know how challenging that is.
Catherine Wessinger:
My son's 38 now, so I've had an empty nest for a long time, but then, in my case, I just fill up the empty nest with more work, right? But I've enjoyed that.
Catherine Wessinger:
Being invited to be on this panel raised the question for me about how many papers written by women or authored by women have been submitted to "Nova Religio", the journal that I co-edit. Because when there's an issue and all the authors are men, I notice that. When we send papers out for peer review, we're not judging them on who the authors are. We're judging the content of the papers. But sometimes it works out that an issue will have only male authors but then other issues will have predominately women authors. I wanted to see what the total percentage was.
Catherine Wessinger:
Just to tell you a little something about "Nova Religio", the co-general editors are Marie Dallam, Joe Laycock, Ben Zeller, and myself. Rebecca Moore is the reviews editor. "Nova Religio" presents scholarly interpretations and examinations of emergent and alternative religious movements. "Nova Religio" publishes articles, perspective essays, field notes essays and literature reviews on new religions, new movements within established religious traditions, neo-indigenous, neo-polytheistic and revival movements, ancient wisdom and New Age groups, diasporic religious movements and marginalized and stigmatized religions.
Catherine Wessinger:
The first issue of "Nova Religio" was published in October, 1997. It grew directly out of the new religious movements group here at the AAR. We had conversations there. I wrote a proposal for this new journal, "Nova Religio" but I wasn't the founding editor; Phillip Lucas was the founding editor. I came on board as co-general editor in 2000. There have been various editors throughout the years.
Catherine Wessinger:
Right now I'm working on the May 2020 issue, so including the May 2020 issue, "Nova Religio" has published 80 issues during its 23 years, and a total of 470 articles. During that period of time "Nova Religio" grew from publishing two issues per volume to three issues, and since 2005, four issues per volume.
Catherine Wessinger:
It was really impossible for me to determine the percentage of women submitting papers because "Nova Religio" goes so far back. From 1997 to early 2000s we were receiving paper submissions, hard copies and those have all been thrown away. Since we started receiving Word files as submissions, well, those are saved on several hard drives that I never access anymore, so I didn't attempt to count the number of women as compared to men who were submitting papers. But what I did is count the number of articles published by women and by men so I could determine the percentage of women who've published in "Nova Religio."
Catherine Wessinger:
Out of the 470 articles in the 80 issues of "Nova Religio" published from 1997 to May 2020, 165 articles have been authored by women, and 305 articles have been authored by men. That comes to an overall number percentage of 35 percent of the articles have been authored by women.
Catherine Wessinger:
When my co-editors and I saw this percentage, our first reaction was that's not a very good percentage. I wanted to dig a little further. I e-mailed Sarah Levine of the AAR. I wanted to get the percentage of women who are members of the AAR through the years so I could put our percentage of publications by women in context. She provided some percentages to me in terms of AAR membership, with the caution that AAR members are not required to give a gender identification. Through the years, approximately 82 percent of AAR's members will give their gender identification.
Catherine Wessinger:
For example, in 1999, 34 percent of AAR members who provided gender identification self-identified as women. As another example, in 2007, 37 percent of AAR's members who gave gender information, they self-identified as women. And currently in 2019, 41 percent of members who provided gender information self-identify as women.
Catherine Wessinger:
These percentages of AAR membership puts, I think, the 35 percent published articles in "Nova Religio" in some context. Of course, not all authors who publish in "Nova Religio" are members of the AAR. We've published a number of authors who live in other countries. One thing I've noticed is that women anthropologists who have published in "Nova Religio" helped increase the percentage of women authored articles in "Nova Religio."
Catherine Wessinger:
In the three most recent volumes of "Nova Religio" from 2017 through 2020, 47 to 50 percent of the articles are authored by women. Time will tell if that trend continues, and we hope that it does.
Catherine Wessinger:
Of course, if anyone here is working in the area of new religious movements in some manner, I would encourage you to please consider submitting a paper to "Nova Religio." The website for "Nova Religio" is at nr.ucpress.edu. When you go to the website, there's a submit tab that gives you the information about submitting, and of course there are brochures here up front and in the back.
