Scholarly Communication

State censorship and cancel culture, trigger warnings and safe spaces, pseudoscience, First Amendment hardball, as well as orthodoxy and groupthink: universities remain a site for important battles in the culture wars. What is the larger meaning of these debates? Are American universities at risk of conceding to mobs and cuddled “snowflake” students and sacrifice the hallowed values of free speech and academic inquiry? Bradford Vivian examines the heated debates over campus misinformation as a language unto itself that confirms existing notions and often provides simple explanations for complex shared problems. In his book, Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education (Oxford UP), he shows how the free speech crisis on US college campuses has been manufactured through misinformation, distortion, and political ideology, and how campus misinformation is a threat not only to academic freedom but also to civil liberties in US society writ large.In our conversation, Bradford explained how campus speech crises are used – and also how faculty, administrators, students and others can recognize recurring patterns and properly respond, for example to distinguish between abuses of scientific evidence and sound scientific claims in public argument. Bradford Vivian is a professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Pennsylvania State University. His research and teaching focuses on theories of rhetoric (or the art of persuasion) and public controversies over memory, history, speech and other issues. Among his books are Commonplace Witnessing: Rhetorical Invention, Historical Remembrance, and Public Culture (Oxford University Press), Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (Penn State Press) and Being Made Strange: Rhetoric beyond Representation (SUNY Press). He is also co-editor, with Anne Teresa Demo, of Rhetoric, Remembrance, and Visual Form: Sighting Memory (Routledge). He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend and, from the National Communication Association, the James A. Winans-Herbert A. Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address, the Critical/Cultural Studies Division Book of the Year Award, and the Karl R. Wallace Memorial Award.Uli Baer teaches literature and photography as University Professor at New York University. A recipient of Guggenheim, Getty and Humboldt awards, in addition to hosting "Think About It” he hosts (with Caroline Weber) the podcast "The Proust Questionnaire” and is Editorial Director at Warbler Press. Email ucb1@nyu.edu; Twitter @UliBaer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Moroccan Other-Archives: History and Citizenship After State Violence (Fordham UP, 2023) investigates how histories of exclusion and silencing are written and rewritten in a postcolonial context that lacks organized and accessible archives. The book draws on cultural production concerning the “years of lead”—a period of authoritarianism and political violence between Morocco’s independence in 1956 and the death of King Hassan II in 1999—to examine the transformative roles memory and trauma play in reconstructing stories of three historically marginalized groups in Moroccan history: Berbers/Imazighen, Jews, and political prisoners.This book demonstrates how Moroccan cultural production has become an other-archive: a set of textual, sonic, embodied, and visual sites that recover real or reimagined voices of these formerly suppressed and silenced constituencies of Moroccan society. Combining theoretical discussions with close reading of literary works, the book reenvisions both archives and the nation in postcolonial Morocco. By producing other-archives, Moroccan cultural creators transform the losses state violence inflicted on society during the years of lead into a source of civic engagement and historiographical agency, enabling the writing of histories about those Moroccans who have been excluded from official documentation and state-sanctioned histories.The book is multilingual and interdisciplinary, examining primary sources in Amazigh/Berber, Arabic, Darija, and French, and drawing on memory studies, literary theory, archival studies, anthropology, and historiography. In addition to showing how other-archives are created and operate, El Guabli elaborates how language, gender, class, race, and geographical distribution are co-constitutive of a historical and archival unsilencing that is foundational to citizenship in Morocco today.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writing and publishing are at the heart of most academic and research pursuits. Many potential authors, however, feel lost in the seemingly Everest climbing-like process. There is little formal education that authors receive during their education. In this regard, John Bond’s new book's The Little Guide to Getting Your Journal Article Published: Simple Steps to Success (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023) seeks to pull back the curtain on the process and provide essential information to lead authors to their goals.The Little Guide answers all of a novice author's questions in a direct and useful fashion. The book can be read all the way through or serve as a spot reference guide as authors wind their way through the process. The book is divided into 29 short, focused chapters. Sections include "Getting Started," "Selecting Potential Journals for Submission," "Writing Your Article," "Submitting Your Article," and "Publication at Last. "Bond brings in a wealth of experience from decades of working in world of scholarly publishing and as a publishing consultant for authors. In this podcast he discusses the contents of his book and the challenges faced in the domain of scholarly publishing today and the simple steps for successful publication. Tune in to listen and get your article published!Sanjay Kumar, Ph.D., is a senior lecturer in the Center for Academic Writing at Central European University. Twitter: @sanju1235 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Quantitative Science Studies (QSS) is a newly launched open access journal that was born out of a collaboration between the International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics (ISSI) and the MIT Press. In this episode, Editor-in-Chief Ludo Waltman discusses the origins of QSS, its growing inaugural issue, and its future as a publishing outlet run for and by the scientometric community. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Archivists feel that what their mission is, is to document society. And the question is: how can you document society if you only look at or value or preserve­—maybe value is the right word—a particular segment of the expressions of society?”In Archiving Cultures: Heritage, Community and the Making of Records and Memory (Routledge, 2023), Jeannette Bastian defines and models the concept of cultural archives, focusing on how diverse communities express and record their heritage and collective memory and why and how these often-intangible expressions are archival records. Analysis of oral traditions, memory texts and performance arts demonstrate their relevance as records of their communities.Key features of this book include definitions of cultural heritage and archival heritage with an emphasis on intangible cultural heritage. Aspects of cultural heritage such as oral traditions, performance arts, memory texts and collective memory are placed within the context of records and archives. It presents strategies for reconciling intangible and tangible cultural expressions with traditional archival theory and practice and offers both analog and digital models for constructing cultural archives through examples and vignettes.Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. Jen edits for Partnership Journal and organizes with the TPS Collective. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom and The Social Movement Archive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is an advance contract? Do you need an agent? How do you know which editor to approach with your manuscript? Successfully following the path to academic publishing can be daunting for first-time authors. But it doesn’t have to be. Acquisitions editor Laura Devulis joins us to explain the hidden curriculum, including: How soon you can approach an academic press with your proposal. What it means when your editor offers you an advance contract. How much of your manuscript can be previously published. What happens when you miss a deadline. Some important things to communicate to your editor. Our guest is: Laura Davulis, who is an acquisitions editor at the Johns Hopkins University Press, where she publishes academic and trade books in American history and current affairs. She lives in Baltimore. You can follow her on Twitter (@davulis) for musings on books and publishing, along with cat pictures and extended discussions of pizza-making techniques.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: What Editors Do, by Peter Ginna Revise: The Scholar-Writer’s Essential Guide to Tweaking, Editing, and Perfecting Your Manuscript, by Pamela Haag Handbook for Academic Authors, by Beth Luey The Book Proposal Book, by Laura Portwood-Stacer Academic Life podcast on writing book proposals Academic Life podcast on revising your dissertation for publication with the editor of University of Wyoming Press A conversation about marketing scholarly books A conversation about the peer review process with acquisitions editor Rachael Levay Academic Life podcast about working with developmental editors ASK UP: Authors Seeking Knowledge from University Presses Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week to learn from experts inside and outside the academy, and embrace the broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, Gita Manaktala, Editorial Director at the MIT Press, and Ellen Finnie, Co-Interim Associate Director for Collections at MIT Libraries, discuss the Ideas series: a hybrid print and open access book series for general readers, that provides fresh, strongly argued, and provocative views of the effects of digital technology on culture, business, government, education, and our lives.Learn more about the full series here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The authors of Data Feminism (2020), Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, along with Catherine Ahearn, Content Lead at PubPub, discuss the value and process of open peer review, share experiences and best practices, and explore issues surrounding peer review transparency. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Cinegogía is an open-access website devoted to the teaching and study of Latin American cinemas. Bridget Franco, an associate professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross, founded and coordinates the website. Cinegogía contains a database of Latin American film as well as resources for teaching and researching film. Teaching resources include syllabi, teaching activities and assignments, and film guides. Cinegogía has a considerable selection of films by and about Black and Indigenous communities in Latin America. Bridget Franco and I discuss how she founded the site, teaching with Latin American film, and digital humanities projects.Bridget Franco is Associate Professor of Spanish at College of the Holy Cross.Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creations. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jess Polka, executive director of ASAPbio, and Sam Klein of the MIT Press/MIT Media Lab’s Knowledge Futures Group (KFG) and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society survey and explain open science initiatives and tools. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices