welcome everyone, welcome you Debbie and welcome the people in the audience to our seminar as part of the seminar series New Voices in Global Security. This seminar itself is a conversation EDI chat with Editor-in-Chief Debbie Lyle of International Political Sociology Journal. So today we're just going to treat this as a conversation style so please ask your questions either in the chat box the question answer box or raise your hands live or raise your hands rather to ask your questions live to Debbie. So is there a gender and race gap in who publishes journal articles? I think this question is a little bit silly now but it's been a question that's been posed numerous times in numerous studies across various academic disciplines in countries and the answer is always overwhelmingly yes there is. More sticky questions that is underpinned emerging commentary within academic circles is why do these gaps exist? How do they impact on our knowledge around war, conflict, security and international relations and how might including more diverse authors and indeed more diverse perspectives impact what we know about global politics more broadly? So we have previously as a seminar series talked with Professor Andrew Dorman and Dr. Victoria Basham as both Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs and Critical Military Studies to gain better insights into how they come to think about EDI decolonizing and internationalizing knowledge as well as those who produce knowledge. Today I am so pleased to be joined by Professor Debbie Lyle editor of International Political Sociology and learn how IPS views these EDI issues and what the journal is doing to develop more inclusive spaces for publishing. The chat like I said is informal in nature and treat it more like a conversation so again please as audience members who are tuning in do raise your zoom hands to ask your questions live to Debbie or you know place a question in the question box and these questions can be any from banal to profound questions or comments will take all of them and we're so pleased that Debbie has kindly agreed to give up her time today to talk to us about all of these issues. So a bit about Debbie she's a commissioning editor of International Political Sociology I think I've mentioned that three times now and she's also the professor in the School of History, Anthropology and Philosophy and Politics at Queen's University Belfast. Professor Lyle's research engages with several contemporary debates in international relations, international political sociology and beyond, most notably around the issues of difference, mobility, security, travel, visibility, governmentality, biopolitics, materiality, technology, practice and power. Her earlier work explored the relevance of cultural and visual artifacts to world politics and argued that cultural realm tells us much about international relations as the official documents that are usually privileged within this context. More recently Professor Lyle's research has explored themes of tourism, militarism and everyday life, borders, technology and security and war representation and surveillance. Professor Lyle's work is published in numerous international regarded journals and university presses. Welcome Debbie, thank you so much for joining us. So I guess to warm up question for you but also for the audience is I just would like you to begin by just telling us a little bit about IPS as a journal and who your key audiences are. Thank you, thank you for having me. I'm really pleased to see this conversation is happening and it's happening with PhD students and ECRs as well because that's really really important. I'll just I'll say yeah a little bit about the journal it's I guess in journal in the journal universe it's a reasonably new one in that we're like 15 years old so we're in the awkward teenage phase of being a journal. It started it's one of the journals of the International Studies Association they have about seven big journals in sort of big areas and as the title sort of suggests it's not a beast that is wholly comfortable in the space of international relations because it's always traversing a number of different disciplines so the transdisciplinary nature of IPS is really really important. I think the way we often think about it is our work is situated between international relations on one hand, political theory on the other, and then on the third hand would be sociology so we're constantly trafficking in between these three sites. I would also say the commitment of IPS is really one of challenging conventional approaches to the global register or the global order so we are about troubling conventional theories, conventional approaches, conventional methodologies that have reproduced what we might call the sovereign order. So I guess one easy way to say that is some people would just say we would be at the more critical end of IR but drawing in a whole series of other traditions and conventions from other disciplines that are that share that affinity.  I guess one thing to say is that that's an important picture to have whenever you are thinking about submitting because it's really important to know what journal you're submitting to when you submit something because every journal has a particular characteristic and you need to know what that is before you frame your submission. You're muted. Brookie mistake. Great. That's great and you know the content and I guess like you said the transdisciplinary more of a holistic understanding of these issues that is your journal's remit I think lends itself to more diverse voices and perspectives in the study of global politics more broadly. Do you have any stats to hand or reflections on how diverse like around gender or around BAME or what our global south contributors to your journal are and I could dig out the statistics if you want but there is some there actually is an important point about gathering the statistics and who does it how we do it. Let me just say something yeah let's talk like the way the easy thing to think about this would be like content and form so in the content of the substantive work that we publish because of the orientation of IPS and its its commitment to pushing against those conventional approaches