Catherine Wessinger:
But I want to talk about another publishing possibility for people who are working on some aspect of women in religions. Rebecca Moore and I are co-editors of the Women in The World's Religions and Spirituality Project. It's an online encyclopedia which is part of a larger online encyclopedia called The World's Religions and Spirituality Project. It's hosted at Virginia Commonwealth University with David G. Bromley as general editor.
Catherine Wessinger:
In the Women in The World's Religions and Spirituality Project, we publish profiles in four areas: women founders and leaders, religious groups and movements founded and/or shaped by women, saints and goddesses, and also women's roles in specific religious groups and traditions. We also have a section on thematic essays on various topics that don't fit neatly into any of those four categories.
Catherine Wessinger:
Women in the World's Religions and Spirituality Project has a Facebook page. If you're on Facebook and you want to find it, you have to type out the whole name. If you just type WWRSP you're probably not going to find it. You'll need to type out Women in The World's Religions and Spirituality Project.
Catherine Wessinger:
When you go to the Facebook page you'll see that we have a call for proposals there and it gives you information. It states that a typical profile for WWRSP will range from 4,000 to 7,500 words. They are peer reviewed by myself and Rebecca Moore, also David Bromley. We ask that you send a short CV, your topic that you would like to write on, a bibliography consisting of at least five sources that you plan to use and it also contains the e-mail addresses for Rebecca Moore and myself. I've got cards up here too, that you're welcome to pick up, and also in the back.
Catherine Wessinger:
If you're interested, if you're working on a topic that relates specifically to women in religions, we would welcome profiles. To write a profile for WWRSP you have to follow a specific template for the section that the profile will go into, so you need to contact us first and we'll be happy to send you the template. Thank you.
Speaker 6:
Thank you. I can testify personally that publishing with "Nova Religio" is an awesome experience for an author. I published with the "Nova" a few years back and the editorial team there is amazing. It's also just generally considered one of the top journals in our discipline.
Speaker 6:
It's such an honor that all of these panelists agreed to be a part of this panel. Thank you so much. I feel like we got so many different perspectives from you as authors, as editors, as women just working in the profession in general. Before we open it up for Q & A, I just wanted to plug one more session that we're going to have on publishing and that is tomorrow afternoon ...
Speaker 7:
That we're going to have on publishing and that is tomorrow afternoon. The How to get Published Panel. That's from 5:30 to 7:00 pm. And it's at the Hilton Bayfront, in 202B. So just wanted to give you guys a heads-up that, that's another, How to get Published Panel, that might be helpful for some of you. So now I want to just open it up, for Q and A. I'd love to hear some questions. Yes, over here.
Audience/Questions:
Hi, my name's Nicole. I'm a PhD student at PU, working with Professor [inaudible 01:06:33] and I just want to study for gender. I just want to say thank you, to all our panelists, for the great information you shared with us. And I'm curious about two things. I was at the Journal for Feminist Studies out of Harvard Divinity School and JFSR, it's called and this panel here. And it struck me as strange, that we're only speaking to each other about these issues, about what is appropriate professional conduct? How do you talk about your colleagues work? Where are the parameters of that? Is tone even acceptable, as a way to discuss somebody's academic work? What are your thoughts on how to broaden this discussion and talk about standards, in the industry, if you will, or in the fields, as a wider discussion? How is this always just a specialty topic and can we change that?
Speaker 7:
I'd just like to say as a journal editor, one of the ways that I address this with both men and women working in the discipline is I bring it to the attention of my editorial assistants who are both men and women. I bring it to the attention of members of my editorial board, my book review editor, and I hold reviewers accountable as well. So if reviewers come back with review reports and they sensed, I mean they clearly they made comments about the article that give me the impression that they sensed the gender of the person who authored the article. We have a double blind review process, but sometimes the reviewer will talk about a manuscript in a way that I don't feel they would talk about it if they thought a man had written it.
