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Edited volumes as acts of resistance

Chiara Ambrosio begins her book review of Milena Ivanova and Steven French's edited volume The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding (2022) as follows: 

Edited collections are acts of resistance. We are told that they weigh less in research assessments and that book chapters are not as valuable as articles and monographs, and yet we stubbornly hold on to this enduring academic format for some of our most important publications. Milena Ivanova and Steven French’s The Aesthetics of Science is a brilliant example of why we do this, why our resistance to institutional pressures is entirely justified, and why we should indeed continue to resist: because edited collections are the materialization of the time and spaces we reclaim as researchers to engage in new conversations that transform our fields.

I love the sentiment expressed there, I don't have much to add, except this. We are faced with tremendous pressure to make our publications count, especially early-career people and people not on the tenure track. Indeed, academic job coaches will tell junior people not to waste their time editing volumes, or publishing in them.

The supposed laxity of peer review process makes you can put things in an edited volume that would not get into a journal, but we also know peer review is broken and that many excellent works never see the light of day (I could go on a bit about how I do think the standards of triple blind review, while excellent, do not promote the quality control we hope, and part of it is that you simply cannot see philosophy papers as these dissociable works from an author and her larger context–another time perhaps).

Edited volumes operate under a different game: there is a hermeneutic of trust and conversation, not of nitpicking and rejection. Philosophy really is more conversational, because the editor thinks about how the shape of the edited whole relates to all the individual contributions. The editor makes careful judgments about who to invite for such a volume. The author can think about the aims of the whole, even the other authors (she will be aware of who they are) to develop her paper in this conversational, broader disciplinary context. This can make edited volumes truly revolutionary in their field. With that in mind, I'd love to open a conversation and a thread for people to post edited volumes which they particularly appreciated. 

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19 responses to “Edited volumes as acts of resistance”

  1. Prof L

    Yes, it’s nice to have a venue to publish more “risky” philosophy … “Acts of resistance”, however, might be both overwrought and overly optimistic. Edited volumes often operate via an “insider’s network”, and have a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” kind of ethic, where friends publish friends’ work, and work of friends’ students, and so on. Getting published in an edited volume is often more about who you know than the quality of your work. Ever wonder why the first publication of a grad student at an ivy league institution is in a Cambridge volume? Yes, the editor “trusted” that person’s advisor when that person’s advisor said “Put my student’s work in your edited volume, please” … What an act of resistance!

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  2. Milena Ivanova

    Thank you so much for the lovely post Helen, it was such a joy to read this review of our collection exactly because it took some work to resist the narrative that as an early career researcher, I should have focused on writing papers and not doing this volume. I was strongly discouraged from doing this book when I was at the start of my career. Perhaps if I had been more immersed into the tenure track system and benefitted from it, I would have been more inclined to follow that advise. I, however, had always felt as a bit of an outsider to the academic circles I had found myself in at the time, which at least allowed me to develop my own intuitions about what was worthy of pursuit. Some of the work that has most inspired me came from women who published their works in edited collections. It is perhaps fair to say that feminist philosophy, for one, would not have been possible without such avenues for publication. And today, I am inspired by the work of Eleanor Drage and Kerry McInerney who recently published an incredibly important volume ‘The Good Robot: Why Technology Needs Feminism’ featuring so many important feminist and race thinkers.

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  3. true acts of resistance

    As Prof L notes, edited volumes are often a primary source of cronyism (though they’re not always this). What I find to be a true act of resistance is the publication of top-quality work in lesser journals (as a first choice and not as a back-up) or just in free online versions, such as in a blog post or on a personal website. Generally speaking, I am more willing to read and engage with someone’s work closely–and even assign it in my classes–the more confident I am that the author is not a salami slicer. Publishing in less prestigious places as a first option is a good sign of that.

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  4. Derek Bowman

    I think the question of whether and how this counts as an act of resistance is a really interesting one. Prof L is certainly right that there are many features of the existing institutional hierarchy and professional pressure that are baked in to making an edited volume, and which therefore aren’t being resisted.
    But I think it’s worth taking seriously why this feels like (and, indeed, may be) an act of resistance, an act of doing philosophy on their own terms, for some of the editors and contributors.
    It seems to take for granted that to be a philosopher is to be employed as a professor of philosophy by an academic institution, and that to do philosophy is to publish written, peer-reviewed scholarly papers. Nonetheless, the resistance is to engaging in that academic, scholarly, peer-reviewed, insider-driven work for its own sake, rather than for the sake of career advancement.
    Why not simply have an ongoing philosophical conversation? Why not simply exchange emails or blog posts? What is it about the edited volume that makes it seem like the proper form, and proper home, for the philosophical explorations these editors and authors are engaged in?