in the content of what we publish like we are pushing against all of those questions so all the questions about what we would do about gendered analysis questions about race questions about the decolonial and you know questions I don't I don't want to use the word diversity I'm not really a big fan of it but but really around bringing in voices perspectives orientations that that have not been received well within the discipline of IR we we're I think we're good at that I think that's what the I think that's what the journal is so substantively you can go back and see how different different voices have been mobilized in the journal from the very start so I think that's like one of those rare moments of like tick I think we're I think we're doing I mean we could always do better but I think we're not we're okay where it gets difficult is in you might call the form or the structures around the journal and let me say something about the gendered aspect of that first I'm the lead of the third editorial team and the first two editorial teams were men and our editorial team is all female and that that was sort of not delivered it just happened in a way although these things are you know you whether they're delivered or not or conscious or not but so there's four of us and Vicky Squire Roxanne Doty Alex Hall and myself and we work as a team senior senior team um to manage the submissions and what's interesting is um our the the the gender balance of what we publish has shifted completely since we since we took over so we now and you can see the statistics of how that's happened and we publish more female authors than we do male authors and and and or like it's either we publish more or it's equal or more it's equal sort of thing that's that's sort of where we're that's where we are at the moment now that's something to that's good but it's not the end of the story and one of the really important parts of that story is around covid because what we have seen absolutely and you're seeing this across all journals is um it's not necessarily in terms of what's published but submission numbers from female academics has gone like everywhere everywhere and that has to do with all kinds of things to do with covid and caring responsibilities work balance life balance homeschooling you know you name it and then i'd want to say something as well about those questions of form and structure around i'm trying to think of what the language is geographical dispersal but what i mean by that is like to what extent has the journal managed to um reach out to publish get reviewers get on the underscore um scholar from the global south and that is a story and now this is i i know that lots of people don't agree with me on this but my my view on this is that that is a story of failure actually because for a journal that is and i say that at like i'm i'm the editor and i'm saying it's a story of failures because for a journal that is so committed to um bringing in voices into studies of the global register that have not been heard before and perspectives and orientations that's been the biggest struggle now i can list you know we can talk about the things we have done to the the techniques and the the strategies we've used but i guess what i would want to say is um this is the this is the biggest challenge that all journals have and we're not doing very well is the bottom line so i'm happy to i'm happy to talk more about it but i that that would be like content doing okay gender stuff thumbs up i mean all to still be approved but the question about let's just i mean i know the words are problematic but let's just say like hospitality to global south scholars like i don't think that that's a thumbs up at all right what what are the main sticking points here i mean um i guess if we reflect upon it this is this is also a broader issue that you know uh journals themselves are just one clog in a a cog rather in a broader wheel of you know structural and systemic points of exclusion um you know periphery of being on you know the economic issues let alone the other structural issues that make it more difficult for global south scholars to uh to publish but i wonder like have what what are kind of the sticky points for for you as a journal like what do you think needs to shift and change here um i mean i would like it's really important to understand that interlocking the interlocking structures that journal but also not just journals but publishing academic publishing as a whole industry uh is part of like it's overwhelmingly anglo-american english language-based global north like overwhelming um but of course it's it's not that there aren't there aren't the content about the global south happens in different ways now ips does it in a particular kind of way which i would place as sort of critical as troubling as trying to be inclusive but you know you could read conventional ir that does stuff on the global south but i would say it objectifies it it does all of that it's kind of worked the ips doesn't do it won't do that but the but the i guess the system's broken right it's broken and this is where we see it and i think i guess there's there's there's questions about like strategy so like one thing that was interesting to me is um the debates around like language right so when we took over the there were no abstracts it was only abstracts in english so it took a number of years but we finally have got those translated but of course they're only translated into french and spanish now that's better it's better because we know how colonization worked right it wasn't just anglo people colonizing right so that that like it's not it that did something but there's also it's also like so one of the comments that happens when you get journal editors talking to the global south caucus for example is this whole notion that there's an agreed upon standard of writing and an agreed upon standard of what's what good looks like and of course there isn't and this is where some of the debate is happening and because a lot of i have heard this from journal editors where they're like well it's the debate around standards right as if there's something that we all agree upon and have consensus that there's standards and we have to reject these pieces from global south scholars because they're just not good enough so then you get a whole series of like well let's mobilize some interventions around how we can intervene and teach global south scholars how to get better at this that's what the main focus is on these new journals and i'm like dissatisfied with that for all kinds of reasons not least of which the logic of intervention that that it reproduces but it's also about like getting in very very difficult areas about writing right like what type of writing how we edit how we revise how we articulate and like the basic stuff about how you put an article together and that there's no there's like some consensus on like the big stuff but like there's a lot there's not a lot of consensus on on what that is yeah so what is the what is the role of the reviewer in all of this or yeah you know because yeah that we all meant about reviewer number two right yeah yeah what is the role of the reviewer and how how might they kind of play in a role in facilitating the pushback against this kind of colonial model of what academic writing looks like or the standard of academic writing enable more of or at least enable more of a support of you know different ways of i guess expressing yeah yeah i mean the one thing to say as well just it like in a broken system the whole peer review system busted because it's basically free labor yeah yeah yeah nobody gets compensated for it i mean if you want to think about it in that transactional way and yet it's crucial to the whole system moving ahead right like you know so peer review holds up all of what we do yeah we'll believe in it and whatever but it's we know it's imperfect but like it's all it's all free labor so i want to start there of course it's like absurd in that sense but in terms of the reviewer right so like i as the editor you see everything and i have to say i've been blown away by the amazing work that reviewers for ips do like really constructive really supportive even on articles that aren't going to make it over the line like the the work that the reviewers do is really careful and like generative and intellectually generous and constructive like that's my big picture piece but i've also seen of course shocking stuff like shocking right of the how how could you fail to cite me i'm amazing to the like this is wrong because you haven't written the article that i want you to write to um you know reviews that are like four sentences like that you know like just so i've i've seen bad practice as well and i actually think that one of the things that's happened is that we have failed to teach ourselves how to do good peer reviews so there's like a some number of things that we're trying to do at the isa that is about like you know passing that knowledge on because of course phd students and ecrs don't have time to do reviews they're too busy doing their dissertations and publishing trying to get their work published but but you learn how to write better by reviewing and understanding how people i mean it's a whole it's a whole part of professionalization but understandably phd students and ecrs aren't they don't have time to do it and we haven't taught them how to do it and so like there's a missing piece there um but like yeah i i i think there's just a there's just a ton it's massively gendered as well of course surprisingly it's hugely gendered right like there's just some like assholes there's just some assholes and then there's like some really generative constructive amazingness yeah i don't know how to fix that either we've got a few questions from our audience um so here okay so oh jim but then jim i think has raised jim's hand so i'm just going to see if jim is going to ask that question oh great yeah yeah thank you can you hear me i can hi jim yeah hi uh it's really great and refreshing to see people in ir talk about these issues because for decades i would see people not talk about these issues and i go back to uh of a comment somebody made to me in 1968 at Wesleyan where she said that people were who were interested in african studies were only interested in it for emotional reasons i know we're way past these kind of comments but the problem i have with uh you know watching and participating i was educated at columbia uh was the ir attitudes are so uh entrenched in essentially reinforcing sort of traditionalist statist attitudes that anyone from the third world who had come up with different alternatives and i'm taking it out to 1970s no people are very much influenced by anti-imperialism by Marxism and other issues and they were just basically shunted aside as being intellectually irrelevant and uh and that of course caused a lot of resentment i think that's sort of one of the sources of the battles you see in academia today because some of these people who were shunted aside finally got tenure and decided to take revenge on the other side um you know and we sort of see that but on the same issue with the south you know they would essentially minimize and trivialize any serious intellectual looks that would attack dominant attitudes of hegemony in the academy that came from the south and i saw that for i've seen that since the 1970s on and so how do you address that because that still remains the same in a way i mean look at how we're uh processing afghanistan which is quite remarkable uh and you know almost anthropological and oh it is anthropological and um and so i'm just wondering what you have to say about that and i and i do share your pain about being an editor uh my foreign wife still reviews a academic journal so all the stuff you've heard about you know you're saying about these people who submit things they get rebuffed they get angry they get egotistical that happens all the time but i think the more important thing intellectually to to to argue about and work out is hold this whole question of being able to understand the rest of the world which i still think america is really backward in thank you thanks jim thanks jim uh yeah i mean surprise surprise the discipline of ir uh it's not super global um i mean i laugh but it's kind of a hysterical laugh there to be honest because uh yeah it's been going on for a long long time it still goes on but it goes on it now goes