The AAA Commission on the Engagement of Anthropology with the US Security and Intelligence Communities (CEAUSSIC) has published its final report on the Human Terrain System (HTS).  Here’s an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

When ethnographic investigation is determined by military missions, not subject to external review, where data collection occurs in the context of war, integrated into the goals of counterinsurgency, and in a potentially coercive environment – all characteristic factors of the HTS concept and its application – it can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.

In summary, while we stress that constructive engagement between anthropology and the military is possible, CEAUSSIC suggests that the AAA emphasize the incompatibility of HTS with disciplinary ethics and practice for job seekers and that it further recognize the problem of allowing HTS to define the meaning of “anthropology” within DoD.

The entire report can be read online at http://www.aaanet.org/cmtes/commissions/CEAUSSIC/upload/CEAUSSIC_HTS_Final_Report.pdf.

–L.L. Wynn

My little brother just started medical school (golly!  I still remember changing his diaper!) and he has been telling me about some of his most exciting lectures.  I asked him to tell me more about what he thought made for a great lecture, because I’m always trying to figure out how to improve my own lecturing skills, and here’s a little anecdote he told me:

[One teacher] gave us a great series of lectures on the pelvis.  He got a round of applause for his demonstration of the female perineum.  He had one student squat down on the ground, representing the bladder.  Another student stood just behind him in a ski-jumper position, representing the uterus with his bent over body body and the ovaries with his backwards-protruding and slightly drooping hands.  The teacher then stood behind both of them and thrust his hands up into the air exclaiming: “I am the rectum!”  I will never forget the relative position of the female pelvic organs.

A couple of things strike me about this.  First of all, it demonstrates the wisdom of some advice I once got from a great teaching mentor, Larry Rosen, which is that you direct your humor against yourself, not students.  This teacher didn’t make a student be the rectum; he took that role on himself.

Second, it’s amazing how memorable you can make something by teaching through embodied experiences.  I try to do this in my own classes by getting the students physically involved in lecture concepts — for a lecture on the placebo effect, for example, I do a blind wine tasting of red and white wines at room temperature to make the point that our sensory experiences are heavily influenced by our expectations.

However, I’m not sure whether the reason this bodily demonstration of the female pelvic organs was so memorable just because it entailed bodily movement or if it’s because it was so unexpected, unusual, and humorous.  I mean, if medical lecturers regularly demonstrated the positions of organs in the body by having students contort themselves, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so memorable.  Maybe it’s the novelty and the humorous unexpectedness of your lecturer shouting “I am the rectum!” that is the real trick to this effective demonstration.

It never occurred to me to use physical demonstrations like this to illustrate physiological processes, but I’m going to have to try this next year in Drugs Across Cultures after the lecture on brain neurology and addiction.  So many students get confused about how neurotransmitters work, and I don’t think it helps much that I find it confusing, too, despite the heroic efforts of our psychologist guest lecturer to explain this with pretty colored diagrams.  Next year I think I’ll get her to direct a bunch of students to play the roles of drug molecules and neurons and neurotransmitters and act it out.  “I am cocaine!”

–L.L. Wynn

Readers familiar with the ongoing discussions on the utilisation of anthropological knowledge and the employment of anthropologists within the Human Terrain System will be familiar with the views of the small band of its most vocal supporters: namely Montgomery McFate, Andrea Jackson and Steve Fondacaro. While these vocal supporters and a number of other program personnel (including, among others, Zenia (Helbig) Tompkins, Marcus Griffin, Brit Damon, and Major Robert Holbert) have expressed their opinions and experiences with the program publicly, the overwhelming tone of analyses of such opinions and  experiences has focused not on their stated experiences but on what their stated experiences belie about the program. Concerns expressed with the HTS largely revolve around the potential of the program to produce effects which are in conflict with anthropological values and ethics.

The views of the anthropologists involved with the HTS have often been censured, derided and ignored on the basis that they are representative of supreme ignorance, immorality and/or naivety. This is likely too simplistic a reading. It is important to acknowledge the diversity of experiences and thoughts of the HTS personnel or else we are subjecting ourselves to a narrow (and potentially flawed) conception of the program and the HTS personnel. In adopting such a narrow conception, we risk distancing ourselves from the actual issues of the program and fighting a war against a phantom of our own creation.

I would thus like to direct your attention to a blog by Ben Wintersteen, a current HTS member. The stated audience of his blog is his friends and family, but as his stated purpose in the program is (at least in part) to critically examine the workings of the HTS from the inside, his blog contains many reflections on his experiences with the program to date (he is currently in week 15 of training). He posts 2 extended blogs per week on his ethical, educational, social, emotional and physical experiences in the program, and often takes the time to compare them to the issues raised against the HTS in the broader disciplinary debate.

Without further ado, here’s the link:

http://www.thoughts.com/blog/browse/keywordSearch/ben%20wintersteen

–Nikki Kuper

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has just announced the winners of the first round of research funded under the Minerva Initiative.  This was a joint process whereby the National Science Foundation (NSF) and DoD determined funding for research on “Social and Behavioral Dimensions of National Security, Conflict and Cooperation” — i.e. social science research deemed of strategic importance to U.S. national security policy.  You can go to the DoD media release for more details, but in case you’re wondering if David Vine’s proposed Minerva research got funded, the answer is no.

There were four topic areas  for the NSF solicitation: authoritarian regimes, the strategic impact of religious and cultural change, terrorist organizations and ideologies, and new dimensions in national security.  17 men were funded, compared to 6 women (1 man and 1 woman were both funded for more than one project).  I did a quick search on the departmental affiliations of each grantee to try to determine disciplinary background, and as far as I can tell, no anthropologists were funded.  The disciplinary breakdown is: 14 political scientists, 6 economists, 3 sociologists, 2 psychologists, 1 linguist, 1 communications studies researcher, and 1 computer scientist were funded.

Of course, what we don’t know is what proposed research projects and disciplines were not funded.

2 upcoming Sydney events of interest to anthropologists:

• Traditional Healing at the 4th Sydney Latin America Film Festival

Monday 7 September 6:00pm @ Dendy Opera Quays

The film “La Curacion / Healing” (Ecuador, Spanish and Quechua with English subtitles, 56 minutes) by Yoni Goldstein will screen at 6pm.  After the film, Kalpana Ram, Head of the Macquarie Department of Anthropology, will facilitate a panel of speakers, including practising shamanic healers.  Speakers will include Chris Kavelin of Macquarie University, Byron Serrano from the Tribal Warrior Association, Beata Alfoldi-Askew from Inner Vision Quest, and Violeta Arraya from the Alazan Horse Centre. Entry is first come first served, no bookings.

• Mining and Sovereignty microcinema

Tuesday 8 September, 6pm @ Dendy Opera Quay

Forum discussion after screening of film When Clouds Clear on resistance to copper mining in northern Ecuador.  The forum has speakers who will connect the struggle to Australian Indigenous politics.

For full program details see www.sydneylatinofilmfestival.org.

I am starting a new study that aims to understand ethnographers’ subjective experience of ethics oversight – their memories of when and how they first became aware of ethics oversight, what they think and feel about it, whether and how they comply with it, and whether they think it makes ethnographic research more ethical or not.

I hope to compare the attitudes of researchers who spent most of their careers not seeking ethics clearance, a younger generation for whom it has always been standard, and those who started their research under one regime and now live under another.

I’m one of those researchers who has lived through two eras: when I first went to conduct my dissertation research, it wasn’t the practice for anthropologists in my department to seek ethics approval from the university’s Institutional Review Board (US equivalent of Australia’s Human Research Ethics Committees). But by the time I came back from the field, graduate students were getting IRB approval before starting research. For a long time, I felt furtive, like I had somehow failed to do something that I was supposed to do, and wondered whether I would ever be accused of unethical research practice (even though I didn’t think I had been unethical in my research). I didn’t understand that it was a changing era.

Now that I have a bit more perspective, I’m interested in knowing more about other researchers’ experiences of this process.  If you are interested in participating in the survey, please go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=N1v1MJvyg3USMopDA0QV3g_3d_3d. The survey will take between 15-30 minutes, depending on how detailed your responses are. All responses will, of course, be anonymous.

PS: I’ve tested that, and it really takes 15 minutes or less if you don’t spend a lot of time on the free answer questions. Which you might do if you have a juicy or provoking story to tell. But it won’t take much of your time. I hate it when people send me surveys that they say will take 5 minutes and they take 45 minutes.

–L.L. Wynn

Below is the content from an academic publishing workshop that I recently ran for Macquarie’s Anthropology Department. I’ve compiled a set of useful, free resources, and some insights coming out of my own efforts to publish, as well as advice from colleagues.  If you find this useful or if you have publishing insights that I haven’t covered here, post a comment!

Like all my teaching materials, it’s licensed for free non-commercial use and adaptation, as long as you (a) attribute your source, and (b) license derivative materials under the same conditions. (c) Creative Commons: attribution non-commercial share alike license

–L.L. Wynn

Publish or perish

There are all kinds of reasons that grad students, and even undergraduates, should be thinking about publishing their original research.

1. Publishing before you start your PhD almost guarantees you a scholarship (in the Macquarie ranking system, a publication automatically bumps you up one level in the 5-point scale).

2. If you are a PhD student and hope to get an academic teaching job, start publishing before you finish your PhD. A few bright stars might get jobs on the basis of their dissertation and strong letters of recommendation, but for the rest of us, publications are what count.  This is especially true in the Australian system, where there isn’t the same tenure system as in North America.  There’s not much a department can do to get rid of a new staff member if they don’t publish, so a department wants to see solid evidence of ability and ambition to publish before they offer you a job. Even in the U.S. system, few departments want to hire a junior candidate who won’t get tenured.  That just makes for awkward moments in the hallway five years later.

When hiring committees are trying to narrow down a large pool into a short list, they’ve got to pick between a lot of bright young graduates with highly rated dissertations, enthusiastic referees, and clever ideas. So what distinguishes candidates?  Often it comes down to bean-counting – grants, awards, publications. Publications really make you stand out, especially if you’re very junior.

Even if you don’t want a PhD or an academic teaching job, publications can help you get a non-academic job too. They are a measure of your ambition, your research success as judged by your peers, and they’re good for your company’s image.

This is an argument that I probably don’t need to make.  Probably every PhD student knows that they need to publish, whether vaguely (early in the PhD) or acutely (when you’re starting to think about going on the job market).  And yet the whole process can seem so daunting.  At least for me it did.  When I graduated with my PhD from Princeton, I really didn’t have a clue how to publish my work.  I had a couple of small articles that an undergraduate adviser, Homa Hoodfar, had helped me get published, but that’s the only way I knew to get published: have some nice grown-up make it happen.  How to get published without the help of Homa?  It was a completely mysterious, opaque process to me.

Then I got a post-doc in a demography department, where all of the PhD students published work with their advisors.  By the time they graduated, they had three or four journal articles.  I couldn’t believe it.  I was totally in awe.  So I went to ask someone in the Anthropology Department how to get published in an anthropology journal.  She didn’t really even know what to say.  She was confused by the question, didn’t seem to understand what I was asking.  I think she couldn’t imagine herself into my cluelessness.

Eventually I figured out how to do what they did.  But I decided that I wasn’t going to let students in my department graduate as clueless as I was.  So here are my tips for publishing, everything from blogs to books.

Publishing for a general audience

This is NOT my area of expertise, so I can’t tell you what I don’t know, but if you’re interested in writing your research for a general (non-academic) audience, check out Marlene Lage’s list of Australian places that sponsor writing competitions or grants for work that is not the traditional scholarly essay: http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/more-resources-for-non-fiction-writing/

Blogs

Blogs are a chance to make a name for yourself online.  But don’t write crazy shit that’s going to live on in cyberspace for years and get you in trouble when you’re applying for jobs.

Blogging is an art form. I admit I still haven’t mastered it, but I know the ideal!  Be witty, concise, and brief. You could start your own, but if you don’t have the stamina to post something every few days, you’ll never get read, so consider trying to get a guest-blogging stint.  Culture Matters welcomes guest bloggers, but don’t come to us if you want to write long boring stuff.  Other places that I know of that welcome proposals from guest bloggers are Material World and Complex Terrain Lab. Take the initiative; write something clever and then send it out to a blog you like and ask if they’d be interested in posting it.