Speaker 7:
And I'll treat that review differently and I might even address the issue with the author when I share the review and say, look, I find these comments problematic. I hope you will ignore them. They are not relevant to our assessment of your submission. And I bring these to the attention of my editorial assistants who are the future generation of our discipline. And I hope that will influence not just the way they write and eventually review things, but also the way they train their own students.
Speaker 7:
And then also book reviews. This is really important when it comes to book reviews as we heard from Lisa. And I think that it's important that we hold our book review editors and book reviewers accountable. For the way they assess books written by women or other gender minorities and as compared to books by men.
Speaker 7:
Any other, anyone else want to address that? How do we basically like change the discipline at large?
Speaker 9:
I haven't had that problem in your religious studies. I think that's why I like your religious studies so much is because you have scholars that are very open minded and it's all about the quality of the paper that's evaluated. You don't get snarky comments about tone or whether that someone thinks the author is a woman or not. It just doesn't come up.
Audience/Questions:
Yeah. I think mainly depending on what field area of religion you're looking at, you might see a variety of problems, but.
Audience/Questions:
I was looking forward to seeing what gendered, what our audience genders would be and there's only one as far as I could tell a male. And that's shocking. I mean that's amazing to me. I really was surprised, so I think we need to organize and advertise panels more boldly. Men need to come, mentors need to come. Maybe you could invite editors to come to department to give seminars. We often do it on getting published, but how to focus more on the review process would be a great panel or a great discussion somehow. Thinking about that, sometimes it's just hard to get people to agree to review. I don't know about journals, but in book publishing we actually don't have that problem too much at UNC press, but from what I understand there are people are just so pressed for time, which bears on, are you going to say yes or no if you need to write your own manuscript so that balance in your own work.
Audience/Questions:
On the other hand, university press, public academic publishing depends on this ecosystem, so I think, I think it's a really, really important.. People need to be trained. I don't see it as much in my, again, my areas, but I guess its out there
Speaker 11:
I guess the thing is I don't really have a problem with the women speaking to women or primarily because you know the gatekeeper issues. Something like do we really want to invest our time and energy in that. However, having forums like the journal, feminist studies in religion, what it does is that it generates interest in the field. It generates the potential for women writers to actually have a space in which to float their ideas, get some feedback, a craft or field shape the field. And then you know, when you acquire the stature of somebody like Kecia Ali, everybody has to put her work down on their syllabi. So then new knowledge is being produced because of the interventions that she made in the field.
Speaker 11:
So I guess it's just like choosing my battles wisely in a sense that you know, and I think the publishing world when they see that, I mean, who's going to say no to Saba Mahmood when she has a new book out, you know? Do you see what I'm saying? So that's why I think that we enter the larger conversation by what we do rather than having the larger conversation open the Gates for us, we open those Gates ourselves is where I feel we need to go. Oh sorry.
Speaker 9:
I don't need two microphones. I think there's something kind of, there are ways in which women, we ourselves are implicated in some of these dynamics. That is, it's insidious in a way. I mean, for example, the request to serve on, to do service when I, when you're unsabbatical that that came to me from women in my department, but it's almost couched in the sense of like, we know that we're the ones who really care. It's what almost like it's flattering in a way. Like, we need you to be on the search committee because you know, cause your perspective matters or that our department is one that's sort of a matriarchy. Isn't that cool? You know, so you're going to help out with this. Right. So I mean it can happen in ways that makes it hard to critique, even especially when it's coming from other women.
Speaker 9:
So, in that particular case, and that's just, that's a minor thing. It's not what, it's not a major complaint that I have, but it's just that that kind of thing can happen pretty often. But I did actually contact my male colleague who was also unsabbatical and said, just curious, did you, were you asked to participate in this? And he said, no, I thought I would leave that to the rest of you or something. And I said, Oh, well I'm actually unsabbatical, but I'm just, I said, I just wanted a reality check on that to find out why. That's why that sort of thing is going on. So I mean, I think it's, I'll just stop there. It's complicated the ways that, that women also play into these dynamics in ways that I think are meant well even sometimes, but can put more of a burden on other women.
Speaker 7:
That's good point. We have a question over here in the front.
Audience/Questions:
How many of you here in this room have been plagiarized? Do any of you have experience of your stuff being stolen? Your publish stuff? I have twice. And let me tell you another story. 20 years ago, roughly. This is my 45th time at these meetings, by the way. I mean you're a long time. I've been both out in the SPR and AR and I had experienced about 20 years ago that a book I've written, I knew that there were publishers who had caught the message from a reviewer, don't publish her book.
Audience/Questions:
So after these two search experiences, maybe three. The person was here at the meetings. I went up to him and I said, I took him by the lapel more or less, and I just said, you have to stop obstructing me. And he said, well, how do you know it's me? I said, I know it's you. And he stepped back. Three paces and disappeared. I'm mostly in a field that's tiny, very small, almost nobody's in it, but none of you address directly the issue of the male established scholarship. Just basically wanting you to go away or not write or say anything. I have experienced real aggression in that respect, so I wanted to, I would like to hear other people's experiences of this kind. If you haven't.
Speaker 7:
I would share that working in yoga studies, which is a historically male dominated field. I haven't faced that sort of any, I haven't faced overt aggression on the part of my male colleagues, but more of a passive aggression where I've been on many panels or in sessions where I raised questions that were just ignored and, I've had no colleagues just kind of sit back and just... Anyone else. I mean just, and it's just, they just get away with it. It's just, I'm just not going to respond and that, that I've experienced that repeatedly. It's another kind of aggression. Melissa?
Melissa:
Yeah, I would, I would say a related version of that that I wanted to ask you all about that, that we haven't had a chance to talk about is mansplaining and whitesplaining. And I will say as somebody that holds an endowed chair and in an R1, I had this weird fantasy that it would stop when I got high enough up the ladder. Yeah, no, I've had my research mansplained to me within the past year. It doesn't stop. So I don't know if that's, I think that.
Speaker 7:
That's a form of aggression.
Melissa:
There's the silencing, there's the plagiarism and then there's the, I understand your research topic better than you do even though no one else has written a book in English on this topic, including that person. Right. I think that's all kind of a larger set. Right.
Speaker 9:
The only thing, my initial response is just don't let them get away with it. I mean and of course they might label you as being, you know, whatever. Yeah. Emotional, angry, psycho, whatever. I think number one, don't let them get away with it, but be professional. Try to even be kind and also have other people amplify your point of view because there has been change has come to some degree I think. I think feel to feel it seems to be a lot different feel to feel, but I also appreciate, and I appreciate it was Zane was saying. In some ways you have to let your work speak for itself or our work together speak for itself. But these kinds of aggressions are, how do you respond? It seems like we need a plan so that you're ready when it happens. You need role-playing. Yeah, absolutely. So often we're taken aback and we let these things pass and you have to say have something to say and again in a professional way, but you can't...
Melissa:
overt aggression, microaggressions are very traumatic and in the moment it's very difficult to know how to respond. And so thinking ahead of time and also having a support group or a therapist. I'm serious because these things can do lasting and damage and as they build up over time. Yes. Over here.
Audience/Questions:
Yeah. So my question has to do with, can you all hear me okay with some of the online publications that are in the area of religion but not academics? So I'm one of the co-editors of, Killing the Buddha I'm feeling our people are familiar with that. We're an online magazine, Religion and Culture. We actually just published a redesigned website on Wednesday it's responsive. It works on a phone. Go check it out. But thank you. It's actually, it's really beautiful. And the other one was at least 10 years old. Anyway, my bigger question here is you know that periodical was founded about 20 years ago by a couple of men with it, kind of masculine-ish atheist kind of perspective, but we've had several female editors on the masthead over the years. I know that the reveler and other online publication with this sort of similar, Ben had a woman at the helm for a number of years. Ellie Handelman
Audience/Questions:
I was also going to mention the religion of America, blog. The specific title of which I'm forgetting I think had women leading it toward. So, I wonder is there a sense in which some of these quasi-academic publishing outlets or religious studies academics might be interested in, is this a more open space for women and potentially for people for women or men, to write about religion from other angles? I've noticed that, you know the title of this is women in publishing, but it's all the academic publishing is sort of assumed. Are there ways in which broadening the conversation to be about more than just academic publishing? To include some of these other stasis for the written word about religion that would be relevant in terms of gender.
Lisa:
I think that's a good idea. I had a good experience publishing and the conversation and of course religion dispatches and I always read articles or essays written by my colleagues who publish there. So I think it's a great idea.
Speaker 7:
Yeah. And we also have Lisa Sideris who is editor on the editorial board at The Immanent Frame, which often times features women as authors.
Speaker 9:
Yeah. And I don't know how many of you've seen the Immanent Frame is now putting out calls for submissions of things. So it has been by invitation primarily in the past.
Audience/Questions:
Can you please say the name again? I didn't hear it.
Speaker 9:
I'm sorry.
Audience/Questions:
Can you say the name of..
Speaker 9:
Oh, the immanent frame. Yeah. It strikes me as being very open to a lot of things, but gender diversity in particular, I think it's and in terms of the editorial direction that it's going in an editorial board. So yeah, that's one I would definitely keep in mind.
Speaker 10:
And also in terms of communications, I think it's important for scholars to try to translate specialized work for a broader audience. And I think it's really important. We try to do books that do that, but any site that can do that, create a new channel for a broader audience is really valuable.
Speaker 7:
So we have time for one more question for you.
Audience/Questions:
I am on the entering end of my academic career as a new faculty so been in this job three to two months now. And so I'm in the world of okay when dissertation is done that needs to turn this thing into the book. But most of what I hear about publishing, just the advice that I've gotten just through doctoral training is you know how to prepare your, whether it's your book proposal or whatever it is. But what I am unclear about is what am I looking for once I actually get to meet an aggregator, right? It's not, please do, please take this I mean, I hope that's not what I'm doing, right? Like begging at someone's feet. Right? So what is it that, how do you know you have a good fit? How do you go? You're at the right place. When do you decide you know this, maybe this isn't the best place for this for my closet, so what should you look for on the other game? Right? Like if you're doing your work, what are you listening or looking for when the editors guide
Speaker 11:
Should I take a small stab at that? I think that one thing you want to ask is a timeline when they can get back to you for, whether the work is something that they'd be interested in carrying. Another thing you want to look at is whether the press is also publishing other works in that field so that they're kind of known as, that's a to go place. If you're interested in migration studies in gender, say for example, a third thing you want to find out is how robust their advertising armies, like are they going to do the work to get this book out to the constituencies that would be interested. Fourth thing is pricing. Because if your book is going to be priced out of the textbook market completely, I mean you can't ask students to buy $50 textbooks anymore, whether an e-version will be possible, what the world rights are or the whether the rights copyright rates, like is it just North America distribution, that kind of thing.
Speaker 11:
And another thing is that you want to have sort of like see, figure out what the royalty arrangement is, agreement is. So those are some things that come to mind right away that you want to ask about. And also then how the working with the editor process works. You folks probably can say a lot more, but those are things that come to mind right away. Is that sort of like from your editorial perspective?
Speaker 10:
Yeah, I think if you have; some projects are competed for among presses, some are so obviously great for one particular press. There's just such a range. So you want to know what they're going to do for you, but you also have to be realistic about... How choosy you can be
Speaker 7:
I think also you shouldn't hesitate to ask for advice. So one of the things you might consider doing is identifying four or five books that are in conversation with your project and emailing those authors and saying, what was your publishing experience like? Who did you work with and where, and was it a good experience and why? And hopefully those authors will take the time to write back or meet with you at the AR and give you a sense of their experience. And I think that can make a big difference.
Speaker 9:
And look and see who's engaged in your world. Your intellectual world, cause then they're more likely to really get your book and promote it correctly. But presses are often opening up new areas too. So don't overlook, don't be driven by stereotypes. Actually go to their website and see what they're doing. They start new series, there's new editors, there's a lot of change. So there should be some good options, I think.
Speaker 7:
Okay, well it is a time to stop, but thank you so much to our panelists and thank you to you all.