on in like in particularly pernicious ways i think those those those modes of dismissal that you were talking about or minimalization or diminishing i those are still happening but they're happening in in much more kind of detailed pernicious sneaky kind of ways i think because you can't get away with those big dismissal comments that you might have got away within 1968 now we can talk more about that but but so yeah i absolutely agree and what what interests me is like what interests me as well is are the different and understandably different positions that like i'm thinking here about the global south caucus within the isa like the different positions that of course scholars in the global south have to this right because some are like systems broken like why would we ever want to participate in the system that was not built for us and is not hospitable to us like you know a totally legitimate position versus positions that are like we need to put in place structures that will help us to um to learn how to operate within this sphere of like journal editing and publishing etc and both of those things are true and both of those things are valid so it's also around it's around attuning yourself into those debates as well those debates those positions of course have been around for a long long long time but it like i i never underestimate the discipline of ir's ability to be shocking in its dismissal of the rest of the world like i never underestimate that so i mean i feel like um do even doing like greater edi work you're constantly feeling like you're banging your head against the wall too right because a lot of these um you know the the structural issues and the historical issues are so profound and often there's so many things that need to change often simultaneously that yeah um and it can be frustrating i just i wonder you know for maybe the the small changes small steps so us as as academics as ecrs located perhaps in the global north but also in the global south what sort of advice would you offer us to you know be better allies to or from the global south any sort of advice would you offer in in in broader at getting access to publishing or what needs to be done that's probably not a very fair question sorry i mean but well it's it's an important kind of it's an important thing to keep asking ourselves right because there like there are maybe some interventions that might be better placed than others so i i would often want to think about this in terms of um collaboration or co-production rather than the preferred modality at the moment which is mentorship because mentorship seems to me to be everybody the professional managers use this as an answer to everything we just need more mentors and we just need whatever without understanding that that in itself enacts the power relation which is crap but um it also it also undersells if you want to mentor i would say collaborate better that takes a lot of work a lot of effort a lot of resource and a lot of time which is right to do but again it's something else that's never compensated and surprise surprise it's gender right who does the mentoring women women are good at it you're so emotionally attuned you're really good at supporting people you know and you've all you've all heard that so but there there are like more modes of collaboration and co-production and support that can be put in place so one thing that we have done at the journal which again hasn't really succeeded but i think it just has to grow a little bit which is we had this thing we developed a thing called the global south presubmission initiative which would mean scholars from the global south could send us a piece that they wanted feedback on before they actually submitted it so they didn't have to get their feedback by putting it through the system and getting a reject they could give it to us we put it to one of our comm scholars and they would get around a feedback right and that feedback would help them to then revise the paper further now as we anybody who's as old as me knows the best writing happens when you're revising right the more you revise the better it gets and that's something we don't teach people either but but so more feedback and then they can revise it and so in advance of them submitting now that has you know we have done that for the last three years but it hasn't had a huge take up right and we don't know why and we're trying to figure that out i think something like that that's that's good that's time it's resource or whatever it's not compensated but i think it's important right and and the kind of support and collaboration i'm talking about is often done one-on-one right so that i'm trying to think about how we might do that in in more collective settings but that one-on-one work is it takes time and it takes effort and it takes resources and it's important to do so so we need to do more of that but like how we encourage and incentivize people to do that and resource it properly is not happening at all yeah i mean i see that even just in my the own institute at king's how we how we mentor and support us right and to really rethink mentoring itself and move away from this hierarchical kind of masculine form of knowledge who the knower is who the learner is and all of that to one that's based on horizontal but also i think much more like you know how do we put it just like just advocacy work that are just more work around just opening up doors for people you know being good voices amplifying platforms amplifying voices of other people i did i heard um one of the panelists for another ecr event we had here ali hawks was talking about her experience she works within the broader global security industry and she was talking about how women don't need any more mentors we've been mentored right done with that we need people who will open doors for us who will take a risk for us and you know get us into these spaces and i think you know that i think that's something that we need to think about more i guess or that's something i've been thinking about more as someone who's in you know a position of privilege in a global north institute well established institute da da da the you know how i can open doors for other people right use my platform and