Blogs are great places to test out ideas and get feedback on work in progress, or outline a research project.  But don’t let it take time away from getting peer-reviewed publications because most institutions don’t see blogging as a legitimate scholarly output.  Combine blogging with other print publications and make them work together, rather than compete with each other, e.g. blog a longer version of a book review or a shorter version of a journal article and use it to generate traffic to / interest in your publication – especially if that publication is behind a pay-wall. Beware copyright violation, though.

Book reviews

Here’s your chance to get a free book and a small publication in a good journal. But beware making enemies by writing a nasty critique! Ask yourself: “Would I say this to the person’s face?” Don’t be mean just for the fun of it — it could come back and bite you on the backside. Imagine that after the book review is published, you’ll send it to the author as a courtesy.  And then do that.

In the Australian system, book reviews are formally weighted at 1/10 the value of a peer-reviewed journal article, so do NOT spend too much time writing them.  On the other hand, a mentor of mine once told me that when he is on a hiring committee, the publication he always reads from short-listed candidates are book reviews, because it gives a good sense of not only the candidate’s intellect, but also how collegial that person might be; he doesn’t hire people who write shallow, nasty critiques.

How to: watch H-net and other listservs for books available to review. If you hear a book is coming out that you’d like to review, you can write to the book review editor at a journal, introduce yourself and your expertise, and ask if you can review the book for them. If they haven’t already invited someone else to review it, then they’ll likely take you up on the offer. (Hint: this is less likely to work if it’s a new book by some bigwig.)

Book chapters

Usually invitations to write a book chapter are a result of networking and conference presentations.  Book chapters often not seen to be at the same level of rigorous peer review publications as journal articles, but getting included in a key volume in your field can be a great opportunity to raise your profile and visibility.

How to: Subscribe to relevant H-net lists (http://www.h-net.org/) and other listservs to keep an ear out for appropriate calls for papers.  Attend conferences and watch for calls to join relevant conference panels – these sometimes turn into edited volumes, and at the very least they are opportunities to network and gain name recognition for work in your field, not to mention opportunities to find out what exciting research others are doing.

Academic journal articles

If you knew how many academic specialist journals existed in the world (Journal of Geoethical Nanotechnology, anyone?), you might believe me when I say that anybody can get published, with enough determination and effort.

Here are some lists of journals to peruse: ‘

• Directory of Open Access Journals: – includes 55 open access anthropology journals
• Springer journals (2000+)
• Elsevier journals (2000+)
• Taylor and Francis / Routledge journals (a lot, including 20 anthropology journals)
• Wiley Blackwell (1900+): includes Anthrosource (AAA) journals

How to pick a journal

There are two ways to find a journal to submit to (that is, if you don’t already have one in mind):

• Peruse lists of journals by subject (see above for lists), and (much better),
• See where people you are citing have published.

Once you’ve identified a potential journal to submit to, do some research.  Go and read at least 3 examples of articles they publish if you’re not familiar with the journal, to make sure it’s right for your approach (ask a colleague / mentor if you’re not sure).  Also, find out who publishes it, because the title alone can’t always tell you the discipline or political orientation of the journal.

Most of you know how to find journal impact factors, and if you don’t, ask your librarian.  That’s one way to decide who to approach.  Another is journal rankings.  The European Science Foundation ranks journals, and Australia is jumping on that bandwagon (though for social science journals, it’s still a work in progress.  Click on the above links for their journal ranking lists.

Take these rankings with a grain of salt. Some classic, important articles have been published in low-ranked journals — think Laura Nader’s “Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Control of Women,” published in Cultural Dynamics, which is officially ranked as a “B” journal in the European ERIH list, and the Australian ERA list only ranks PoLAR as a C, but it’s an important place to publish legal and political anthropology.

How to submit to a journal

Find their submission guidelines – usually online, but may also be found in the print version of journal. Then follow those guidelines scrupulously, especially formatting and bibliographical style. And PROOFREAD!! Nothing makes an editor put your submission in the recycle folder faster than a submission full of misspelled words and grammatical errors.

Make sure the abstract and introduction are incredibly clear and compelling so that they keep reading, and write a short cover letter that SELLS your article: in it, you should make clear what is new and significant about your approach.

Dealing with rejection

Don’t let it get you down. People will always have different opinions about your approach. One person might love it and another might hate it.

Consider this anonymous review I got on my book manuscript when I first sent it out:

“No amount of revision could ever make this manuscript suitable for publication by an academic press. The author should submit to Lonely Planet or similar presses that publish on the manners and customs of exotic peoples.”

Now consider the citation the published (by an academic press!) book received when it was named Leeds Honor Book for 2008:

“Gracefully written and theoretically astute, Pyramids and Nightclubs is an extraordinary ethnography… Multi-layered and fabulously textured, the book weaves meticulous ethnographic accounts of cross-cultural encounters with history, images and the anthropologist’s own experiences.”

And now consider what this Amazon.co.uk review said about the book:

“In fact the book sometimes suffers from a rather academically constipated style…” (but he still gave me 4 stars!)

In short, don’t take one rejection (or even two) as the definitive word on your writing.

If you get a nasty review, mope for a couple of days if you must, but then move on and decide what to do with the feedback you’ve gotten.  The best revenge is to prove the reviewer wrong by getting published.

One strategy that some people use: before submitting your article, get it in the proper submission format for 3 different journals. The minute you get rejected from one journal, instantly submit to the next. This keeps the process moving quickly and prevents you from wasting time getting over rejection.

But sometimes it can help a lot to incorporate the advice of reviewers before you submit to the next journal.  Two bits of advice: Pay more attention to constructive criticism than nasty comments, and ALWAYS take seriously any critique made by 2 or more reviewers.

Also, don’t mistake a “revise and resubmit” response for a rejection! Revise and resubmit can look a lot like a rejection letter, because it always starts out with something like “The editors have decided that your manuscript cannot be published in X Journal in its current form…” Don’t get down about it before you read ahead to the part of the letter that suggests that you resubmit after revising according to the suggestions of the reviewers.

The open access movement and self-archiving

Last word on journal articles, before we move on to books. There are pros and cons of publishing in open access journals.  More people will read your stuff, but you’ll pay for it (literally, and substantially — the author fees can be over $1000).  And so far, only a few open access journals are seen as top journals in their fields – mostly in medicine, not so much in anthropology.  But the trend is definitely heading in this direction.

Go to the Open Access Anthropology blog for more info about the movement. http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/

Even if you don’t publish in an open access journal, you can still self archive! (see http://savageminds.org/2008/02/06/self-archiving-made-easy-for-anthropologists/ — but note, Mana’o is offline, so check out Open Access Anthropology for more ideas about where to self archive: http://blog.openaccessanthropology.org/2009/07/24/in-search-of-anthropology-friendly-subject-repositories/)  At the very least, you should make pre-print versions of your articles available on your website for those who might not have library access to the journals you publish in.

Converting a dissertation to a book

So you have a PhD dissertation or a master’s thesis.  Next step is to revise it for book format.  The tricky part is to revise enough that a press won’t dismiss it as “just a thesis,” but not to spend years futzing around with it until you’re completely and thoroughly sick of it (which you probably already are by the time you graduate).

I asked one university press editor why he avoids publishing dissertations.  He gave me a thoughtful response and permission to post it online without his name or press attached.

“There’s a number of reasons that we avoid dissertations. Generally, they are written for one’s committee rather than a larger audience, and half the goal of it is to prove that you can do scholarship, whereas the book isn’t meant to prove yourself but rather your argument. Also, dissertations are often very narrow. Now all of this can be fixed with a good revision. But the author is still generally a near unknown, so we don’t have name recognition or previous books to use to promote this book. In the old days, dissertations were generally available only in the home library or maybe on microfilm, making books based on them more attractive. These days, dissertations are readily available on line and so people can access them more readily, making the book less attractive unless it really adds something new.

“So it’s a difficult bind to be in, wanting to support younger scholars, especially since we’re still bound into the whole tenure process requiring publication, and wanting to find books that will sell reasonably. I’m just working now on a book that was a diss but really works as a book by being something important for the field that hasn’t been done already. It got rave reviews by our readers, and I think it will sell well.

“I think students (and their advisors) need to be thinking about publication even before they choose their topics. If they want a small, manageable topic that can be handled in a reasonable amount of time to finish and defend, they should make sure it’s part of a larger topic that can form their book, maybe using the diss as the basis for just a chapter or two. They need to make sure that the book has plenty of new material to make it attractive to both publishers and, eventually, readers/buyers.”

Below is one press’s guidelines on revising dissertations for book publication.  It’s no longer the press’s official policy, so the editor gave me permission to publish it without the press’s name attached.

Checklist for revising dissertations for book publication

1. Eliminate the review of literature. A book manuscript is not for your dissertation readers; it’s for your colleagues, who have done their homework and will do you the courtesy of assuming that you have also.
2. Outlining. You have probably divided each chapter into sections and each section into subsections. This shows that you know how to outline or write a brief, but for most books the outline should disappear into the fluidity of a context. The book should flow; it should not hop from stone to stone.
3. Repetition. Does the beginning of each chapter and major section announce what you are going to say – and then, at the end, do you announce that you have said it? Remove repetition.
4. Footnotes. Dissertation writers, afraid that their judgment carries to weight, are apt to footnote almost every statement. But the author of a book must accept responsibility. Delete half your footnotes.
5. Bibliography. Having cited everybody who has written anything pertinent, the dissertation writer gathers them into a list and calls it a bibliography. But a useful bibliography must do more than alphabetize footnotes. A judicious bibliographical essay, grouping major references into sections according to their importance to your topic, can be part of what readers will pay for when they buy your book.
6. Too much? When beginning writers don’t know quite how to make their points – when they are teaching themselves the techniques of writing as they compose their material – they are apt to fumble a great deal, and the result is wordage by the yard. They don’t know when to stop or how to move on. Re-examine your dissertation critically – others will. Ruthlessly cut out the flab. Don’t depend upon the editor to do this. A flabby manuscript may never survive to get into the editor’s hands. Read questionable passages aloud. If they sound stilted or obscure, they probably are.
7. Too little? A thorough, definitive study or a superficial treatment? Has the treatment been stretched beyond the scope which the topic warrants?
8. Up to date? “If accepted for publication, I plan to update.” Better do it now, before the material is submitted. The reviewer has no way of gauging the effectiveness of work yet to be done.
9. Is it readable? The strictures surrounding dissertation writing seldom produce readable writing. Stuffy phrases, passive voice, attribution, and polysyllable jargon are roadblocks in the path of readership. Again, read it aloud. Does it sing or sag?
10. Research. It is also essential that a scholarly publication include original research performed by the author. Moreover, this research should be consistently organized according to a sound theoretical perspective.

Also, William P. Germano’s Getting It Published, 2nd Edition: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books comes highly recommended by several colleagues, though I haven’t used it myself.

Sex it up!

That’s the advice I got from one mentor when I started revising my dissertation to send to a press.  For example, compare the chapter titles in my dissertation vs my book.  In the dissertation, one chapter was called “Arab Tourism in Egypt: An Egyptian Perspective.”  In the book, that chapter became “Sex Orgies, a Marauding Prince, and Other Rumors about Gulf Tourism.”  Similarly, the dissertation chapter called “Arab Tourism in Egypt: A Saudi Perspective” became “Transnational Dating.”

All the content of the chapters in both dissertation and book is essentially the same (i.e. neither of them describes a sex orgy), but how boring is a chapter entitled “Arab Tourism: The Egyptian Perspective”?? Blah.

Maximize your publications

Consider publishing 1 or 2 or 3 chapters of your dissertation as articles first, before you publish your book. You can do this while you’re still working on your dissertation, so you’ll have some publications by the time you submit or defend.  This maximizes publications and exposure. Once published in a book, few journals would consider publishing as an article, but a book will usually allow you to include a couple of chapters that are slightly modified versions of published journal articles. I wish I’d done this myself.  Sigh.

