Andrea
R. Jain
Editor,
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
Since
March 11, 2020, the day the World Health Organization announced that the spread
of the COVID-19 virus was officially a pandemic, I have been worried in my role
as the editor of the JAAR. Unsettled as I felt things recede into an unknown
future, I have been beset with questions: Would there be delays in production? Would fewer people have time
to review submissions and write book reviews? Would the number of manuscript
submissions drop? Would fewer women submit manuscripts?
Within
just a few weeks, some of those fears came to life.
First,
the pandemic significantly impacted the JAAR’s publisher, Oxford University Press. On March
24, the government of India ordered a nationwide lockdown to prevent the spread
of COVID-19. OUP production takes place in India. Our OUP team has done
everything they can to minimize disruptions in production and distribution.
Nevertheless there have already been small challenges in maintaining the usual speed
at which we get through the production process and see articles and book
reviews published online and in the supply of print copies to international
members (OUP had to adjust the print and distribution strategy for the JAAR
in the short term, shifting to a model in which they continue to print copies
but only mail them to domestic AAR members and personal subscribers).
Second,
and more alarming, submissions by women dropped, although the number of submissions
to the JAAR remained steady. I am not exaggerating when I say that almost
all of the article submissions I have received in the time of the pandemic have
come from men. A recent article in Inside Higher Ed
notes that other journal editors are seeing similar trends. Another New
York Times article confirmed what many of
us suspected: pandemic-era domestic labor is not being divided equitably. The
pandemic has not thwarted our heteropatriarchal culture and its assumptions
that the majority of emotional and family labor should fall in the laps of
women. And now that daycares and schools have shut down and our students are emotionally
overwhelmed and in some cases financially burdened, we are feeling the ways the
crisis impacts many of our women colleagues to a greater degree.
Before
the pandemic, there was already inadequate attention to and questioning of the
dominance and normativity of not just gender but also racial and class
privilege in the cultural construction of religious studies. For that reason,
when I stepped into the role of editor and shared my vision for the JAAR, I called for more scholarship on
disciplinary reflexivity. The AAR president José
Ignacio Cabezón articulated a similar request in his 2020 theme for the AAR, “The AAR
as a Scholarly Guild.” In his call, Prof. Cabezón asked for more attention
to matters of the guild, including “the demographics of our membership” and the question of “what challenges have traditionally marginalized groups
faced (and face) in the Academy?”
In the 111 years since the 1909 founding of our
guild as the National Association of Biblical Instructors, the precursor of the AAR
(1963), and the 1937 establishment of the Journal of Bible and Religion, the
precursor of the JAAR (1966), we have made progress, though not
always steady or linear, toward diversifying the religious traditions and
cultures we study, the theories and methods we use and develop, and the
publication media through which we disseminate our scholarship. Diversity in our demographics and also and more
importantly in our leadership positions and in publications has been critical
to and necessary for anything that could be framed as “progress.”
We
now find ourselves facing a new global crisis. As we meander our way through it,
we risk, perhaps more than ever, reproducing privilege in the breadth of our scholarly
pursuits and coverage, in our theories and methods, and in our publishing practices.
I
write today to address that risk and to plead with you, with every member of
the AAR, to help me in my role as the editor of our discipline’s journal of
record to think about how we can continue to improve equity in our publishing
practices, and in so doing extend their scope and quality, making decisions
that will, if slowly and even at first imperceptibly, shift the burden of
inequity from traditionally marginalized groups to those in positions of
privilege and power. Let us work together intentionally to prevent what could
otherwise be an irreparable disciplinary regression. The inequities that
this pandemic is intensifying could lead to a moral crisis for our discipline. The
choices we make will necessarily be political and historical, but they need not
be at the dictate of prescribed social roles or economics.
Many of our colleagues are facing a choice forced upon them:
meet the needs of my family and students or the mandates of my profession and
the demand to “publish or perish.” I myself live within this dilemma as a
single, working mom with two sons who are just four and six years old. They are
here with me right now; as I write, they run wild. My family is nevertheless
doing well through this time. We have a small, reliable quarantine circle, so I
am not on my own. Yet the work continues to pile up at its usual pace even as I
have far less time (and focus) to complete it. I cut corners and fall behind. I
remind myself, like I tell my friends and colleagues, that we are worth more
than our productivity or basic utility. That is easy for me to say from my
privileged position, tenured and the editor of the JAAR.
The duty of those of us in positions of
privilege and power is to not simply engage in virtue signaling but to come up
with concrete strategies to pursue greater equity in our publishing practices
during this pandemic. I ask you all to reach
out to me directly (jaareditor@aarweb.org)
and help me by sharing your ideas for how we can press
harder than ever during this pandemic against the insidious actions of those
who care more about the virtues of competition and the capital of productivity than
the pursuit of equity in our guild and the quality of our scholarship.