Introduction
This piece is about academic publishing and what we should be doing to amplify our voices in both academic and non-academic outlets. It’s also a bit personal as I have nothing to lose and in that way am privileged. I am retired and have a stellar h-index as far as metrics are concerned. I am also very stable financially although I do have a physical as well as a psych disability. I don’t need to worry. Or do I?
What follows was originally published on an email list of users and survivors aiming to advance mad knowledge. My conclusion was to resolve not to publish in academic outlets any more. So clearly, as this piece is in Psychiatric Services, I broke the resolution almost immediately. I did this at the request of an Editor. Their grounds were that the arguments needed to be heard in the mainstream too. I am uncomfortable with this paradox and paradox it is. Plagued by paradoxes seems a good motto for survivor work.
The reproduction of knowledge
Peer-review publishing in the mainstream is a major way the academy reproduces itself. The groups of journals that mirror disciplines, the requirement in many psychiatry and psychology journals that papers be ‘data papers’ (please no concepts here), the make up of editorial boards, the apparatus of peer review and the metrics of Impact Factors and citation indices are very important for jobs and progression but they also constitute a self-sealed system with boundaries that you break at your peril.
What should we be doing about all this? And I mean in an ideal world. Because if you want to progress as an academic you are heavily constrained in what you can write and how you can write it by this system. The Arts and Humanities may be a bit more fluid but, looking at some material, they have their own self-policed systems. They are just different from ‘psy’.
For some, for me at an earlier point, it is unquestionable that you have to play by the rules. You choose your target journal(s) and write to their rubrics. Most papers in the ‘psy’ disciplines have multiple authors. So if you get your name on one such, what is going on in terms of change? One answer is that you have to play by the rules because the system can only be changed from within. So you hope that being involved in this work, and being named, perspectives will gradually shift in the direction that ‘we’ want. At the other end of the scale having an LE author on a paper seems just a technique of legitimation. At least in the UK, LE authors are, today, actively wanted by many so your name goes on a paper even if you had nothing to do with the work. You are a ‘badge’ for good user involvement. This happened to me more than once and I found out by accident. I complained but nothing came of it. I should have been more forceful.
If this is the route some should take at least some of the time, then what difference will it make? Progressive change? None? There has to be something new and strategic if people are going to have their names on papers. But there are only weak strategies because of the dominance and repetitiveness of the mainstream. Sometimes people don’t think about it too much. It is what you do. A deep dive would be too uncomfortable. But in my view if non-academics or LE academics are to have a place in the academy then we need a plan. It is very difficult, everything is stacked against us but otherwise it is like throwing away tissue paper day after day. The risk, although some don’t see it this way, is that the dominant place for a non-academic author is to have their personal story as part of the writing. This can make people angry because they have much more to say than that and in any event people do not control the story they tell. Only certain stories are allowed. This is exemplified in much of the ‘Recovery’ literature where stories must be driven by the desire to ‘recover’ and end in just that. Lucy Costa and colleagues go so far as to call this ‘disability porn’ – you lay open your life with the end-point being recovery for the delight of the audience (Costa et al., 2012)
Of course, it is not essential that non-academics or LE academics (they are not in the same position) get into this mainstream game. Setting aside that people have to eat, the newest ideas are appearing on blogs, on substacks, social media platforms and self-funded reports. The writing is different and so is the content. This is often framed in terms of ‘jargon’ but it is something more complex and nuanced than that. It is about what you need to do in order to be understood outside your typical peers which in the case of the academy is other academics. And a very strange discourse it is. I was at a Zoom seminar recently where a service user finally said she felt not only confused by the language, she felt alienated. Aliens and alienists.
Decision time
I have more or less decided that I am going to give up publishing in mainstream journals. The crunch point, believe it or not, was about the bureaucracy of digital submission and peer review of a particular co-authored paper. It had actually been accepted but there were all kinds of ‘requirements’ that had to be met. One afternoon I received 4 emails in total each saying I had not addressed such and such. Could they not have said it all in one email at the start? I was very unwell anyway and the stress made me feel like a rat in a maze. Eventually I asked the editor if they were aware that authors are human? Part of the problem was that we were having the Open Access fee waived and there were all kinds of glitches. It is another topic but Open Access is a fraud in my view. Papers are often not ‘open’ at all unless you have an institutional affiliation and the system further intensifies the mandate that we ‘play by the rules’. It struck me that the sclerotic nature of the bureaucracy mirrored in an inexact way the sclerotic nature of much of the content of mainstream publishing today.
One of the reviewers of this paper pointed out that I did not consider what amounts to ‘strike action’. What would the world of publishing look like if all LE researchers, in and without academia, simply downed tools? I am very pessimistic about such action. The world of publishing would probably breathe a collective sigh of relief. Actively trying to include us in publishing is something of a double-bind and the reasons range from irritation to epistemological clashes. At root, we want things and are creating knowledge that is both misunderstood and rejected by the mainstream (Bag, 2023). It is fundamentally a power game and a money game as well as an epistemological one and we are not yet in a position to effect a paradigm shift. Maybe soon but not in my lifetime. So don’t strike, write. Just not in the same structures and their offshoots.
So where will I put stuff if I continue to write? I honestly don’t know but I have something and I am testing the waters to see if I can find a non-academic ‘home’ for it. And we will see where that goes. Nowhere, most likely.
I said at the beginning that I am privileged and I need to emphasise that again. If people want academic jobs today, or promotion, they have to make it in the mainstream. I did achieve that although I would like for half of my ‘output’ to disappear. I would like this because, in hindsight, I was coopted and used. The other half is another matter but surprise, surprise it is in the least prestigious journals and has lower citations. Still, it seems to have the right audience. If nobody is interested in what I write, so be it. But I do think that LE academics and especially non-academics could bring a freshness, and even something more fundamental, to the field by pushing boundaries until the house collapses and we have to build a new one.
Again, as I said at the start ,a draft of this column was posted on an email list for people who are trying to advance survivor and lived experience research and thinking. BUT this piece is being published in a mainstream psychiatric journal. I broke my own rule almost immediately after making it public? And it is a paradox. But I was asked very forcefully (not aggressively at all), if I would be prepared to submit it to this column in Psychiatric Services, It was in fact the Editor who invited me. Her grounds were that the mainstream needs to hear these arguments too. Well, yes. I would have preferred it had someone else had taken on the task. On the other hand, purity is a fiction, everything is contestable and has weak spots and as the world collapses around us we just have to muddle through,
Bag, M. (2023). Mixed Bag #21: Diana Rose on Mad Knowledges and Epistemic Collisions. Mixed Bag.
Costa, L., Voronka, J., Landry, D., Reid, J., Mcfarlane, B., Reville, D., & Church, K. (2012). ” Recovering our Stories”: A Small Act of Resistance. Studies in Social Justice, 6(1), 85.