The edited volume

Just as with book manuscripts that are revised dissertations, editors are also wary of edited volumes.  (Check out the June 12th issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Section B, for three articles on publishing, and you’ll see that there seems to be a general consensus that most editors are cutting down on the edited volumes they publish.)

I asked my anonymous editor why he avoids edited volumes, and here’s what he had to say:

“As for edited collections, they tend not to sell as well as monographs, though it does vary by discipline. Collected volumes in film/media studies for example tend to do better, often because there are so many movies/shows out there that it’s sometimes hard for one person to do them all justice. They also tend to be more work from a publisher’s point of view. Ideally the volume editor(s) will have made sure that all the formatting, citation style, and illustration quality are consistent, but that’s frequently not the case. The volumes tend to be longer, and thus pricier. The quality is often uneven between the essays. And often people will just copy the one or two articles they want and not buy the whole volume.

“There’s often variable name recognition, too. If you’ve got at least some well-known scholars in there, it can balance out the younger scholars. I once turned down a volume sent to me by someone working on a monograph with me (yes, his revised diss). But he was a junior person, his co-editors were junior, and every contributor was either freshly PhDed or still in school. It was a decent subject, but the inexperience of everyone involved was the main factor in my turning it down.

“It’s frequently hard enough to wrangle just a single author into turning everything in on time, but with a collected volume you’ve got 8, 10, 15, 20 people you’re trying to wrangle. There’s inevitably going to be at least one person who’s late turning in their chapter, or checking their edited copy, or their proofs.

“Often too, collected volumes, especially if they’re based on symposia or conference panels, don’t truly cohere as a book. There needs to be some specific rationale for these papers to be gathered together, rather than just this was what was presented or what the editor(s) could get. So the introduction needs to be really strong, to present the volume’s raison d’etre coherently and make a case for the volume, the essays in it, and often the arrangement of the essays. When I send edited collections out for review, more often than not it’s the editor’s introduction that comes in for the most criticism from the readers.

“So all of these reasons are ones that editors see sometimes as a reason to shy away from collected editions. Not to say that we don’t do them, but just like with revised dissertations they need to be really stellar and really worth the trouble.”

It looks like the moral of the story is: you can sell an edited volume, but only if (a) it really coheres as a topic, (b) you can convincingly argue that it’s value-added, i.e. the edited volume does something that a single-authored volume can’t do, (c) you’re really disciplined and you don’t include mediocre work by friends, and (d) you’ve got big names on board.

Picking a press

The American Association of University Presses has an amazing matrix where they list just about every press that distributes in the U.S. (so that includes Canadian presses as well as some European presses) by the subject areas they publish in: http://aaupnet.org/resources/2009AAUPGrid.pdf

It’s incredibly time-saving when you’re thinking about where to submit.  Instead of checking out every press’ website and perusing their lists of recent publications (which is still a good thing to do, but save your time and do it once you’ve narrowed things down a bit), you can just print this out, take a highlighter on the x-axis, and then see which presses are interested in the areas that your book covers.  Then examine those presses more closely to come up with a list of presses to approach.

I haven’t found anything equivalent for non-North American university presses, but I’ve compiled a list, ordered by region, of a few of the better known ones. Click on this link for the Word document: University Presses in Australia, NZ, UK, Europe and Asia.

Do you need to network with editors at conferences?

Short answer: No.  You can try chatting up editors at conferences to get them interested in your book, but you don’t need a personal introduction or an ‘in’ to get a publisher’s attention. A lot of people think you do, and they stress out trying to earnestly chat up an editor who is standing at their booth at the AAA book fair, but I’ve found sending a prospectus out of the blue gets results, and so have several of my colleagues. How you sell your idea is much more important than a personal connection to an editor.

The book proposal

Next, put together a book proposal. The contents usually are:

• A cover letter
• The prospectus (typically 4-8 pages)
• Table of Contents
• Sample Chapter or 2, and
• Your CV

Let’s break that down a bit.

• The cover letter should sell the concept in a quick paragraph or 2. This should be your best, most engaging writing!
• The prospectus is usually 3-8 pages (but some can be much longer depending on press and type of book), and you’d better get their attention in the FIRST page or they won’t keep reading.  In the prospectus you should
  • Describe the book
  • Show how it is unique
  • Compare it with related literature
  • Summarize chapters (Don’t just summarise the theory – yawn.  Include juicy examples to anchor the theory and make it memorable.)
  • Do some market analysis (more on this below).
  • Specify length (publishers rarely accept more than ~80-85K words)
  • Will there be pictures? (this is good but only if they’re B&W)
  • Time line for finishing draft manuscript
• Table of Contents (sex it up!)
• Sample Chapter (pick your most engaging and tantalizing, and if the intro isn’t it, then include 2 chapters)

Market analysis

This is a really critical part of your prospectus.  It’s important to show your book is different and unique, but not TOO different – there should be an existing market of people buying books like yours. One good strategy is to list competing titles and show how your book is different and significant.  Editors don’t want to duplicate something else that’s already on the market, so you’ll need to persuade them that your book on women in the Middle East is different from all the other books on this topic.

In this section of your prospectus, you should also tell the editor: Who will buy it? Who might put it on their course syllabus?  I’ve seen one friend put together a really fantastic market analysis that included a huge list of actual classes in universities around the world where her book might get assigned.  It was really convincing.

It’s especially good if you can plausibly claim it will get assigned in first-year undergraduate courses – but everyone claims this, so editors are skeptical of such claims!  Getting assigned in undergraduate courses requires clear, accessible writing that’s low on jargon, and a topic that is broad enough (or sexy enough) to be of general interest.

Or show that your book fills a specialist niche (ideally a few niches).

Or show that it’s really theoretically sophisticated and challenging (but proving that you’re the next Homi Bhabha or Judith Butler is tough).

Or show that it’s going to be read outside of academia – but it can be hard to back up this claim.  Think Fadiman, Ehrenreich, no footnotes or references, and U Cal’s Public Anthropology series – they have good guidelines on how to write for a wide audience: http://www.publicanthropology.org/.  (But if you’re at work, turn down the volume on your computer before you click the above link, because the website immediately launches a slideshow with music and there’s no immediately obvious way to turn it down.)

Sending out the book proposal

Pick your presses well (check that AAUP matrix).  Make a list of presses that interest you, and the order you’re going to approach them.

Then send prospectus to 1 or 2 presses at a time, and wait a reasonable amount of time for a response before sending to the next one on your list. Don’t wait months for someone to respond.  If they don’t respond in 2 weeks, send the proposal to the next press.  You’re not an exclusive item with your press at this point unless you’re asking for a contract on the basis of your prospectus and they’re contemplating sending out the prospectus and sample chapters for review.

If an editor bites, send them the manuscript.  Do NOT send manuscript to more than one press at a time without getting their consent. Sending a manuscript for review is time-consuming and expensive, and presses usually insist on exclusivity at this point.  It’s possible but rare to negotiate simultaneous reviews. (I have seen one friend do this when two presses wanted to review her book.)

Think about the psychology of generating desire for a rare / in-demand product. Don’t wait around for an editor who thinks s/he’s king or queen to get back to you.  Also, if you’ve been rejected by one press, don’t tell the next press that.  Nobody wants someone else’s reject.

Suggest names of friendly reviewers (but presses usually won’t consider your advisor(s) or people from your PhD-granting department as reviewers).  Editors often use at least one of your suggestions.  Presses even more than journals are likely to use your suggestions, because once they decide to send your manuscript out for review, they’ve invested money and effort and want to see your book succeed. Even if they don’t use one of your suggestions, they look at that list as an indicator of your network and your awareness of the field.

But one bad review can sink a project.  Move on to the next press on your list. Don’t get hung up about it.

Reviews and revisions

If a press editor asks you to make major revisions, don’t do it unless you agree with the proposed revisions.  Editors may know the field and the market better than you, so they might have some good ideas for revising. But some editors are known to jerk authors around for months and then they don’t even publish them in the end. It’s your book!  If you and the editor can’t agree about what it should look like, find another editor who sees it your way.

If you get a review, you’ll write a rejoinder that only the press editor will read. Show that you take the reviewer’s criticism seriously.  Tell the editor what revisions you will (and won’t) make in response to the reviewer. If your reviewer is critical and you disagree with him/her, keep your cool, respond with clear-headed logic, and show your mastery of the topic and the literature. Write as if your rejoinder would be read by the reviewer, not just the editor.

Negotiating contracts

If you’re offered a contract, pat yourself on the back, and then consider it carefully before signing.  There may be some room for negotiation, and this is the one time when you have the most bargaining power, so make the most of it. Some things to consider:

• Don’t quibble about royalties (you won’t make any profit on academic books).
• Do you want to ask for extra author copies? (10 is standard)
• Do you want to ask to retain any rights that standard contracts give to the press? (e.g. movie / television rights, translation rights, etc)
• Do you want final say on cover design / title? (you can’t use same title as your dissertation)
• Some sneaky clauses that some publishers put in their contracts is they demand a first option on your next book.  This is probably not enforceable, but still annoying.  Strike that out.  If you’re both happy with the experience of working together, you’ll likely go to them with your next book anyway, but you don’t want to be bound by it if you find the press hard to work with.’
• Do worry about whether they’ll publish in paperback – this is a sign of how well they’ll promote your book, and how many people will read it.
• Price is another super important thing to consider.  If they’re going to price your book at $120, nobody will buy it except (some) libraries.
• Distribution networks: where can they market your book?  Do they attend annual conferences e.g. AAA?
• Do they partner with local presses in other countries? This can be important for reaching markets where your press might not have good distribution or prices.  For example, Chris Houston’s book Kurdistan was first published in the U.K. by Berg and then in the U.S. by Indiana U Press; my book with U Texas Press was published in Cairo by AUC press, and if AUC hadn’t published it, I couldn’t have reached a local market because it’s hard to import books into Egypt.

Samples of successful prospectuses and cover letters

I’ve gotten permission from Chris Houston and Greg Downey to post their successful book proposals here.  Chris’s book proposal got him a contract for a book he hasn’t even finished writing yet (that’s a lot easier to get when you’ve already published two highly regarded books).  Greg’s proposal was instantly snatched up by Oxford University Press.  I’ve also included my proposal and cover letter for Pyramids and Nightclubs.  I thought it might be nice to see how people sell their book ideas, rather than just hearing about how to put together a book proposal in theory.  Many thanks to my colleagues for generously sharing these materials publicly.

Chris Houston, City of Fear: Violence and Spatial Terror in Istanbul book proposal

Greg Downey, Learning Capoeira: Lessons in Cunning from an Afro-Brazilian Art book proposal

Downey, Learning Capoeira cover letter

L.L. Wynn, Pyramids and Nightclubs book proposal

Wynn, Pyramids and Nightclubs cover letter

Final word: get to work

The one thing that makes the biggest difference in whether you get published or not is how much effort you put into it.  It’s not a magical process.  It’s a step-by-step process that anyone can master, but it takes a lot of effort.  So get to work!

Rind by keishkakeishka, (c) Creative Commons, some rights reserved.

Below is an announcement about an upcoming lecture by Kathleen Stewart in Sydney.  Scroll on down to wonder at the postmodern abstract for her talk.

Transforming Cultures is pleased to announce that this year the TfC Annual Lecture will be presented by:

Professor Kathleen Stewart (Dept. of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin).

Atmospheric Atunements

Thursday 20th August 2009, 6:00-8:00 pm
University of Technology in Sydney Gallery Function Centre, Level 6, UTS Tower Building.

Abstract:
Something throws itself together. Or sags, shifts tone, or fails. Invisible airs quicken around nascent forms, rinding up like the skin of an orange. Circulating forces waver and pulse, visceralizing the sheer sense of something happening. The ordinary hums with the background noise of all that takes place in moments, scenes, objects, resonances, rhythms. The atmospheric attunes to the sentience of things passing in and out of existence, to the expressivity of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘whatever being’. This sensing out that attends is itself a labor of worlding, an effort to inhabit a flighty ground.

