Congratulations to our 2015 CELJ Award Winners!

Congratulations to positions and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies for their 2015 Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) Awards! The awards were announced on January 9, 2016, during the 2016 Modern Language Association annual meeting in Austin, TX.

positions won the 2015 CELJ Award for Best Special Issue for “reconsidering the 2006 MIT visualizing cultures controversy,” volume 23, issue 1, co-edited by Winnie Won Yin Wong and Jing Wang! This award is given to the best special issue published in 2015.

“reconsidering the 2006 MIT visualizing cultures controversy,” takes a look back at the MIT “Visualizing Cultures” controversy of 2006. In April 2006, Chinese students at MIT mounted a protest over the appearance, on an MIT website, of historical Japanese war propaganda depicting the victorious killing of Chinese, Russian, and Korean enemy soldiers. Rather than frame the controversy as Chinese student censorship of US scholarship, contributors turn their attention to a broad interrogation of wartime imagery and the representation of violence, student activism and image-driven nationalism in cyberspace, digital pedagogy and the impact of the Internet on knowledge production. Essays examine the crisscrossing context of digital content with a critically balanced mindset and question the responsibility of every party (native and expert, academic and the wider public) in an age of digital pedagogy. The goal of this issue is to offer multiple avenues for understanding why the controversy broke out and how it was represented in the public sphere, as well as provide longer and more layered historical contexts for similar conflicts in the future. Read the introduction, made freely available, and browse the table-of-contents to learn more about the special issue.

A before and after look at the redesigned journal.

The Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (JMEWS) was awarded the 2015 CELJ Award for Best Journal Design! The journal was redesigned for its eleventh volume in 2015 by journals designer Sue Hall.

In a recent blog post, Sue explained the process of redesigning a journal: “I enjoy the redesign process because I feel like I’m collaborating with a couple of people. One is the original designer of the journal, because I try to retain the things I think are successful and workable. I like the idea of the redesign being an evolution and not just a sudden change. To make it feel like an evolution, it needs to have a sense of continuity.”

miriam cooke, co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, states, “We had extraordinary conversations with Sue Hall about how to design the journal about things that never would have occurred to us. The care that every single page elicited from the design team was extraordinary. The way the journal looks externally is really important. What Duke does so well is to really work on the presentation of the journal and to make it change each time, which then becomes fun for the editors; it’s enormous fun.”

Check out the redesigned covers: