Call for Papers: Policy Analysis and the Politics of Health Policy

How, when, and where does academic policy analysis about the health care system enter the policymaking process?  How have healthcare policymakers seen and used policy analysis in the development, implementation, and perhaps repeal of the Affordable Care Act?  As the US moves from a more technocratic to a more populist administration, how is the role of policy analysis likely to shift? We invite papers for a conference at the Wagner School, New York University in spring 2017 to explore the role of policy analysis in the political process, focusing particularly on the Affordable Care Act. The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law will accept five to seven papers from the conference to run in a special issue after undergoing peer review. Sherry Glied, Dean of the NYU Wagner School of Public Service, is Guest Editor of this Special Issue of JHPPL.

Background

The relationship between scholars in health policy and policymakers has long been contested.  Back in 1966, following the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, Odin Anderson, reviewing the relationship between research and policy, reported that he was “pessimistic” and concluded a dispiriting review by asking “what is then the value of social and economic research in the health field?”  In the ensuing 50 years, health policy scholars have continued to publish and policymakers have continued to legislate and implement health policy.  Funders increasingly demand dissemination plans to ensure that the findings of the research they support are influential in the policy process.  A new scholarly field of “knowledge translation” has emerged.  Yet many observers remain pessimistic about the influence of evidence on policymaking.

Many aspects of the Affordable Care Act’s development and implementation offered opportunities for scholarship to influence the process – from the initial decision to focus on health reform, to the design of the exchanges and the Medicaid expansion, to the investment in comparative effectiveness research and delivery system improvements, through the most recent repeal-and-replace debates.  The Law’s path has wound through Congress, the Federal Executive Branch, the Courts, and through State Legislatures and Governor’s Offices.  How, where, and when did policy-related scholarship play a part in these processes?  How, where, and when should it have played such a part?  The purpose of this research conference is to explore these questions both positively and normatively.  While the focus of the conference will be on the Affordable Care Act, we are also open to papers that consider other aspects of health policymaking.

Possible Paper Topics and Target Audience

We seek to cast a broad net and are open to studies by political scientists, economists, sociologists, historians, health services researchers, and others. Papers could examine differences and similarities in how research evidence is used in the various institutions of government (committees, budget agencies, executive branch departments, the judiciary); how evidence plays into lobbying and stakeholder engagement; the uses of evidence in the context of Federal/State relations; the role of the technocracy (expert advisory panels, budget agencies, actuaries, regulatory impact analyses, budget scores); how policymakers address conflicting research findings (for example, in the discussions of job loss); how Congress acts when evidence is sparse (as in the case of the CLASS Act), how partisanship affects the use of evidence; as well as papers that explore more normative issues, such as the relationship between scholarship and accountability.

The target audiences for these papers include academic researchers; funders; and health policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels. Papers should be written so as to be accessible to all of these audiences.

Submission Guidelines

Interested authors should submit a 1-3 page proposal by March 1, 2017 by email to Jennifer Costanza, Managing Editor of JHPPL, at jhppl[at]brown[dot]edu. Please put “Policy Analysis Conference” in the subject line of the message. JHPPL will respond to the proposals by March 15, 2017.  Accepted authors will present completed papers at the conference at NYU on May 2, 2017.  The papers will then undergo peer review for a special issue of the journal.

The Year’s Top 10 Blog Posts

As 2016 comes to a close, we’re grateful for another year of sharing Press news and essential scholarship on our blog. Travel back in time with us as we take a look at our most-viewed blog posts of the year.

10. Remembering Nancy Abelmann

“We were saddened to learn of the death this week of Nancy Abelmann, Associate Vice Chancellor for Research (Humanities, Arts and Related Fields) and the Harry E. Preble Professor of Anthropology, Asian American Studies, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Gender & Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, co-director of the Ethnography of the University Initiative, and author of The Intimate University: Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation (2009) as well as several other books.”

9. Digital Collaboration with Hemispheric Institute and Scalar Launches

“We are excited to announce the launch of two new born-digital book projects published in collaboration with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University. … Dancing with the Zapatistas, edited by Diana Taylor and  Lorie Novak, brings together scholars, artists, journalists, and activists to respond to the continuing work of the Zapatistas twenty years after their insurrection in 1994. … What is Performance Studies? is edited by Diana Taylor and Marcos Steuernagel. This multimedia digital book, available free online, asks thirty leading scholars from seven different countries throughout the Americas the same question: What is performance studies?”

