*Here’s the notes from our MLA roundtable on ethical review practices in Seattle, 2020. 

• Jill Ehnenn speaks about how regional universities can actually accommodate a wider range of research than R1 institutions, and assures us that the structure of peer review is already transferable to other work, like DH work. EHnenn MLA paper

 

1.Here’s our initial ideas (full notes from our first meeting here):

Reader’s reports: Read the article twice, allowing time between the readings. State the argument first. Suggest ways the writer can make it better, especially by articulating the stakes and using terminology for concepts (‘my x’). Don’t guess at writer’s status.

Citations: Try to cite junior people, people of color, women, and explain that explicitly (but also be careful not to commandeer them or overshadow them).

Book reviews: Ask ‘what is this book trying to do, how well does it do it, and to whom is it useful?’

Recommendations: Produce differentiated letters for people from the same institution.

Basic principle: Be intellectually and humanely generous, because you can’t do anything about resource scarcity and this is the least you can do.

 

2. Here’s the discussion that got us going (for the full initial handout with lots of crowd-sourced ideas, see here)

• From Grace Lavery’s original FB thread:

“I try to conceptualize generosity as pragmatically as I can: I try to cite as fairly as possible scholars with whom I disagree (I *prize* earnest disagreement); I avoid predatory reading, and discourage it in my students; and I take any opportunity to promote the shit out of junior people, and colleagues from groups underrepresented in the academy at large. But I don’t think these are perfect and I’d like to cultivate a fuller sense of generosity.”

• From Talia Schaffer’s response to Grace’s thread:

“I’m trying to map how we can use ethics of care for academic work, which means seeing reader’s reports and reviews and grading as opportunities to care for the person on the other end of the document. That doesn’t mean being ‘nice,’ by the way. As we all know, often the best care is a helpful critique (in fact my project is called Critical Care in order to highlight that). But you can make a critique using the protocols ethics of care teaches, like motivational displacement, reciprocity, and acknowledgment, so that the critique gets issued and hopefully accepted as an act of care rather than a self-aggrandizing assertion of your superior intellectual prowess. Ie the point is not to outdo the author but rather to help the author. It is jaw-dropping that we do not teach this. It’s not just a matter of personal generosity but also of professional efficacy; nasty critiques are not heard, except as pain, so if you want to have a viable academic system you have to learn to do it as care.”

• From Melissa Valiska Gregory’s VLC “Provocations” response:

“Let’s take this fissure in our community as an oportunity to ask how we might more consciously embody qualities like fairness, generosity, and compassion in both our work and our professional interactions. What forms of professional networking might we develop? What genres might we employ? What rhetorical tactics might we wield? What professional strategies best support intellectual exchange that is rigorous as well as humane? Because as Humanities scholars, we owe ourselves our best selves.”