This writing asks what it takes to live out the worlding of forces rinding up and dissipating. But it also wonders about the significance of accretion itself. The way that an atmosphere accretes for senses in sync with it (or sort it) and the worlding that accrues partially or fully, quickly or slowly, for a time, with habit or shock, in practices or daydreams. A worlding – an attunement – that can be sloughed off, realized, imagined, brought to bear or just born.

I hope to attend so that, if there’s a question and answer session afterward, I can ask, “What is rinding?”

In a 1990 article on anthropological ethics, Philippe Bourgois wrote,

We have come a long way from our European forebears (especially the British) who flew into colonial war zones under the auspices of colonial offices to interview ‘natives’ and write ‘how-to-administer-more-humanely’ reports for government bureaucracies intent on increasing ‘administrative’ efficiency and lowering costs. Today, few self-respecting anthropologists would condone the exercise of anthropology at the service of a world superpower or as a complement to espionage (Bourgois 1990:44).

It would appear that either Bourgois was a bit too cavalier in assuming that all of his fellow anthropologists shared his opinions about serving an occupying power, or perhaps anthropology has just changed a lot over the past two decades, because, while it’s not quite accepted by the disciplinary mainstream, there are indeed self-respecting anthropologists who are participating in the Human Terrain System and in other efforts to put anthropological knowledge at the service of an occupying superpower in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It was one of my honours students, Nikki Kuper, who brought Bourgois’ article to my attention.  Nikki is doing a very interesting research project on the relationship between anthropology and the military, looking in particular at the Human Terrain System as the current flashpoint for debate about research ethics and about our historical relationship with colonialism.  And she’s just launched a survey to canvass academic opinions on the topic.  It takes about 15 minutes (I timed it myself), so if you’ve got an opinion about the relationship between anthropology, the military, and research ethics, go to

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=2HgHXDxMlbdXjLWZn6quzg_3d_3d and tell Nikki what you think.

[reference: Philippe Bourgois, 1990. "Confronting Anthropological Ethics: Ethnographic Lessons from Central America."  Journal of Peace Research 27(1) p.43-54.]

–L.L. Wynn

When I arrived at Macquarie in 2007, I had big plans for my students.  I was scheduled to teach a postgraduate methods class, and I decided that the students were going to learn research methods by undertaking their own research project from start to finish and trying to publish the results.

“Crazy!” one of my colleagues said.  “Do you really think that they can get published?”

“Of course!” I said. “Have you seen how many journals there are out there?  You can publish anything if you are persistent enough.”

Another colleague said, “What are you going to do about ethics clearance?”

Uh-oh.  I hadn’t thought about that.  But I wasn’t going to let it derail my plan, so my ad hoc solution was to make each of my students apply for ethics clearance.  Macquarie has 30+ page ethics application form for human research — not including appendices.

I tell you, the students LOVED that.  And so did the Ethics Secretariat, which had to process 20 ethics applications from one class and deal with weekly phone calls from me cheerfully asking when so-and-so’s project was going to get approved so s/he could start her research.  Some students didn’t get ethics approval to start their research until the last week of classes.  There were lots of extensions and late papers.

Despite the slow start and the frustrations, the work that my students did was really good.  In one semester, every student had to come up with their own original research projects, design an appropriate methodology, obtain ethics approval, execute the project, write up the results, and submit for publication. Every student came up with a completely unique research project, from researching the smoking practices of international students at Macquarie to investigating online lesbian networking in New South Wales to studying how Aboriginal artwork is marketed to tourists. Students gained a tremendous amount of hands-on research experience. At every seminar we discussed the progress of their research projects, and there were fascinating discussions about methods and ethics.  Even though they had largely seen the ethics application as an exercise in bureaucratic hoop-jumping, they were genuinely concerned with ethics, and we regularly discussed research ethics dilemmas.

So at the end of the year I decided that it was a good exercise and worth keeping the independent research projects the next time I taught the class. But the students were pretty clear in their feedback that they didn’t want to have to deal with the bureaucratic obstacles themselves.

Informal feedback from the Ethics Secretariat also suggested that they would be grateful if I found another solution (or at least stopped ringing them to ask about the status of students’ ethics applications).

Finding work-arounds for bureaucratic obstacles

So after the semester was over, I made an appointment to meet with the head of the Ethics Secretariat to try to find ways to simplify the ethics approval process for student research projects.  I’d gotten a fellowship from the Provost, Judyth Sachs, to work on this project, so I was empowered by significant institutional support.

We batted ideas around together. The Ethics Secretariat pointed out that Macquarie had a simpler process for evaluating student research projects that weren’t going to be published, but since helping students to publish was a major goal for me, I didn’t want to take that easy route.  They rejected the idea of a blanket template that would cover any sort of student research project.  I wanted to give my students some choice in what they could do.

The compromise that we worked out was this: I designed 4 basic research projects, all revolving around a different methodology and method of recruiting research participants. Students could then pick a project that already received ethics approval.  I tried to come up with projects that collectively would use every method that I could imagine a social science discipline using: online and street surveys; interviews, formal and informal; research in online communities; public observation; participant observation; even oral history, which has quite different conventions surrounding confidentiality and intellectual property than I was familiar with. The goal was to create a set of “templates” that colleagues could adapt to develop their own ethics applications for student research projects, so others could take advantage of my work and wouldn’t have to start from scratch.

The 4 projects

Here are the research projects I came up with, along with an extract from the project summary that I included in the ethics application. Each project title links to the full ethics application that I submitted. Of course, it is in the peculiar and particular format of Macquarie University’s ethics application form, but because MQ’s form is more elaborate than that of many other universities, you’re likely to find that I’ve dealt with most of the concerns that your own ethics committee or IRB might raise. All these ethics applications are Creative Commons licensed for non-profit use and adaptation, so feel free to borrow as much as you want. If you do decide to adapt one of these ideas for your own teaching, I’d love to hear about it! Send me an e-mail at lisa.wynn[at]mq.edu.au.