concretely think about that rather than mentoring whatever that means right um but it's work you're right it's all this free labor i mean has anything has the publishing industry thought about that have you know concrete ways of thought about how to no no because the publishing industry is in the like i'm going to swear here but the publishing industry academic publishing is shitting their pants at the moment because open access means that they're going to lose all of the revenue right that they've been making on the free labor of academics you don't get paid for what we write yeah right you tell this to like you like anyway it anyway so they are not the people they're there that's so they're like panicking looking around for new revenue streams like how can we get new revenue streams because we're going to lose this right so there's all kinds of different ways that they're trying to do that with their new packages of read and publish and you know trying to yeah i mean that's a whole other conversation um but no so publishers is not where you look um journal letters might be where you look but again journal editing is a huge job and universities are reluctant to support that properly because it means so so my institution i had to fight for it but they've given they've supported me in doing this role because it's important for scholarship but that was a fight and it's not enough so i got some a little bit of time relief because i do because i'm doing this job but a lot of institutions at the moment will not provide any relief for this kind of job so then who's going to do it it's going to get worse because it's going to be only the people at the institutions able to afford that kind of stuff just sort of see what it means so it's not i'm not painting a very nice picture the other thing i wanted to say about your um your your point about like allyship or what we can do right like the first part of the piece is opening doors for people absolutely and and and secondly creating more space like just just actively like getting in and creating more space for for more voices uh for for early career researchers for phd students for people in global south for marginalized voices for all kinds of different um different angles and then the third part which is the part nobody wants to talk about is that some of us have to get out of the way like some of us have to get out of the way and and i include myself in that right so my my editorship ends at the end of this year and like it's time for me to like like back up and and other people need to need to get moving into these roles and i you know i will keep getting asked to do these things and i'm some sometimes i do want to and part of the question that i have to ask myself is if i do this role that somebody asked me to do will i be able to use it to open more doors for people that has to be the metric that i'm going to use now not will it further my career or will it like make me rich and famous it's can i use it to open doors for other people and sometimes if the answer to that is yes then that that would make me do it but also if it's just about like you know there's a times where i should say no because i need to get out of the way and let someone else do that i think that's a tricky one i think and then i don't think it's a conversation we're having actually and we need to have it yeah i mean i was going to ask that it just you know um i mean your comments and think uh you know thinking about this is so really reflective um and as jim highlights to really sobering and important important conversations and i just wonder you know you reflecting on the broader publishing are these conversations beginning to happen is the conversation around decolonizing knowledge around inclusivity around scholars and scholarship is this actually starting to take holds or uh or not do we have some hope or not uh okay so i don't use the word hope i'm not going to use that word okay we can talk about that for like 20 hours but um about why so i would say that let's talk about this in relation to say the isa because this is a journal of the isa right and every journal every editor of those journals will have a different answer for you my general read of it is that the conversation is happening around gender because it's an easier conversation to have i'm not saying like i mean there's all kinds of massive ways that that patriarchy still rears its head and in gross ways and and and new and subtle and prodigious ways but it's an easier conversation to have and the interventions there are more of them and there's more people on board there's more consensus on it so those issues are being discussed and there's discussions especially around the covid stuff around around what that's going to do so one of the arguments i've been having is that this is not something that you intervene in like now and that's it because the the long tail of covid is going to last for a long time so this drop off of submissions from female authors is really really worrying and because it's not like it's going to be like oh never mind in like December it'll all change and i believe you know what i mean like the tail of this is huge so we need to keep our eye on that ball i would say so those conversations are happening around gender and that's good and that's important and we should keep having them and all the things but the conversation around global south scholarship and i understand the problems with those terms and i you know we can talk about that as well is really hard and and it's very hard for people to have the conversation and when the conversation happens in my view it's too often happening in a way that is reproducing a logic where it's us teaching them how to do better at what we do i i'm there can't put it any more simply than that i'm probably complicit in that as well right so i'm not i'm just saying and so the the the recognition of complicity in that system requires that you start from a position that says the system is broken and i feel like i'm the only journal editor that's willing to say the system's busted guys and a lot of my colleagues will be like no no no we can it's fine we just need to fix it we just need to do this we just need to do this so we're not really having the