8. Jennifer Doyle on Queer Theory and Current Events

A guest post by Jennifer Doyle on behalf of Social Text

“‘How are gender and sexuality central to the current “war on terrorism”?’ This question opens Jasbir Puar and Amit S. Rai’s 2002 essay ‘Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots‘ and has become more pressing over time. The alarming news from Orlando caught numbers of us off-guard — not (sadly) because mass shootings are unthinkable. We found ourselves off-balance but because, with Orlando’s news cycle, queer people of color, mostly Latino and mostly Puerto Rican, were quickly deployed, as victims, in the service of the discourse of national security.”

7. It’s Not What You Think: Affect Theory and Power Take to the Stage

A guest post by Donovan O. Schaefer, author of Religious Affects

“Affect theory is an approach to culture, history, and politics that focuses on the role of prelinguistic or nonlinguistic forces, or affects. Affects make us what we are, but they are neither under our “conscious” control nor even necessarily within the register of our awareness—and they can only sometimes be captured in language. In Religious Affects, I offer an introduction to the subfield of affect theory that is (I hope) accessible to a range of backgrounds. I then explain how affect theory can be linked to other conversations happening in the humanities—including Michel Foucault’s ‘analytics of power,’ the recent ‘animal turn,’ critical secularism studies, and my home field of religious studies. Affect theory helps us understand power by encouraging us to think of power as theater.”

6. For the Liberation of a Pluralist Thinking: An Interview with Roland Barthes

“The most recent issue of Cultural Politics (volume 11 and issue 3) features an interview with cultural theorist Roland Barthes that has never before been published in English. Barthes’ 1972 interview with Japanese academic Shigehiko Hasumi includes discussions of Le Plaisir du texte (1973), and of a restlessness that kept Barthes moving from one critical language to another, ‘as soon as meanings have solidified and acquired the status of stereotype,’ translator Chris Turner writes.”

5. A Wealth of Scholarship on Stuart Hall

“As we announced this spring, Duke University Press is the new home for the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall. In addition to publishing work by Hall himself in the new series Stuart Hall: Selected Writings, we are excited to be publishing new books and journal issues about Hall and his influence.”

4. Ten Queer Films That Changed the World

A guest post by Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt, authors of Queer Cinema in the World

“In our new book, we attempt to reorient queer film studies away from a largely American and Eurocentric canon and toward non-Western forms of queer filmmaking that have increasingly been important for the circuits of world cinema and local queer politics. Here are ten queer films that we think you should see.”

3. Feminism Without Transphobia

“Feminism and trans activism don’t have to be mutually exclusive, argue the contributors to ‘Trans/Feminisms,’ the most recent issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly.

“This special double issue, edited by Susan Stryker and Talia M. Bettcher, goes beyond the simplistic dichotomy between an exclusionary transphobic feminism and an inclusive trans-affirming feminism.”

2. Queer Geopolitics

“Today, we’re excited to share ‘Area Impossible: The Geopolitics of Queer Studies,’ the latest issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Edited by Anjali Arondekar and Geeta Patel, ‘Area Impossible’ stages a much-needed conversation between two often-segregated fields: queer studies and area studies.”

1. Duke University Press Launches New Series Collecting Writings of Stuart Hall

“Stuart Hall (1932–2014) is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost cultural theorists and public intellectuals of the late twentieth century. Though circulated, read, and taught for decades, Hall’s seminal essays are widely dispersed, with many pieces out of print or difficult to find. A new Duke University Press book series Stuart Hall: Selected Writings brings together Hall’s well-known works with previously unpublished ones to create a portrait of his wide-ranging intellectual and political investments.”

Best Books of the Year

It is almost the end of the year, which means it’s time for best books lists. We’re pleased to share the accolades our authors and their books have amassed from a variety of outlets this year:

Tim Lawrence’s Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-1983 has received praise from some big names in the music industry. Life and Death marbles 1980s dance culture with politics, funk, and liberation. The Village Voice named it one of their Ten Notable Books of 2016 calling it “scrupulously researched” and a “marvelously detailed history.” Over at Music Is My Sanctuary, they named Lawrence’s book one of the Top 10 Music Books of 2016. David Cantin writes, “This eagerly awaited follow-up to Lawrence’s classic Love Saves The Day is by far my favourite book of the year. A brilliantly documented and written piece that ventures into the New York party scene with great depth.”

