And this is what makes it so tragic, as I noted in another post. Feminists and left activist scholars have been chipping away at this. We've been working to show that we CAN hire people with no PhD, like Churchill, and they can be just as wonderful as any wanker with a PhD. We can hire people on the basis of publications that popularizations of scholarly work and they can be just as good and important to the field as any wanker with a PhD.
He flushed that down the toilet and shat all over the people who made it possible for that university to hire him in the first damn place.
so, if things were changing so that publications in non-refereed journals count for something, I'm pretty sure they won't be for another decade or more until this blows over.
so, to answer your q, it may be diff for natural science, so I don't know. This is how it works in my discipline and likely Churchill's area studies. But in my area, in general, yes. There are always exceptions of course and my guess is that almost anyone who popularizes is tenured and probably Full Professor'd. At that point, they don't _have_ to play the game and can pursue their desire to make an impact on a broader audience. What was Zinn's career trajectory in this regard?
Let me make clear: this has little do with clarity and clear writing. By simplification, I mean what they refer to at the AHA web site.
let me tell a story. When I first met R, he was annoyed as all get out at all the qualifications and ifs ands buts or maybes I'd make about what I was saying when I explained something to him about my work or the work of others.
AT the time, I was also transitioning from academia to writing for an ordinary audience and I was seeing how my academic writing was filled with too many ifs, ands, buts, and qualifications.
Those are the things you have to do when you write a paper for academia. Why? Because..
Well, read the statement on the code of conduct from the American Historical Association. They warn historians who are writing and speaking to public audiences that they must be careful not to present their interpretation as THE only one. They must be careful to always present their work as science, with plenty of "more research is needed" and "we can't make absolute claims". In other words, the basic approach in academia is to always be cautious or to at least balance your bold claims with a humility about the fact that your work may have proved wrong. After all, you're supposed to put it out there to find the weak spots in it! It's supposed to be found wanting by someone and so you'd better not adopt an air of utter certainty because you would then be acting as if the social production of knowledge and the contributions of your peer matter not a whit to you.
but this is NOT what anyone at a trade press wants. They want a lot more certitude and they sure as shit don't want literature reviews where the author does what a scholar does and places his or her work in the broader body of knowledge through which one is speaking. They don't want to read anything that says, "My thoughts are these and here's why. Please do understand that Professor Paddy Wanker Soandso said X, Y, Z in response to this thesis. His objections are worthy insofar as X corrects the record on D. Y and Z, however, turn out to be problematic because Scholar Flufferhumper says this about such a claim. Given how I've systematically showed where my works fits in within this body of work and why it's unique, let me move on to the Main Event."
So, you must speak with a certitude that is not called for in scholarly work and you speak as if you are the only one saying it, and as if you're working out of a vacuum. Knowledge production in the academy is supposed to be honored as a supremely social product. Knowledge in popular books is presented as if it was this one great dude thinking it all up and presenting it if no one else is working on similar things. As if, poof! one day you got a brilliant idea and wowie kazowie look at me ma! no hands and no training wheels and no one else helping me! wheeeee.
And, the fact of the matter is, there's a hierarchy of Important Places to Publish.
I was given the smackdown by Jonathan Sterne, Annaleee Newitz, and other years ago at the Bad Subjects list. At the conference I mentioned, I'd presented one of my papers on Habermas. I was approached by a small university press and asked to publish my work on Habermas. It was something they published and, because I was grounding Habermas's work in an analysis of my empirical work on new social movements, community-level unemployment and structural economic change, they thought that was the awesomest b/c there is very little work that shows how to apply this theory or which has tried to elaborate the theory and test it through empirical work.
The Bad Subjects gang, all from much more prestigious universities, gave me the smackdown. Awwwww. What a crappy little press that is! Don't do it! Forget it. Try for something else. It's not that important a press. You should publish at the big places like us. Thus, they were telling me not to do it because it wasn't a big press and I probably shouldn't be publishing a book before the dissertation was actually done. It would make me look bad b/c I should 1. hold out for a better press and 2. I should only publish a book if it was for something they considered worthy.
so, publications have ranking. The aim is to publish in peer-reviewed journals. Yoshie can edit all she wants, but it's not going to change the assessment of the wider academic system about someone who lists on their CV a publication at MRZine, ZNet or Counterpunch. They aren't peer-reviewed.
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