same conversation that's my view i could be wrong maybe there's surprises out there but that's my view and so i'm my question for myself and for my co-editors and for the IPS community is what does this look like if we start from that position right what what IPS is a journal look like so there's a new team taking over uh january 2022 and i'm super excited because it is a really diverse team it's a much much bigger team which is great and they have representation all over the globe and that's fantastic it's what we weren't able to do and so i'm like i'm super happy about that and what that's going to mean in terms of how they can shake things up that's great that's so great because i mean i think what you're talking about reminds me of um it's a book that just came out this year um silvia tamale she's um it's called decolonization and afro feminism and she's a scholar from kanda anyway um there's a particular chapter in there where she talks about uh the intellectual moves of feminism on the african continent and the difficulties in even running journals that were specifically designed to encourage and illuminate the knowledge production around that and it's just you know what you're saying is generally um these issues one get relegated to women's studies departments that then underfund under resource and just the pure labor let alone um you know material implications of trying to have a journal that remains open access away from paywalls that she it's a it's a chapter if anyone's interested in understanding kind of the political economy around knowledge production particularly in a feminist knowledge production in the african continents i recommend that chapter um yeah that highlights very much that jim you have another question go ahead yeah no thanks it's really interesting you guys getting me all uh riled up here thinking about this stuff uh i'm thinking about when uh in the 80s there was this big shift in the area studies programs in the international affairs schools because as we know they were derived from how the os s was set up in world war two and the needs of fighting global war and then they were intellectually taken into the universities uh i came through that kind of system and what i always understood about it was the financing of it depending on what global threat faced united states so you had a lot of money going into russian studies a lot of money going into chinese studies then of course when they discovered the third world after decolonization a lot of money went into latin american and african studies and then it flowed back out so there's been this inconsistency at the federal level united states to say okay these areas of the world are worthy of uh people understanding uh in depth what goes on in them for our own purposes our own self-interest at the same time uh to have that permeate into the public's knowledge about this and so i see that as one problem in what you're talking about now when you talk about the sort of rise of the you know what is left of all the different kind of intellectual revolutions of the 60s into the academy such as feminism etc and gender studies i'm pretty sure that is rather well covered the problem of course is that then to me it becomes a focus of attention and ignores everything else that has to do with these other areas of the world uh because you know feminism is important and feminism is uh crucial but on the other hand it's just part of the picture not the whole picture and so how i am curious about what you guys think about how the academy can handle this is how do you think they're going to be able to deal with these dissonant voices that we see around the world because they've been basically distancing themselves from this for the past 20 years i think the global war on terror has imposed an intellectual framework that tends to uh intellectualize the other the dissonance of what what's coming out of the third world and overemphasize the negative in the third world so for example if we look at africa we're only thinking about Boko Haram all Shabbab or what's going on in Mozambique all these other issues that are going on in africa tend to be ignored you know and there's certainly a lot going in on in africa for example that counters this negative attitude uh or perception so those are the kind of things i think that filter into the academy and tend to sort of sway how the academy looks at the rest of the world and it's i you know i don't know what to do about it i just uh you know i'm a journalist i've been a journalist for 50 years so i just left the academy i just said the hell of it but um you know but i of course have to depend on the academy because it's part of my bread and butter to understand what's going on and criticize it or learn from it so i just wondered you know and it's great to hear someone in isa actually thinking like this it's really exciting frankly because i knew some of the male editorials got to folks in the past and they certainly weren't into this so but thanks a lot it's really great to hear you guys talk um yeah jim thanks thanks i mean it's also like the thinking back to matt's point like it's also about the histories of knowledge production right the global histories of knowledge production and if we don't have a handle on that then we can't answer any of these questions about journal publishing or whatever because that's part of what this is so like does does knowledge production have a geopolitics yep and is it is it a colonial one yep so it's so that's part of this part of trying to understand this i do want to say though um yeah so like there's this this is just a wider question on this is specifically about the discipline of ir which is which i've come up in but always with one foot resolutely outside of it elsewhere and is to say there's there's two things one is is to trouble like what we think counts as ir so you were talking about like whatever an overemphasis of the negative right so when we think about africa we just think of boko haram and and etc or or migrants you know and so part of what the the critical turn in ir has done is say is is to broaden that landscape to say like guess what there's a whole series of other things that count as international as global as as valid objects of study