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  5. anon

    Some edited volumes actually advertise a call for papers on lists like PHILOS-L. I wish this sort of thing happened much more reliably, for the reasons some commenters have already noted.

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  6. Caligula’s Goat

    It’s possible for an edited volume (or anything else for that matter) to be an act of resistance without resistance everything one could possible resist. Edited volumes are definitely ways of resisting the peer review system (though not all of them – some editors try to send submit chapters out for semi-blind peer review). Some volumes are ways of resisting disciplinary boundaries or paradigms (though most are not). Some may be forms of resisting prestige / friendship networks depending on how they solicit contributions (but many are not).
    I like monographs and edited collections a lot mostly because they really do free you from the (often ridiculous) peer-review system. When I’ve published or edited either sort of thing I’ve felt much much freer to publish the ideas that I want to publish and not the ones that peer reviewers want me to publish. There’s something really amazing about that experience. It might result in less careful philosophy – more eyes on an idea are often better than fewer – but at least it results in more authentic philosophy.
    However, any individual edited collection is really only an act of resistance if it seeks to be one. There’s no resistance in editing a collection that solicits and reviews submissions exactly as a traditional journal would.

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  7. V. Alan White

    Last year I published with more illustrious co-editors an edited volume where we took chances not with just selections of contributions that placed known scholars alongside less prominent ones but also willingly took on our own role as editors in framing an introduction that tried to reset discussion in the field. Editors should try to do something new–even if they in the short term are regarded as flailing around the boundaries of insiderism because of the simple fact that people know people with different views. Otherwise edited volumes are just treading water in the ways suggested above.

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  8. Heather

    I’m working on my third edited project at the moment. Frankly, I find some of these reactions absurd, knee-jerk cynicism. It’s unfair to assume deliberately selected authors necessarily implies “cronyism.” What is your ideal alternative? A blind meritocracy where the ideal set of total strangers publish together? That’s not what an edited book is for.
    Editors know most of the people working in their subfield, and this knowledge is precisely the virtue of an edited collection. We are able to judge prudently who is important to this conversation, who would be a good fit to advance the key question or theme, who would derail it, maybe even taking a risk on a person or two who might be marginal. — i.e. drawing from lesser known minority groups or promoting younger scholars – are you really saying it is a bad thing to give a younger person a chance? Just because they come recommended?
    There is also an assumption that edited collections is not just cronyism but playing political powers; maybe that’s what some people do, but that’s not how I work. I seek the best people for the book. I include senior mentors not because they are powerful and I want to flatter them, but because they are amazing philosophers who have been a model for rigorous thinking, and I think their work should be read and learned from. I take seriously advice about younger scholars I may not know, when I hear it from people who have a track record of finding talent (then I look at their work and judge for myself whether it deserves to be in a collection). Again, what is the alternative? Should we distrust the advice of people we know and respect just because they may have biases? In what world is it realistic or even desirable to work in a vacuum, to ignore someone’s track record, to ignore the advice of people we respect? (If I’m not mistaken, Helen has made this very same critique!) To me, that sounds more like a world for automata, not humans, and doesn’t respect the collaborative character of philosophical thinking.
    We have our anonymous peer-review for a reason. This is a good thing. That doesn’t mean blind review is the only way of judging the merits of someone’s work or ideas.
    An edited collection is doing something different than a journal. It is a way of framing a current in the field, highlighting it, putting it forward to anchor major debates and questions by an interesting and collaborative community of people who have done important work on this area.

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  9. Heather

    I suppose (rightly or wrongly) I see the act of publishing an article in a peer-reviewed journal a more individual exercise, voicing my own ideas to advance my own point of view and as a way of advancing my individual career. An edited volume seems more of a communal exercise, bringing different voices together (creating a community of authors) to advance a shared foothold for the larger field (creating a community of readers). Building a community is not contrary to an individual career, but it’s a different, bigger-picture orientation.

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  10. Shelley Lynn Tremain

    Helen wrote: “This can make edited volumes truly revolutionary in their field. With that in mind, I’d love to open a conversation and a thread for people to post edited volumes which they particularly appreciated.”
    No one thus far has recommended any such volume. I’d like to be the first to do so by recommending a revolutionary collection that was published in December (and that I edited): The Bloomsbury Guide to Philosophy of Disability which aims to radically transform philosophical work on disability and redress the exclusion of disabled philosophers from the profession. You can read a description of the book, its table of contents, and reviews of it, as well as order it here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/bloomsbury-guide-to-philosophy-of-disability-9781350268913/

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  11. Curtis Franks

    I want to offer a bit of evidence, perhaps from naivete, against an apparent assumption driving this discussion: I have served on and chaired a few hiring committees and tenure cases, and I have written letters for others’ tenure and promotion cases, and I have neither thought for a second nor been told by anyone that publications in journals somehow “count more” than contributions to edited collections. I’ve only ever attended to the significance of a person’s ideas and discoveries.
    If anything, my own bias would tend in the other direction. Suppose a research immunologist lands a few papers in Nature. That’s good evidence that they are generating significant results worthy of wide scientific attention. But if, say, the NIAID puts together a volume called “Modern perspectives on infectious disease: Ecology, Ethonography, and Virology” and selects this same person to contribute, that gets my attention even more. What it signals to me, even as politicized as science is, is not cronyism but that this person is recognized as a leading authority in their field.
    Of course, a bias is a bias, and the main thing is to cut against them all in search of ideas and results and to assess their significance directly. I just find this easier to do in the presence of a journal article, the existence of which means very little on its own.

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  12. Curtis Franks

    I also would like some verification that one can be involved in a resistance movement unknowingly, because I have poured a lot of myself into edited volumes without ever realizing that I was sticking it to the man. And my deliberate acts of resistance have been middling.

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  13. Julia

    No one here has mentioned the often completely ridiculous timelines of publishing in edited volumes. I don’t think I have ever contributed to one where the initial deadline for submission was not moved several times. Often, it takes several years (!!!) for everyone to get their act together and send in their contributions and editors tend to wait for people who are ridiculously late with their submissions. By the time an edited volume is finally published, the articles are often several years out of date. Until this is fixed, I think people who need stuff published for tenure/promotion/etc. are well advised to be careful, because it’s completely unpredictable when their work will actually be published.

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  14. Anon For Clear Reasons

    I do agree with Curtis on there being clear value in edited volumes and contributing to edited volumes for someone’s CV.
    I also just want to add that I think that many junior people would LOVE to contribute or even edit a volume, but they simply don’t get the chance, for precisely the reason that others above note. Most edited volumes are closed shops, and you get into them through knowing someone. [Take this one under discussion: 10 contributors, only three are more junior (5 are full professors!). Of the three junior people, one is the editor – fine of course – one is the post doc of their co-author and the other is a former PhD student of the more senior editor. Hardly giving much chance for new young voices on this topic.]
    If edited volumes are ‘acts of resistance’, then they only way they are is for generally more senior people to avoid having to deal with the peer-review system (and often therefore write more substandard contributions in part for that reason). Here we have two very senior people (the reviewer and the OP) congratulating themselves and other senior people as ‘resisting’… Real resistance would be to fight against publishers and reform the peer review system in a way that doesn’t constantly punish junior people and less represented people in the discipline.

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  15. about CFPs…

    Above, one commenter writes: “There’s no resistance in editing a collection that solicits and reviews submissions exactly as a traditional journal would.”
    The comment above doesn’t make the more precise claim that I’m going to criticize, but I will criticize the more precise claim just in case anyone’s thinking it.
    You – the person editing the volume – could do a call for papers, and also invite some people to apply. Then, you could decide on what to publish in your own way, and not the way a traditional journal would. This is a pathway to giving young people who you haven’t heard of a chance to get into the book (just a chance), and it doesn’t involve replicating the traditional journal process.

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  16. NK

    about CFPs…: What’s the more precise claim you’re criticizing? I rather like the idea of edited volumes put together by editors who call for papers and then select from the submitted papers those to be published. I think there’s a distinctive sort of value in reading a collection of papers on a topic that were all deemed interesting and significant by a single person (or small group of people). And I agree with the claim that such a procedure is likely to give less “established” scholars a chance. But the way you wrote your comment suggests that maybe you mean to be rejecting these claims? If you do, I’d be interested in knowing why.
    On the other hand: I’m sometimes tempted to try to put together such a collection myself, but then I think, “Why would anyone submit a paper for such a collection?”
    Of course, if everyone sees edited volumes the way Curtis Franks does (above), people would in fact have reason to submit, and perhaps many would even know that they did. But given what I generally overhear people say about (the point of) publishing, and the relative status of different journals, and of edited volumes (particularly volumes edited by relative unknowns like me), I’m not so sure.
    Though I suppose the CFP could say “Send me the papers the journals refuse to publish!” If people don’t think they’re going to get certain papers published except in an edited volume, they might be more willing to send them to one. (Maybe someone should just start a Journal of Misfit Papers, a place to collect a curated selection of rejects.)