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being by Christina Sharpe received high praise from The Guardian as one of its Best Books of 2016. Madeleine Thien says, “The book that will live on in me from this year is Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke), on living in the wake of the catastrophic violence of legal chattel slavery. In the Wake speaks in so many multiple ways (poetry, memory, theory, images) and does so in language that is never still. It is, in part, about keeping watch, not unseeing the violence that has become normative, being in the hold, holding on and still living.” Additionally, and in light of the political and social upheavals this year, Flavorwire has named In the Wake one of its 15 Nonfiction Books from 2016 to Bolster the Resistance.

Double congratulations are also in order for Susan E. Cahan’s book Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power. Culture Type chose it as one of the 12 Best Black Art Books of 2016—a list that includes works that are “in various ways reframing art history.” Vulture included Mounting Frustration in their 10 best Art Books of 2016 category claiming, “Protest histories like this feel more vital than ever as we prepare to set forth into the long winter of unrest ahead.”

Rolling Stone has named Greg Tate’s Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader one of its 10 Best Music Books of 2016. Michaelangelo Matos says, “Greg Tate’s ferocious, slang-tinged salvos and deep-rooted historical analysis have inspired readers and intimidated colleagues for decades.”

Catherine Besteman’s book recounting the experiences of Somali migrants—Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine—has been included in Foreign Affairs‘s Best Books of 2016. Arguing for the importance and timelessness of Besteman’s work, reviewer Nicolas van de Walle writes, “Besteman eschews social science jargon to tell her story with great insight and empathy. Her book should be required reading for policymakers currently debating what to do with refugees from Syria.”

Donna Haraway’s latest, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, was chosen by POSTmatter as one of their Top 10 Books of 2016. They say, “Through a combination of science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism and speculative fabulation, Staying with The Trouble maps out new ways to reconfigure our relationship with the planet, and makes a case for its future.”

Over at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Tim Lawrence’s biography of Arthur Russell—Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992—has made it on to musician Devonté “Dev” Hynes’s 10 Favorite Books list. Hynes calls it “an inspiring yet tragic read” that he’s read “cover to cover three times.”

And finally, World Literature Today cited Margaret Randall’s anthology of Cuban poetry, Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry, as one of its 75 Notable Translations of 2016. Only the Road / Solo el Camino provides an English-speaking audience with an expansive bilingual collection of work from Cuba and its diaspora.

Exciting Work from Cultural Politics

We are pleased to share two works this month from Cultural Politics: a special section on “Mediated Geologies,” edited by Jussi Parikka, in the most recent issue of the journal, and the first book in the Cultural Politics books series, Finite Media, by Sean Cubitt.

The most recent issue of Cultural Politics includes a special section on “Mediated Geologies.” The special section approaches topics such as cultural politics of the environment, ecological contexts of contemporary media, and debates concerning the Anthropocene from the angle of media studies. Contributors argue for new ways to understand media culture as read through a materials focus: from waste to building materials and from temperature control to more conceptual developments concerning new materialism.

From the introduction:

Cultural politics of geology sounds rather oxymoronic, considering the distance geology seems to have from concerns of reproduction of cultural inequalities, power struggles, formations of identity, and issues of governance. Geological investigations of the earth and its layers, resources, dynamics, and histories occupy a timespan that is assumed to speak to  an altogether different set of questions than what we consider as the task — or even the capacity — of the humanities. Yet the past years have seen a rather dramatic increase in debates about geology, although often through the term Anthropocene. The concept refers to the impact of human agriculture,science, and technology on a planetary scale; it could be said to function as nothing less than a modern “design brief” (Bratton 2016) for how the earth has been reformed and, as many would argue, catastrophically pushed to a point of no return when it comes to the amount of toxic content in the air and soil, to global temperatures, to sea-level rise and polar ice melt, and to many other interconnected chemical reactions and consequences. These debates have also led to intense discussions in the humanities and the arts, including the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s (Berlin) significant long-term project, the Anthropocene Observatory, involving artists, curators, theorists, and other participants. Although that project concluded, similar projects continue, with an abundance of art works and theoretical writings starting to address a set of interrelated questions: What are the political stakes in the nonhuman context of the human impact on the geological scale? In which particular territories, case studies, concepts, and questions are the entanglement of the scales most visible, most prescient?

Read the full introduction to the section, made freely available.

Finite Media by Sean Cubitt is the first book in the Cultural Politics series, which examines the political aspects of culture and the cultural aspects of the political.

While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media, Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all.

Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA’s Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.

Watch Sean Cubitt discuss his research:

Read the introduction to Finite Media free online, and use coupon code E16CUBIT to save 30% when you order the paperback edition through our website.

