I’m excited to be co-organising a session at the 2019 TAG Conference at UCL with Zena Kamash (Monday 16 – Wednesday 18 December 2019). The full session line up will be announced soon with plenty of exciting speakers, but here’s the session abstract:
Publishers and editors together form one of the most powerful gate-keeping groups in archaeology and academia more broadly. In this session, we invite authors, editors and publishers to discuss the power imbalances in publishing practices, both in the current landscape of neo-liberal universities and throughout the professionalization of archaeology during the twentieth century, and to explore what measures can be employed to bring about more publishing parity. Potential topics for discussion include:
Diversity
- How can we ensure that under-represented groups have equal access to publishing?
- What data exist to explore issues of diversity amongst e.g. authors, editorial boards, reviewers, commissioning editors etc?
- What are the relationships between moves to ‘decolonise’ curricula and publishing?
- Are there models and approaches in different disciplines from which archaeology might learn?
Open Access (including, but not exclusively, Plan S)
- What might an Open Access future look like for archaeology?
- Would an Open Access future entrench current power imbalances or bring about more equality?
- Are there different sets of issues for e.g. journal and book publishing? To what extent might this be driven by current or future REF plans?
Data sharing
- Who has financial access to digital repositories such as the Archaeology Data Service?
- How do issues of career precarity link to data sharing?
- In what ways and to what extent are senior gate-keepers in journals playing a role in improving data sharing?
Language
- There are significant access problems around language – are there potential tech solutions to these issues?
Canon vs textbooks vs public-facing (trade) books
- Who gets to write the key parts of the canon?
- Are textbooks and public-facing (trade) books of more importance for wider communication of archaeology? But under-respected within academia?
- What are the relationships between publication venue, publication format, accessibility and curriculum development? What are the power networks controlling inclusion or exclusion from reading lists?
Organiser details:
- Zena Kamash – Royal Holloway University of London
- Lisa Lodwick – All Souls College, University of Oxford
Lisa Lodwick 