for for global politics so that's thing one but thing two is also to look at those conventional things like security like war like violence in new ways to unearth and expose all of the different angles perspectives and contours that conventional approaches have just ignored gender's a great example of that but there's others as well so i think like it's a it's a kind of an overwhelming picture when you sort of think about it's not just this is what i'm why i wanted to talk about in terms of content and form because it's not just about the substance of what we are studying it's about the way that we are studying it the approaches to it the epistemologies we're using the methodologies we're using and the one thing this is slightly a slight tangent but actually i think it's really important and related the way that we teach phd students ecrs questions about method right and methodology is shockingly bad shockingly bad it's just embarrassing really yeah i have to agree with that and i think i mean i think your intervention around the colonial model models of knowledge right certainly feminism is it you know carries that with it too right what what feminist voices are heard you know and so yeah so um for the longest time we've generally heard you know feminism largely articulated from a western generally white generally a middle class kind of positioning right and this and so um yeah so i think you know feminism as a subfield or a particular approach to understanding international relations has had to reflect upon that hard too and how we encourage different voices of feminisms in understanding experiences gendered experiences that brings in queer bodies that brings in women of color you know disabled all of those all of those aspects which again why i think api has such a fantastic journal is its remit is about that right is about beginning with those sorts of questions and and what that what that then tells us about global politics writ large as well too so yeah yeah um here i'm just there's so many different rabbit holes we can go down dubby of just talking about this broader knowledge but i just wonder and and probably for the recording too and people who couldn't make it now but want to listen um later i'm going to ask those banal practical questions of us too yeah so as uh yeah as i guess a phd student who's looking you know has aspirations of going into academia from that position um would you recommend them sign up to be reviewers would you is that is that a skill set that you would recommend them to do or is that something that i know we've just talked about all the free labor right that's done in this so putting you know that aside is that a particular um strategy you would ask people to phd students to get involved in reviewing uh i yeah but in a way that's manageable right so i've had conversations with other editors where they're like oh would you send would you send a piece to a phd student to get reviewed i'm like yeah but we we send a lot of our pieces to phd students they're brilliant like absolutely brilliant because they're experts on whatever it is that i mean really really good um but i guess you know i guess that it's it's a tricky one because it's about they need to understand that this is part of what the professional life is about right reviewing each other's work and it has to become embedded into what they do right from the start now that you do that because even in your research you're reading someone else's work and you're forming a critical approach to it or an understanding of it but then you do that anyway but then how would you translate that into an actual peer review so so absolutely i would but also under the understanding i always want to say whenever talking about phd students and ecrs is like it can only be done under the understanding of all the other things that you have to do so i guess the one way to think about that would be to say what we're telling phd students that they have to have in order to be to be like competitive on a global job market what we're telling they have to have is 100 impossible right nobody can have it yep right nobody it's totally fictitious it's impossible to have this and so it's like all these people scrambling up this ladder to get as close to that as possible and peer review is another one of those things that people like yeah yeah do that do that that'll make you more competitive i understand that's what i mean the system is broken but i'm saying i'm saying it might be something that phd students and ecrs students can do to to understand and and inculcate them into a system of academic sort of critical review and peer review and response because that is that is how how it works so you have to know how it works right but it also it just makes you it makes you better it makes you better at spotting what's a good paper and what isn't it makes you better at understanding how people make arguments and that's just something you just have to learn it but you learn it by doing it that's the that's the best thing to do but you also learn it by seeing it by engaging with it and by reviewing it yeah i mean i i totally agree my brief stint on the um editorial team for politics journal i learned so much about yeah what what makes a good paper um or what makes a good article what are kind of the key you know our um architecture of a good article and um yeah so i totally agree with that i wonder to i guess if someone is considering submitting to ips what would be the top three tips that you would give them love the list right top three debbie um okay so the first one i think i've mentioned which is fit yeah yeah don't submit to ips if it's not an ips paper okay that's the biggest reason for a for for any journal but the biggest reason for a desk reject is like this is not ips it might be a brilliant paper on like political economy or something else but if it's not directly addressing what ips is and what it does and engage you with the debates that we've developed for a number of years then then this isn't the journal there'll be another journal that's for you but this isn't it like it's ips is a specific beast yeah there are other journals that are much more generic like uh about ire so review international studies um ej ar you know