Norman Foerster 2016 Prize Winner Announced

This year’s winner of the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published annually in American Literature has been selected. Congratulations to Meina Yates-Richard, winner of the 2016 Foerster Prize for her essay “‘WHAT IS YOUR MOTHER’S NAME?’: Maternal Disavowal and the Reverberating Aesthetic of Black Women’s Pain in Black Nationalist Literature,” featured in volume 88, issue 3. The selection committee, comprised of Michael Elliot, Nihad Farooq, Zita Cristina Nunes, Matthew Taylor, and Priscilla Wald, wrote of Yates-Richard’s winning essay:

In a field of distinguished work, Yates-Richard’s article stood out for us by tracing a compelling, provocative genealogy of black maternal sound and its relationship to black nationalism. By attending to the screams and songs of African-American women, Yates-Richard in this piece shows how black nationalism has both required and sacrificed the vocalizations of women. The result is an article that charts a textual tradition from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, and that raises important questions about the political work of such figurations. We are truly pleased to be able to recognize this path-breaking scholarship.

Additionally, there were two honorable mentions for this year’s contest. Congratulations to Mary Grace Albanese and James Dawes!

The selection committee chose Mary Grace Albanese’s essay “Uncle Tom across the Sea (and Back),” from volume 88, issue 4, for its innovative and thoroughly researched reconsideration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin within the context of Haitian politics and its comprehensive, multilingual readings of American literary history. In constructing a genealogy of the Haitain appropriations of Stowe’s novel, Albanese reminds us of the unpredictability of literary translation across national boundaries and the significance of hemispheric literary histories.

They chose James Dawes’s essay “The Novel of Human Rights,” from volume 88, issue 1, for its vital, challenging, and open-ended readings about the political urgency of the novel, and how the representation of atrocity exerts pressure on the form itself. This is a significant, provocative intervention in American literary studies—a stimulating call for us to rethink the relationship of literary genre to the most pressing political questions of our time.

Congratulations to Meina Yates-Richard and both honorable mentions! Read all the articles above, made freely available.

Call for Papers: The Political Beliefs and Civic Engagement of Physicians in an Era of Polarization

To what extent do doctors’ political beliefs, identities, and ideologies influence their professional decisions in the medical exam room? How do these political views shape what doctors do in their role as citizens, including their political participation on contested issues, such as abortion, gun control, and Obamacare? We invite papers for a conference at Tufts University in fall 2017 to explore the political beliefs and civic engagement of physicians in an era of partisan polarization. The Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law will accept five to seven papers from the conference to run in a special issue after undergoing peer review.

Background

Physicians have substantial autonomy in treating patients according to their best judgment. To be sure, doctors must uphold standards of professional conduct. They are also subject to the incentives and constraints of insurance plans, payment systems, and malpractice rules. Yet the role of a physician is defined loosely enough that doctors can bring to their work predispositions about how their jobs ought to be done. These predispositions can come from many sources, including medical school training, prior experiences, peer effects, individual personality and—the subject of this call for papers—politics.

A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (Hersh and Goldenberg 2016) demonstrates that physicians allow their political worldviews to influence their professional decisions on certain politically salient issues. For example, doctors who identify with the Democratic Party are more likely to urge patients against storing firearms in the home, while Republican physicians are more likely to counsel patients on the mental health risks of abortion and to urge patients to cut down on marijuana use. Yet many questions remain unanswered:  How important and far-reaching is the influence of physicians’ political beliefs? What factors shape the emergence and development of these beliefs? Does the influence of physicians’ political beliefs on their professional behavior benefit or harm patients? Does it significantly affect variation in medical spending and health outcomes? In addition to these questions about how physicians’ political views affect medical practice, there are a range of questions about how physicians engage in politics, such as the level and variety of political activism among physicians and their professional associations.

Possible Paper Topics and Target Audience

We seek to cast a broad net and are open to studies by political scientists, economists, sociologists, health services researchers, and others. Papers could examine how doctors form their political ideologies and identities, whether there are significant differences in beliefs or belief formation across variables such as gender, age, region, training, residency, practice type, or medical specialization, as well as the implications for health outcomes. We are also interested in papers that examine the political participation of doctors in areas including but not limited to voting, testifying, letter writing, participation in agency rulemaking, contributing money to candidates or PACs, bundling donations, running for office, making public speeches and media appearances, and formal or informal lobbying. We are primarily interested in the political views and behavior of U.S. physicians, but papers that offer a comparative perspective are welcome.

The target audiences for these papers include academic researchers; health policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels; and health legal practitioners. Papers should be written so as to be accessible to all of these audiences.

Submission Guidelines

Interested authors should submit a 1-3 page proposal by March 3, 2017 by email to Jennifer Costanza, Managing Editor of JHPPL, at jhppl[at]brown[dot]edu. Please put “Physicians and Politics Submission” in the subject line of the message. JHPPL will respond to the proposals by April 21, 2017. Accepted authors will present completed papers at the conference in October/November 2017, at Tufts University in Boston. The papers will then undergo peer review for a special issue of the journal.

An Interview with Timothy Mitchell, co-editor of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

In early December, the editorial collective of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East gathered for their quarterly meeting at Columbia University. The journal’s managing editor, Liz Beasley, attended the meeting and spoke with Timothy Mitchell, who co-edits the journal with Anupama Rao, about his role as senior editor over the past five years.

Tell us a bit about CSSAAME. How has the journal changed since the time you took over five years ago?

It’s an unusual journal, because it’s neither the journal of one region—it’s not a journal of Middle East studies, of African history, or of any single world region. But nor is it simply a journal of transnational studies or of the global South. It has a focus on three intersecting world regions, and we’ve tried to make that not just an accident of the title but something that defines the work it publishes. Most work we publish focuses on just one of those three regions, but we want it to be read by scholars of the other two regions—that’s something we’ve really tried to emphasize in the kind of scholarship we look for. When we get submissions that don’t do that explicitly, we try to get those submissions rewritten in such a way that, while they will still appeal to specialists of the history or the politics or the anthropology of a particular place, they will be accessible also to those who work on one of our other two regions.

We do also encourage some more specifically comparative work. We have a book review section called Kitabkhana, which usually takes a single book, or a pair of books, and includes reviewers who are from all three regions.

Kitabkhana is a new section since you’ve taken over the journal, because before it was individual book reviews.

Yes, it had a conventional book review section before. We wanted to do something different. There are many good journals that do book reviews, but we felt what we could do differently was review from the perspective of both specialists in the region that the book deals with and those who are just outside and on the borders of that region.

How does the editorial collective function?

Like certain other journals, CSSAAME is edited from a particular geographic and some extent intellectual location. We’re based at Columbia University. Not every member of the editorial board—currently there are nine members—is from the faculty of Columbia, though the majority are. And so the editorial spirit of the journal is a reflection of the intellectual community within and beyond Columbia. Some members of the collective are based elsewhere, some move between Columbia and research centers on other continents. And our contributing editors and our authors write from many parts of the world. I think the two work together symbiotically—the intellectual community in New York, which is composed of scholars who meet regularly and continue conversations across a variety of forms, and a journal that engages with scholars and ideas across multiple locations around the world. We’re trying to see how the two can develop together.

Other journals—and other Duke journals, for example—do a similar kind of thing, and have a strong base in a particular intellectual community. That’s not the way every journal should be—there are other journals that have no specific geographical location in their editorial boards. But our base in New York does give us opportunities to have conversations that extend beyond the editorial meetings and get reflected back into the pages of CSSAAME.

And Anupama Rao, CSSAAME‘s other co-editor, is here as well.

It’s fortunate that we have offices in adjacent buildings—I think it really helps on a practical level to be colleagues in the same institution and be involved in many other intellectual projects together. Of course it helps that she’s so smart, has a wonderful knowledge of scholarship across so many fields, and has a fantastic sense of what’s new and what’s interesting.

Are there any upcoming special sections that you would like to tell us about? And of all the things we’ve published in the past five years, is there anything that really stands out to you? Any work that you thought was doing something especially important?

That’s a tough one—I really don’t want to pick favorites. It’s actually another answer to your question about what we’ve tried to do differently. The other thing we’ve tried to do is publish work other than the standard academic article. So we’ve done a number of interviews—some of them have been wonderfully insightful discussions, and even historical documents. The interview that Fadi Bardawil did with Talal Asad in our pages [volume 36, issue 1] has been very widely read.

And we’ve staged discussions: there’s one that we’re in the process of publishing that came out of an essay by Partha Chatterjee that appeared in the “Provocations” section of 36:2. We invited responses to the essay, and being able to think about debates that we were interested in hearing and organizing has been a feature of what we’ve tried to do. In some ways I’m keenest about some of those things, but I don’t in any way want to slight the very serious, more conventional academic articles.

