AO: Analysts do not note specific practices but they call for “strengthening of respectful collaborative spaces for scholarship to flourish in a way that is truly concerned with diversity.”
AO: the (increasing?) precarity of academic labor is noted.
AO: The analysts do not cover data practices themselves.
AO: Analysts are concerned with how “digital technologies might facilitate bad or inappropriate editorial practices—and how they might also be harnessed to refuse or resist such practices.” They noted that the same digital communication technologies that allow a publication to be run by collaborators who are spatially isolated from one another can also create challenges that need to be actively and continuously addressed, not the least of which is the potential for abuse. In other words, the same tool cannot be expected to lead to the same results across different contexts.
AO: The analysts note the power of social media in bringing these issues to light as well as the labor that goes into making those contributions.
AO: They call out a certain kind of “love” for big, Euro-American, largely white and male theory has come to be the distinguishing mark of “serious” scholarship for so much of the social sciences and humanities (2017) and call for recognition that like everything else, theory has its contexts, histories, politics.
AO: The analysts iterated the importance of self-reflection on practices in order to better create a “respectful collaborative space... for scholarship to flourish.” They argued that such spaces need to be concerned with diversity … and rooted in an ethic of care.” For collaborative spaces to “work” according to these analysts, it appears that acknowledgment of diverse voices (they define diversity as that which is “defined by the voices of diversity not from a colonial centre blind to its own position”) as well as mindfulness about the role of technologies in shaping these interactions is important.
AO: It is unclear what exactly they mean by “respectful” – What do “respectful” practices look like? Agreeing to disagree? Agreeing?
AO: The analysts do not explicitly note this but as Somatosphere’s Editorial Collaborative, they write to discuss the collective work it takes to run and organize their online publishing initiative.
AO: Analysts highlight attention is needed to the gendered forms of harassment, bullying, and abuse within anthropology and to the ways that exclusion and exploitation along the lines of race, class, national origin and language, sexuality, disability, and other forms of difference are reproduced through the academy’s own power differentials.
AO: The analysts look at power differentials within the academy and the volunteer labor of collaborative projects.
AO: The analysts are thinking over the valuing of volunteer labor within scholarly collaborative projects. How not to broad-brush categorize all scholarly work that doesn’t have a wage-relation as inherently exploitative and also not to make payment the sole criterion for valuing the kind of work that we do. They hold that key to an ethical engagement with volunteer colleagues is not separate from the ways we think about paid labor–and that “this means thinking about the specific conditions both of those undertaking the work as well as the nature of the work itself.”