I Think I Broke the Journal: A Fantasy Financial Fiction
The words “I was only trying to help” must have preceded many a calamity…Oppenheimer…Truss…and while I’d strenuously distance myself from both the ruinous evil overlord of brutish power and Oppenheimer, I fear my recent experiences with the journal may yet be roughly in the same ballpark.
I applied to join the editorial team of the journal because I genuinely love all that stuff. I love reading what people think, what they think that they think, what they want others to think that they think that they think. I love finding typos. I love scrabbling through the lush undergrowth of someone’s emerging insight and clearing the weeds. I enjoyed what I already knew to be a delusion that working on the journal would be sufficient reward to counterbalance its £500 per year honorarium.
Turns out it wasn’t. Weeks in and already I found myself staring down a growing pile of untended editorial laundry. This was going to take months to clear, not to mention the trickle of new submissions each needing their own individual washing cycles.
Here was the washing pile:
Contrary to the information on the website, masthead and host page, there was no Advisory Board. It was a panel of - literally - zombies, one person long deceased only recently having been removed. All others put on notice, rightly, that the composition of the board was to be reviewed and renewed under new equitable principles. Apparently Covid had scuppered this process, presumably because renewing a journal Advisory Board is not an administrative task that can be done remotely while absolutely all other outdoor professional activity is on hold.
A long promised consultation of its professional body’s members was hanging, Damoclesque, over the journal’s head, while circular rumblings looped like acid reflux concerning a mooted move to online-only, and dropping the corporate publishing contract with its host, all creating a sort of conditional and paralysing existential crisis.
Meanwhile no member of the editorial team had a contract for their role, or a sense of who they were accountable to. No channels of accountability or communication were in place, no exit routes in case of emergency, and no clear complaints procedure for internal or external matters. No sense, therefore, of how deeply unequitable this was.
There was no sense that the journal had an obligation - not to mention a joyful enthusiasm - for hosting and starting conversations about the meaning-making it relied upon for content farther down the line. Only a latent sense of being judge and custodian. When it could have been champion and cheerleader.
The information in the journal about the journal was factually and ethically out of date. Sections of its website were duplicated. The Editors list was two generations old. Peer review information was wrong and the peer review internal structure relied on the personal goodwill of existing contacts. There was no anti-oppressive stance, no vision statement, no published stand on equalities and decolonial positioning, no editorial point of view or published rationale regarding relevant scholarship, and no guidance on inclusive language. More than a whiff of fiefdom.
The internal dynamic of the team relied on a saviour & saint role play, in which any action was - being essentially voluntary - greeted as some sort of star act, especially when done by men. We all know how these situations play out. Ignorance is feigned, silences boom, grudges form, and when the Saviour or Saint roles can not be played, the only alternatives are Villain or Victim.
So I resigned, effective after the delivery of our next issue, once all my genuinely happy editorial work was signed off.
This is what I wrote in my resignation email to the big boss:
“After giving myself a probationary period of three months, I have had to accept that I am not able to do the required amount of work, at the level of expertise required, essentially for free. For background, as you know, the compensation for working as a journal editor is £250 each per issue. I knew this on accepting the role. After working for a minimum equivalent of one day per week since March, at a level of at least a Grade 8 academic, I don't feel able to equate the compensation with the labour, responsibility and expertise. On one level, that's the bottom line.
On another level, which I also shared with the team, this situation brings up a wider concern for me around the way we all in fact support an academic system which is still based on an unrealistic economic relationship. It is still assumed perhaps that a journal editor is fitting in the role's - often daily - thinking, writing, managing, networking, and administration within a stable, salaried, congruent job such as a course faculty member or at least within a steady clinical role. For half of the current team this is not the case. For myself, I am fully freelance, precarious, unsalaried and unpensioned. So an equivalent loss of at the very least £7k in potential earnings is, I have had to admit, unsustainable for me in my own personal situation. Many artists and scholars these days are used to being the only person around the table without a salary, and we try our best not to support those structures.
The systemic consequences of this kind of economic relationship are of course that journal work imitates the conditions of most arts, culture and care contexts in maintaining a dynamic of saviours and martyrs. In the absence of equitable financial compensation, the currency and indeed the risk, of course become reputational. This dynamic makes it very easy for those in power to silence, ignore or undermine the reasonable insights and activities of those who are not. One way for me to have acted in this situation would have been to remain, and continue trying to make changes from within. This would inevitably manifest the alter side of the saviour and martyr organisational dynamic, which is villain and victim. We see this all across our profession, and I am not willing to support it. To be further self-reflective, if I am saying this as a middle aged, middle class, white man, you can only imagine how prohibitive and inaccessible a structure such as this would seem or feel to someone excluded from my positions of relative power.
I'd like to stress that my choices here are based on a reading of my own economic situation, and of the socio-political conditions I wish to create in the world. On a personal level and indeed as colleagues in an important scholarly endeavour, I enjoy being with the team members and I appreciate them. There are other matters that we have all as a team raised with you recently, which relate to structural aspects. Neither my team members nor these structural matters are reasons for my decision to step away.
Finally, and for context, I have perhaps spent three hours thinking about and writing this email, not counting the emotional labour of the past month. In any other professional situation I would be writing you an invoice for at least £150. I truly don't mean this in spite. I would just like to illuminate the economic and political realities which are alleviated in many situations by feelings of saviourism or martyrdom. As I wish not to subscribe to that dynamic, I will just - warmly - say you can have this one for free.”
I thought that would be it. A teachable moment for us all.
As with many situations that white liberal culture maintains, it turned out that we had of course been coasting on a wave of wait-and-see, clutching our veils of ignorance close to our throats until something forced our hands. Shortly after I shared my decision, the organisation funding the journal leapt into decision mode. I guess I was the crisis they didn’t know they had been waiting for.
White liberal power loves a shadow. It’s quite easy actually for white liberals to eye roll, sigh and tolerate a person pointing out the faults in the system. We love it actually, because we can agree in bad faith, “put something in place”, and then hide the fault in the shade of bureaucracy and rhetoric. What white liberal power can’t tolerate is an equal and opposite light. So when someone rejecting white liberal power says that their power, position and reputation are no compensation for financial survival and equitable relationships, they return one light with another. No shadow ensues, nothing can be hidden, and the Emperor’s nudity is exposed.
There will be all kinds of actions now: pausings, rethinkings, reckonings. Opportunities seized for recalibrating on new principles. We wait and see whether those are going to be equitable ones, or economic. They have asked me to stick around as a critical friend.
So far, it is hard not to infer that any future actions will be based on the usual considerations of money and power. Likely, the journal will be reviewed and evaluated within an essentially corporate framework of PR & Comms, which means its role and outputs will be stacked alongside the discourse and values of social media, not scholarship or even professional development. Its value to the organisation will be quantified in a value-for-money calculation pitting running costs against, well, what exactly?
It’s clear that no premium is placed on the creation of new knowledge.
Why is that?
Maybe the organisation doesn’t consider the creation of new knowledge to be part of its role. It used to, for sure.
So why not now?
Maybe the profession doesn’t think there is new knowledge out there.
And why is that?
Maybe part of our grand colonial, patriarchal, northern hemispheric, white delusion is that over the last fifty years we have done what we always do to territory: we saw a field, saw it (wrongly) unpopulated, saw it fertile for all kinds of riches: money, power, status, self-worth, benificence, and then worked it dry. Only this time, the territory was the already fully composted and microbially active soil of artistic healing work with people. Just a thought.
I don’t know whether in this situation I help by staying, or by going. While I’m undoubtedly a repository of white power, saviourism and privilege, I also know that I have some enzyme that seems to neutralise professional power and reputation whenever it comes near me. I am the Domestos of my own dominion.
As it turned out, I didn’t realise the impact one can have just by doing a Bartleby and saying, “I would prefer not to”. The question is, if this is the situation that our scholarship is in, what then would I prefer to do?