Something that is not new or particularly distinctive to the journal has turned into a very important aspect of it: most of what we publish is organized thematically, with each issue having two or three special sections. Often these arise from workshops, conference panels, or symposia that we are involved in, or hear about, or that others bring to us. We won’t ever just take the papers from a conference panel and publish them as they are. We do a lot of work continuing to develop the ideas that make the papers hang together. We’ll sometimes suggest other papers to add to a special section. That ability to do collective work, work that forms a section where the papers are speaking to each other, and not just to scholarship to the field in general, is something you can really work on in editing the journal. We are developing a conversation even through the editorial process, in the process of revision, comment, and re-revision, so that publishing is not just something that you do at the end of things. It is a process that develops the quality of the scholarship.

Do you have specific thoughts about where you want to take the journal from here? I know that the editorial collective works to pull together ideas as a group and has just discussed a potentially divisive book for a Kitabkhana, for instance. Are you looking for more controversy?

One of the directions in which we’ve tried to take the journal is to think about scholarship after area studies. Another way of putting it is what I said earlier, that this is post–area studies journal but one that hasn’t abandoned the advantages of regional specialization and specialist readership. It’s trying to continue to develop scholarship that is written from a knowledge of languages, of histories, of cultures in a specialized way but finds a way to speak to a much broader audience, to make this a journal that scholars of Europe or Latin American or East Asian history and culture would want to read as well. That’s something we want to continue to develop.

People reading this post may be thinking about sending their work to us. What are you looking for in submissions? You’ve already mentioned that you want to appeal to nonspecialists. By the same token, is there anything you do not want?

We look for a certain kind of academic writing. As editors we work hard with authors on producing a readable academic prose. Other journals do this, too, but it’s something that we’ve tried to make a hallmark of the journal. In submissions, although we’ll work with authors to revise toward the kind of writing we want—focusing on the readability of the text, the freshness of the prose—it’s something we encourage authors to pay attention to. Some of it is the business of avoiding jargon, cliché, and terms that have become used in a specific way that will not make the article easily reach a wider audience. As we’re doing this to get scholarship read outside of the narrow fields in which it would otherwise be read, we take the level of the writing seriously.

Is there any particular field or area in which you’d like to receive submissions? Anu had mentioned that she thinks we’re being known as a history journal and perhaps wanted to bring in anthropologists and others to contribute.

We get some great submissions from anthropologists, and we’d like to have more. But I’d say the field we would encourage even more than that is literature—work on contemporary or historical literature of the Middle East, South Asia, or Africa. Again, if it fits the larger mission of the journal, I think we’d really like to do more of that.

And much of that is outlined in the Mission Statement from your first issue as editors.

Yes. We’ve published one or two pieces that have been about the history of ideas and intellectual and political debates going on in particular parts of the region, like the piece we did on the Arab Left and Palestine [Anaheed Al-Hardan’s essay “Al-Nakbah in Arab Thought: The Transformation of a Concept” from 35:3]. But we’re also interested in current contributions to ongoing political debates and cultural arguments.

Another thing we’ve changed in the journal is the cover, introducing new artwork by artists from the three regions in every volume. In one case so far, we’ve accompanied that with a symposium with the artist. So Shahzia Sikander’s work appeared on the covers of volume 34, and we were able to publish an extended conversation about her work in volume 35.

That kind of engagement with contemporary cultural production, artists working today whose work we can publish, if we can do photo essays or interviews that bring in aspects of contemporary cultural movements and visual culture—we’d love to do more of that. We really are a very interdisciplinary journal. The majority of what we publish tends to be historical scholarship, work on the visual arts, or politics, literature, intellectual thought—all of those fields are part of the scope of the journal.

Interested in submitting your work to CSSAAME? Visit the journal’s Editorial Manager site. Stay connected! Read CSSAAME, follow the journal on Facebook, and sign up for electronic table-of-contents alerts delivered directly to your inbox when a new issue is published.

The Best Books We Read in 2016

From novels to biography, sci-fi to political theory, at Duke University Press, reading is our jam. Here our staff members share their favorite reads from the past year. We hope you enjoy their suggestions, and perhaps find a few gift ideas in the mix.

Kristen Twardowski, Sales and Marketing Research Coordinator, recommends Alan Moore’s epic novel, Jerusalem: “It is a glorious, dark fairy tale that beautifully marries the grime of modern England with mystical and historical stories. Though it is a lengthy read—I might even describe it as an epic—the book captures the complexity and fragility of humanity extraordinarily well. Reading Jerusalem is a great way to close out 2016 and welcome in the new year.”