that are that are specific to ire and there's one specific to security european journal security security dialogue you know what i mean so but ips is a is a thing it's a genre so the question fit is i think super important the next one would be uh a sort of about this bigger piece about uh revision and critical feedback so i had a colleague when i was starting out say to me oh just just chuck it in just chuck it in and get and get feedback right and i totally disagree with that a because you're using people's time reviewers time and so you want to make sure that what you submit is the best the best thing that it can be and that means you are responsible not just for self editing and self-revision but for getting critical feedback from critical friends peers mentors supervisors in advance of you submitting it because you don't want to waste people's time and if you just chuck any old thing in just to get feedback it's not fair because the system is broken right this isn't wasn't broken though whatever it cares but it is so just respect yeah you know respect that respect that um i would also say strategically it's important to pay attention to the introduction and the abstract and in doing that you have to let the argument do the work so often we get people they're going like you know this is what i will do or like this is what i will do instead of just like just do it don't tell them all this time sign posting what you will just do it and secondly we get a lot of like contextualization this is because we're taught badly we teach writing badly right so we had a lot of contextualization of like you know for 200 years people have said this and then they and then like you know and then it's like page 16 here's my original contribution you're like don't do that don't do that like just tell me what the original contribution is um and then just finally like i'm going to sneak another one in it is respect the review process right so so it's not perfect but it's what we have and you are going to get decisions you disagree with you're going to get rejected i get rejected you get rejected you're going to get rejected right um when you get rejected it's important for you to work out what to do about that and here's what not to do do not fire off an email to the editors within half an hour of receiving a decision that tells the editors how wrong they are and how great you are don't do that that happens a lot right a lot and not just from like from established scholars don't do that write that email yeah but send it to yourself and then sit on it for 48 hours and see how you feel after that um and then when you do get feedback constructive or otherwise sit with it for a while get upset do what you need to do take care of yourself and then put on your big girl pants and go see your critical friends your supervisors your peer mentors or whatever and discuss what it means because chances are there's something in that review that'll make your paper better not everything maybe but like there'll definitely be something in there yeah i think that's um you know important and it is um an important part of the process the last point too that regardless if you're early career or established senior professor you're going to get rejections of of your pieces right and i think um there needs to be more sharing of that you know yeah i had one paper that was rejected by four journals before it was finally picked up um and it was it's fine in that you know you're right each kind of um revision process made the made the argument clearer because part of this is you think you know your voice and then you don't really have it right and so it yeah it took those many revisions to finally get the piece but it's also i believed in that paper i believed in that argument there was something there so there was um perseverance with that i think is also important and that just yeah and find your critical piece right i think too in that you know you can affectively unload on they can support you you can build a community there but also yeah for critical engagement and to have people who um don't tell you what you want to hear all the time but also you know reflect upon um challenge you right challenge your ideas and this is what makes your papers and your arguments stronger as well too so just to add on supplement your advice there debbie so um so i think um yeah i think we're coming to the end i don't think there's any other um practical advice for on from the perspective of the phd that i can think of at the moment um no i'm sure if there's more you'll be circulating through twitter right they can follow up with different questions too i just want to thank you so much for your time today debbie for talking to us in very real not the toxic positivity terms of you know just do this and this and this and you'll be fine but you know a sobering reality that we're in um you know colonial and gendered structured models around publishing and that these have real implications that significantly condition how we work as academics and work in publishing and who gets published um so yeah i think this conversation is important it's great and i'm i'm so happy that we can have this with you today i'm just going to i guess give the the floor to you if you have any less comments before before we sign off uh no thanks so much that i mean just for any opportunity to kind of engage with people who were publishing they don't really know how it works or it or no one's told them or you know that that's always a good uh a good position to be in but um i mean i would just i would just i don't want to underestimate like writing and publishing writing in particular is is hard work like it's hard work and the only way to get better at it is to just do more of it and i don't mean do more of it and then publish or i'm just saying do more of it so you get better at it uh and i do think that there's more work to be done on how we teach each other how to write and how and what we think good writing is and not like that's something for IPS definitely but for also for lots of other critically and diverse oriented approaches i do i still think that that's a conversation we need to learn to have with ourselves yeah


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