This morning I read this CFP on teaching with computers and thought, “huh, that’s cool. I don’t really have anything to submit, but I’m curious about it.” So I clicked to read more from the journal itself, and saw a link for graduate students who want to submit. From that page: “You are welcome to submit a class paper and/or thesis/dissertation abridgement”
1 as long as it is co-authored by your professor
2 this journal believes that student’s professor ought to get credit
(They make more caveats as well.) This is an interesting perspective that I haven’t seen in other policies before. I wonder what others think of this policy? Benefits I see right away: it prevents submissions by graduate students who haven’t taken scholarly conversation into account well enough, or who are making claims that are way outside the accepted boundaries of that conversation; it acknowledges the ways in which feedback from readers is often like co-authorship and that single-authored texts are actually collaborative. Drawbacks: it can ignore a situational setting where the graduate student wrote an excellent paper and didn’t get any feedback from her professor; related to my second benefit above, it seems to say that only graduate student work is written in collaboration with others and that everyone else is okay at continuing the single-authorship “myth” (for lack of a better word). That’s just off the top of my head. Others’ thoughts?
I’m wondering if the folks who wrote the CFP are from a field where graduate students don’t typically write papers that aren’t explicitly about their advisor’s research area or in a field where people typically co-author papers. Most of the social science and hard science grads I know don’t write papers that aren’t linked up with an ongoing research project in their department — or they have to do some wriggling to get IRB approval before writing a paper, which can be hard to do for a semester-long project. A lot of the media effects folks write as teams, too.
I like your reasons for this better, but could it just be from where they hail driving these caveats?
I think you’re probably right, Hillary, that there’s probably something about the authorship practices of the disciplines privileged in the journal, or that the editors come from.
good stuff, hilts. yes, this is further evidence of the colonization of the humanities by the social and harder sciences. imho.