Chris Robinson, Copywriter extraordinaire, read a ton of sci-fi this year. He says, “My favorite was Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, which takes place in the near future after a virus wipes out most of the world’s population and follows an intertwining group of characters both before and after the epidemic. I loved how she was able to create a post-apocalyptic/dystopian future and make it so real and believable.”

Our Publicist and Exhibits Coordinator, Katie Smart, thoroughly enjoyed the modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice—Eligible by Curtis Sittenfield. “Sittenfeld does a great job of presenting a well-known story in a new, exciting, and diverse way that holds the reader’s attention, even if you know Darcy and Elizabeth will end up together in the end. First impressions, we’re reminded, are never quite what they seem. I recently discovered that this book is part of a series of Austen retellings, so if you’re not an Austen traditionalist and can stand some changes to the original novels, check out the other books in the series.”

Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel in over a decade made it onto Publicity Assistant Jessica Castro-Rappl’s favorites list. She says, “Here I Am follows a Jewish American family as both their personal world and the real world fall apart. It’s a story of love, loneliness, and longing; of the meaning and meaninglessness of life. It’s beautifully written and deeply affecting—it totally destroyed me emotionally, but it’s absolutely worth reading.”

Editorial Associate Sandra Korn suggests Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World: “It’s such a beautiful short book, telling the story of Makina, who travels from Mexico to the US to retrieve her brother. Herrera uses lyrical, otherworldly language and nearly-magic descriptions and his book has totally reshaped how I think about border crossing and migration.”

Liz Beasley, Coordinating Editor, gets political with The Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik: “Words cannot express how much I love Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or how much I am absolutely SURE that you should read this book. Although it is in some ways a coffee table book—with illustrations of RBG’s daily workout, recipes from her late husband, Marty, and numerous photographs (including photos of young girls dressed like her in pearls, large glasses, and “dissent collars”)—there is nothing light or shallow about it. Her annotated notes on her decisions and dissents reveal an incredibly razor-sharp mind as well as the nuances involved in making judgments, and they give us an important sense of how women’s rights have both picked up and lost steam at various points in US history. You learn about the serious discrimination RBG faced in her long career, as well as her surprising friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia. I hope you will be charmed and moved, as I was. I read The Notorious RBG before the election, and I suspect reading it now might be heartbreaking, but I still recommend this book wholeheartedly. May she, and all women in politics, live long and prosper.”

The editors for our humanities and social science journals offer up the following recommendations. Charles Brower, Senior Managing Editor, says, “The most satisfying book I read this year was Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles by John Mack Faragher. It takes LA noir all the way back to its dusty beginnings, the incredibly violent decades before and after California became a state in 1850. The murder rate in Los Angeles was fifty times higher than in New York City, and Mexican Californios and Anglo settlers both resorted to ‘justice’ via posses and lynching as a way to make up for the incompetent, corrupt, or nonexistent legal system. Faragher’s book is filled with frequently hair-raising stories of villainy, retribution, and mob rule; in his account, from its earliest days as part of the US, California has been the nation’s Eden but also its bleeding edge.”

Joel T. Luber, Assistant Managing Editor, writes: “The book that struck me most this year was something older that I read for the first time. The Bus by Paul Kirchner reprints a series of one-page comic strips about municipal buses. In the strip highlighted below, the most common protagonist—an unnamed businessman—sits in jail and is able to escape by summoning a bus with a drawing of a bus stop sign. This points out the reader’s assumptions about the depicted reality (e.g., that there’s a fourth wall to the cell that’s not pictured) and also inverts on the normal cause an effect of the bus stop to great comedic effect. The book features almost one hundred similarly clever strips that use this most quotidian of subjects to subvert the conventions of representation, particular in comics, and the normal rules of the real world.”

Thanks to our staff for another year of great reads and recommendations. We look forward to expanding our collective literary minds in 2017.

Duke University Press Director Steve Cohn on how independent publishers succeed

At the November Charleston Library Conference, Duke University Press Director Steve Cohn participated in the panel “Is Small Beautiful? The Position of Independent Scholarly Publishers in an Environment of Rapid Industry Consolidation.” The panel, moderated by Charlie Remy of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, brought together three nonprofit publishers to discuss the challenges and advantages of being a small publisher in an industry where large commercial publishers increasingly dominate. In addition to Cohn, panelists included Richard Gallagher, President and Editor-in-Chief of Annual Reviews, and George Leaman, Director of the Philosophy Documentation Center.

