Tag: academy and publishing

Kafka on patience (from Mark Pianalto’s @mpianalto lovely book On Patience)

Lisa Schweitzer

I have ben reading Matthew Pianalto’s excellent On Patience the past week. It’s philosophical exploration of the virtue, and I’m finding the book both intellectually worthwhile and emotionally nurturing.  In the first chapter, he has an extended quote from Kafka’s biography that I found particularly inspiring: 

[p]atience is the master key to very situation.  One must have sympathy for everything, surrender to everything,  but at the same time remain patient and forebearing…There is no such thing as bending or breaking.  It is a question only of overcoming, which begins with overcoming oneself. That cannot be avoided.  To abandon that path is always to break into pieces. One must patiently accept everything and let it grow within oneself.  The barriers of the fear-ridden I can only be broken by love.  One must, in the dead leaves that rustle around one, always see the the young fresh green spring, compose oneself in patience, and wait.  Patience is the only true foundation on which to make one’s dreams come true. 

 There is an activeness to Kafka’s patience, and that’s one key to Pianalto’s argument.  Patience does not mean acceptance or inaction, particularly vis-a-vis injustice.  It is something else entirely, something active, that holds you together while the rest of the world is what it is and while change creeps along. 

Very cool things I am getting to do

Lisa Schweitzer

1) I am going to be on a panel with Ian Parry in February. Total fangirl moment!!! I wonder if he’d sign my copy of the Washington, DC congestion charging study for me?

2) The book reviews editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association has asked me to contribute one of a group of reviews of the 10th anniversary edition of Suburban Nation. I’m honored, even if I am not entirely sure how to review such a flawed but important book.


On the reading of “old” scholarly contributions

Lisa Schweitzer

One of my wonderful planning theory students was clearly worried about my using a chapter from Manuel Castells’ The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements. In particular, I use the chapter on the formation of San Francisco’s Castro district as a means to discuss cosmopolitanism and the tensions that arise between integration and invisibility and using urban space and enclaves as a means to create power and visibility in urban politics.

“Have you thought about using something more….recent…about San Francisco?” he asked.

In a word, no. I haven’t.

It’s my opinion that the City and the Grassroots is, by far, Castells’ best book, and given that he has written wonderful book after wonderful book, that’s saying a lot. In fact, I think that The City and the Grassroots is one of the best books written about the city, ever, period.

But doesn’t the fact that it was published in 1983 make it dated?

How, really? Did the Castro re-form itself? Certainly, the place has changed, but the fact that the city didn’t stay frozen in time does not invalidate or erase Castell’s point: that the formation of a gay space was intentional, political and effective, at least for awhile.

Where do students get this idea that you can’t read anything over five years old? Are there teachers and parents out there telling them that a book written about Plato in 1960 can’t be any good? No, I don’t necessarily want you reading atmospheric science from 1983. But should you really not read Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan simply because it’s old and doesn’t have some of the newer Must Reads on there? Honestly, if you follow the no-older-than-five-year rule, you won’t read most of the contributions that win Nobel Prizes for their recipients, and I’m here to tell you, you really need to read William Vickrey.


Planning Journals, Rankings, and Internationality

Lisa Schweitzer

My former advisor, Randy Crane, opened up a can of worms when he sent out what he must have thought was an innocent note to the planning academics’ listserv on ideas for what we’d like to see happen with the Journal of the American Planning Association. It evolved from a request to be open to international scholarship into a nice long discussion of US hegemony in publishing and an old-school discussion on what constitutes rigor and what doesn’t. As usual, quite a bit of defensiveness and a lot of victimy language on both sides of the issue.

I responded this morning to the following effect:

What would a low publication count in JAPA for international scholars really mean?

It could mean A) US scholars are biased if we are getting submissions from scholars outside the US and turning them down disproportionately to domestic submissions (assuming that international scholars are sending their best stuff, which they may not be if they don’t think JAPA is an important outlet for them). The lower publication rate could also indicate that B) international scholars have their own supply of publication outlets that matter to them more than US outlets (At least four people, both international and domestic, have said as much in this discussion).

A is evidence of hegemony and bias and B is the opposite of hegemony and in that case, US scholar bias, however odious, would not have the power to constrain the publication trajectories of international scholars.

One question I had was whether JAPA was indeed publishing fewer papers by international authors than anybody else.

This information proved hard to find, but there is a metric out there on journals that contain international collaborations. Not the same thing, I admit, but it strikes me as a related, if admittedly imperfect, proxy for what we are discussing; whether US journals are insular, and JAPA in particular.

As usual, planners get lumped in with geography and development, so we get apples and oranges. You can also look at the urban studies journals separately. Undoubtedly there is a western bias to what journals are included here.

The international collaboration, percentages, since 2004 generally:

JAPA–has gone up since 2006: ranges from 6 percent to 21.6 percent
Canadian Journal of Urban Research ranges from 4 to 9 percent
Acta Journal Sinica (Chinese journal) ranges from 6 to 18 percent
Forum for Development Studies (Norway) ranges from 8 to 20 percent
Chinese Geographical Science ranges from 8 to 10 percent–higher in earlier years
Geografiska Annaler, Series B, ranges from 8 to 20 percent
Town Planning Review ranges from 20 to 40 percent; it also has gone up over time
Environment and Planning A runs from 10 to 20 percent
Geography Research Forum (Israel) 13 to 25 percent
Journal of the Indian Society of Remote Sensing (couldn’t find anything listed that directly related to planning) ranges from 3 to 8 percent

So JAPA runs with everybody else in terms of international collaborations: some of the German geography journals have lots of international collaborations. Town Planning Review, too.

Looking at different English-language journals (biased towards what I read):

American Economic Review (17 to 30 percent)
Econometrica ( 30 to 45 percent) UK journal
Science (pretty consistently 20 percent)
Epidemiology (25 to 37 percent)

A better indicator would be whether these collaborations include authors from places outside the traditional seats of academic power, but I don’t have that. Also keep in mind that single-authored papers are not counted here, so that single-authored manuscripts don’t get counted one way or another, no matter where from. I don’t know why Scopus is more interested in the collaboration issue than these others.

But in looking at the numbers (not just the ones I’ve listed here), in disciplines where there is an established hierarchy of journals (like economics), the percentages are far higher than in any of the geography and planning journals I can find.

What does that suggest to you? That US economists are less insular/biased than US planners? That because it’s a bigger field, it has more international collaborations published even though co-authoring is a arguably a bigger no-no in economics than it is planning?

Or have economists, by structuring the field around journal hierarchies more rigidly, created an environment where international scholars HAVE to send their stuff to particular journals (most of them US and UK journals) to be reviewed favorably at promotion time? If so, is this concentration in a few journals better for the global cross-pollination of ideas than a multiplicity of outlets, where JAPA matters a lot to Americans but other journals matter more to international scholars and not everybody is reading and writing for the same journals?

Or is it that if you want to get published in the most competitive economics journals, you need to have access to to new and different data sources made possible only through international collaborations?

Is increasing the percentage a sign of increased inclusion or a sign of increased control?

I can’t figure it out.