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  17. Cenz

    Few more points I would like to raise in this very interesting discussion (I read all the comments, I swear).
    1) For whom aren’t chapters in a collection ‘valuable enough’, or as valuable as peer reviewed articles in journals? I know a social scientist who is very proud of the chapter she was invited to write for a SAGE volume. She even mentions it in her bio as one of her academic achievements. This consideration adds to that of Curtis Frank, who made an example from the field of immunology. Perhaps only philosophers, or scholars from the humanities, look down at edited collections, whereas natural and social scientists do not? If that is the case, then we should wonder WHY do philosophers have these feelings towards edited collections. Is it a sort of a ‘disciplinary bias’? Or is the intrinsic quality of edited collections in philosophy that is, or is perceived to be, lower?
    2) Many have commented about the ‘freedom’ that publishing in an edited collection grants. Some have even said that these publications are a remedy to the somehow deficient traditional peer-review system. My experience does not align with these claims. Not too long ago, I was invited to contribute to an edited collection after I presented my work at a conference. The chapter underwent a first peer-review from the editor of the volume (whose identity of course I knew) and from another referee (who was anonymous). I made the required corrections. Then my chapter, as well as all the other contributions to the volume, underwent a second peer review, from two anonymous referees appointed by the publisher. While my chapter was accepted after this second peer review, many others need to be majorly revised. As a result, even though my chapter has been accepted, the book is not out yet. Of course, this upsets me a bit: it is not nice to have a chapter “accepted for publication” or “in press” for ages, not knowing when it will actually be published, especially if you are still trying to secure a permanent position. At the same time, I can only commend on the seriousness of the editor of the collection as well as of the publisher for their rigorous peer review. Given this personal experience of mine, I was not expecting to read that actually many edited volume are almost ‘peer-review free’.
    3) About merit vs. cronyism. I am not an established and tenured professor, but my published work is read, cited, and somehow impactful. People who work in my niche often have read and cited what I wrote. I have participated in many international conferences and I personally know the ‘top players’ in my sub-field, who take my views seriously. As for today, however, I have been invited to contribute to only one edited volume (the one I spoke about above). When I look at all the other numerous edited volumes that have recently appeared in my sub-field, I can see that they contain two kinds of contributions. The first: chapter written by established and well known philosophers, who often do not say anything radically new, but they summarise what they have already written elsewhere. The second: junior researchers who have just completed their PhD, or are about to complete it, who say something original in a chapter that they co-author with their PhD supervisors (who are established and well known philosophers). Since I am not an established philosopher, nor have I ever published thanks to the recommendation of some well known academic, the norm, for me, is to be left out from some kind of editorial projects and, more in general, academic network. Of course, this is my personal and limited experience, and I am talking about my restricted and small philosophical niche. Yet, for me personally, the real act of resistance is to keep getting published or going to conference thanks to my efforts and to my efforts alone.
    4) Many people accuse philosophers of being too idealist and not caring enough about the material conditions of this or that. I think this conversation run this same risk. In particular, no one is talking about one thing: money. The price of many edited collections is often crazy. Really really crazy. That means that many of these works are inaccessible to some universities (there is more to Oxford, Cambrige, and super wealthy research intensive universities), or to early carreer reasearchers finding themselves in between jobs but keeping on writing articles, and who would benefit enormously from reading some of the chapters of one of such edited collections. How can anything so expensive and therefore inaccessible, which feeds the capitalistic beast of academic publishing, be an ‘act of resistance’? I mean, maybe it is an act of resistance after all, but it is not resisting the right things.

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  18. tenure and promotion

    Hi Cenz: the value issue isn’t about pride in one’s work or feelings. It’s about how and whether things count for tenure/promotion. A pretty standard thing to hear about tenure cases in the US is that papers in edited volumes fall somewhere in the “don’t count at all” to “count for 50% as much as a peer reviewed journal article” range. In my department (PhD granting but not very elite at all), for example, our tenure standards simply don’t mention anything but books and peer reviewed journal articles, so it is at best unclear whether there is any point in additionally publishing in edited volumes pre tenure (in terms of those things counting towards tenure–obviously there might be other points in doing so!).

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  19. Cenz

    Dear “tenure and promotion”, perhaps my comment was not clear enough. Of course, we are talking about”academic value”, not about personal feelings. And my hypothesis was that in fields other than philosophy, chapters in edited volumes have indeed an academic value, assuming that such edited volumes are also peer reviewed (something that many people in this thread seem to assume that is not the case). I am also talking from a European perspective and I know for sure that in many European countries the thing that counts for tenure is the quality and quantity of peer reviewed publications, and these may be articles, monographs, or chapters in volumes (again, assuming that such volumes are indeed peer reviewed).

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