Remy, who is an electronic resources and serials librarian, introduced the discussion by referencing an article that found that the five largest scientific publishers now account for more than 50% of scholarly work published. He asked how smaller publishers have continued to thrive in this time of consolidation.

Cohn stressed that independent publishers succeed when they focus on their strengths. Duke University Press focuses its acquisitions efforts on books and journals that are a good fit with our list rather than responding to more general journal publishing RFPs that will go to the highest bidder. As a result, we have been able to bring on journals that fit well into existing marketing, editorial, production workflows and focus our efforts to bring the content to the most appropriate audience. We are also fortunate to own many of the journals on our list, which makes them less susceptible to poaching from commercial publishers. Diversification of revenue has also positioned DUP well for the future: the Press’s decision to make affordable paperback versions of our books available for individual purchase makes our book publishing program less reliant on tight library budgets. DUP also stays competitive through active experimentation—the Press has explored various Open Access models, is currently researching new access options for individuals, and is working on a major project to unify the user experience of its web resources.

With mostly librarians in the panel’s audience, the publishers took the opportunity to stress that nonprofits and libraries share a mission to create a sustainable ecosystem for scholarship, and to urge librarians not to approach negotiations with small publishers as if they were in the same category as the major commercial publishers. Gallagher pointed out that price negotiations that focus on a percentage increase rather than a dollar amount are disadvantageous for nonprofit publishers, for whom the percentage increase may only amount to a few dollars.

Support from librarians remains crucial to many small publishers, and we were glad for the opportunity to share information and engage in conversation with the library community.

Translating Transgender

The most recent issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, “Translating Transgender,” edited by David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta, calls for a multilingual and translational critique of discourses of transgender studies. Few primary and secondary texts about transgender lives and ideas have been translated from language to language in any formal way over the centuries. Meanwhile, transgender, gender variant, and gender non-confirming people have often been exiles, translators, language mediators, and multilinguals in greater numbers and intensities historically than their cisgender counterparts have. This kind of positionality among languages has become a generative, yet often precarious aspect of trans* embodiment. Nonetheless, the discourses of transgender studies continue to be more Anglophone, more monolingual, and less translated than they historically ought to be, given how the subjects that produced those discourses have often been prototypes of transnational and translingual border-crossing.

Susan Stryker and Paisley Currah, editors of TSQ, state in their General Editor’s Introduction: “It feels vital at this early phase of its institutionalization to facilitate transgender studies’ becoming as multilingual, multidirectional, linguistically centrifugal, and untranslatable as methodologically possible… We see this issue of TSQ as a many-voiced wager on what promises to be a rich, ongoing conversation in years to come, and we look forward in anticipation to whatever future contributions this journal can make to that dialogue.”

From the introduction by special issue editors David Gramling and Aniruddha Dutta:

As editors, it brings us more than a little delight that the articles we present here far outshine—in their political imagination, analytical precision, and methodological ambition—the hopes expressed in the original call for papers. The contributors include literary translators (Nathanaël, Rose, Baer, Larkosh), anthropologists (Jarrín, Pons Rabasa), a musicologist (Roy), a political scientist (Josephson), a classicist (Gabriel), a modern linguist (Leino), a film scholar (Leung), literary comparatists (Concilio, Heinrich, Larkosh), a sociologist (Einarsdóttir), poets and fiction writers (Nathanaël, Dowd), a religious studies scholar (Strassfeld), and translation studies specialists (Baer, Almarri). These critics and writers draw on the demands of their particular research contexts to nourish a sensibility around translation that is vernacular, emergent, and problem oriented, rather than prescriptive and monodisciplinary. They have thus offered an unwieldy, asymmetrical, and mutually interrogative constellation of approaches, such that one contribution’s core categories of analysis find profound and contradictory echoes in the next. To take just one instance, while Unni Leino, writing from the Scandinavian context, contends that the ways the Finnish language divides the conceptual domains of sex, sexuality, and gender “make a difference in fighting the sexualization of trans people,” Alvaro Jarrín’s critical analysis of travesti access to public health care in Brazil is in contrast primarily oriented around fighting precisely the nonmedicalization of travestis in that context. Divergent linguistic orders that constrain local and transregional modes of “thinking for speaking” (Slobin 1996) thus play a complex structuring role in the putatively extralinguistic social and symbolic positions available to speakers. These two juxtaposed analyses—Leino and Jarrín—clarify why and how (trans) gender discourses mean in structurally distinct ways in one linguaculture versus another, thus placing the broader justice claims pertinent to each in critical relief.

Read the full introduction, made freely available.