1) An ethnographic study of mobile phone use in Sydney

Anthropologists have always been interested in the relationship between technology and culture.  Contemporary anthropologists have recently been particularly interested in the spread of global communication technologies and how they are taken up in local social and cultural contexts (Axel 2006).  Mobile phones, in particular, have been revealed as devices which extend social networks in unique ways and which have been incorporated into local cultural norms about sharing, gift giving and exchange, and economic strategies (Smith 2007, Horst and Miller 2006, Wong 2007).  Corporate anthropologists have also researched the materiality of cell phones – where they are carried, how they are held, when they are turned off and on – to inform product design (Chipchase 2007).  Sociologists and psychologists have also examined the uptake of cell phone and messaging technologies amongst subcultural groups (e.g. Sylvia and Hady 2004).

Globally, some 3 billion people are expected to have cell phones by the end of this year, so it is clearly a technology that has a powerful global reach across cultures and socioeconomic class. How do new technologies such as cell phones extend or modify existing cultural norms and social networks?  What are the explicit and implicit cultural rules that shape how people use these technologies?

The methods for this study included street interviews and online questionnaires, as well as participant observation.

2) An ethnography of a virtual online social world

Tom Boellstorff (2008) poses this question: “How is everything from identity and community to property, place, and politics shaped the fact that human beings can now live parts of their lives in virtual worlds?”  Some of the potential research questions raised by cybersociality in online virtual worlds like Second Life include the following:

• How are social norms enforced and violated, and how does that contribute to a sense of community?
• What does identity mean in a massive multiplayer online role playing game when people can have alts (secondary accounts not linked to their primary avatar, or animated representative), or more than one person can control an avatar?
• What does embodiment mean in Second Life, where you can change your gender, body type, skin color, and even species at will, where other players can even *give* you a new body type to “wear,” and you can buy a penis to use for cybersex?  Do people change certain aspects of appearance (such as clothes or hair style ) more than others (such as body shape or gender)?  How often to people change their appearance?  To what extent does an avatar’s appearance influence how people interact with that avatar?
• What religious or cultural rituals do people engage in, in cyberspace?
• What are the social norms for gift-giving and reciprocity in cyberspace, and how does this contribute to community and sociability in cyber worlds?
• Are there coercive exchanges, and how are they handled or talked about?
• How does partnering occur in Second Life? Do virtual partners know each other in real life, and if not, how does it impinge on their real life worlds? What is the interface between Second Life and “real life”?

In this ethics application, I got a lot of help from Tom Boellstorff (whose ethnography on Second Life we read for the class). He generously shared with me his original ethics application for his research in Second Life, which I was able to draw on in figuring out how to answer the Ethics Committee’s concerns about privacy and the permissibility of research in Second Life.

3) Oral Histories of International Students in Australia

Education is a $12.5 billion “export industry” for Australia, bringing in more income than tourism (Rout 2008).  Yet little is known about the social experience of international students in Australia, despite the fact that they face unique pressures.  Rout (2008) summarized recent research that points out that, “Contrary to their image as cashed-up BMW drivers, many overseas students cannot afford to eat, are paid well below the minimum wage and are among those most vulnerable to exploitation in this country.”

For this project, students in ANTH 801 will conduct oral life histories of international students at Macquarie, focusing on their educational trajectory leading to, and including, their student experience at Macquarie.  How did they end up at Macquarie?  What are the personal, social, financial, and familial obligations that shape students’ experiences at university in Australia?  What are the cultural factors that influence their integration into, or alienation from, the Macquarie student body?

Very little qualitative research has been done on the higher education experience of international students in general, and yet they comprise a large minority of students at Macquarie.  Letting them speak in their own words about their experiences is an opportunity to learn about the pressures and problems that international students face, their goals and aspirations, and the social and learning strategies that they use to cope with a culturally new educational experience, which Macquarie University may be able to use to improve the experience of international students on campus.  It also has the potential to inform our understanding of the informal, affective, and social aspects of learning and intellectual development for international students.

I grounded this project in the principles of oral history methods, which specify that (1) the interview or transcript must be placed in a repository, and (2) those interviewed retain copyright and control over the use of their interviews.  It was therefore a complicated application, and probably the most closely scrutinised of all the projects I submitted, but it eventually received approval.

4) An applied anthropological study of the social use of space on campus and its relationship with ‘intellectual climate’

Macquarie University is looking for ways to improve its rankings in graduate student evaluations of “intellectual climate” on campus.  U@MQ is eager to think about new ways that the food and social facilities on campus could be restructured to be more appealing and better utilized.  Might these be linked?  Do students’ most formative moments at university happen inside or outside of the classroom?  How is social time in or outside of the classroom related to intellectual interaction?  To what extent is intellectual climate shaped by space and facilities?  What other factors shape the perception of intellectual climate on campus?  The aim of this project is to study use of space and evaluate whether there are any inexpensive or cost-effective interventions that you can recommend to improve the intellectual climate for students at Macquarie.

Here are some angles that you may consider:

1) In the library, how do students mark off spaces for individual and group work?  The library is the most formal learning space on campus.  How do students claim it to be more informal?

2) How much does home life influence use of public spaces on campus? Do students who use the campus do so to escape from home life for whatever reason?

3) Using the language of de Certeau, what are the tactics that students use to claim space and how does it differ from the ostensible ways that the space was designed to be used?

This particular project was set up as an applied anthropology project for a “client,” Macquarie University, and one organisation in particular, U@MQ, was very interested in the results and sponsored a competition and prize for the best student project.  (U@MQ is the company that provides non-academic services on campus — they run the coffee carts, the food court, the gym, etc.)  At the end of the semester, the students who did this research project presented their research results and policy recommendations to a panel from U@MQ, the Learning and Teaching Centre, and Facilities Management.

Protocols and scripts

In the ethics application for each project I had to set out the general research question and draft protocols – scripts actually – for students to follow in recruiting participants.  This was the only way that the ethics committee could feel satisfied that students wouldn’t put undue pressure on friends and family to participate in their research projects.  I also had to draft protocols for taking pictures, and several variations on informed consent forms and recruitment advertisements.  Students put their own spins on the research project and came up with their own lists of interview questions.  They submitted a short description of their own approach at the beginning of the semester and this received expedited review by the Ethics Secretariat.

So students in that same methods class the following year were able to either do their own research project (and go through the whole ethics approval process), OR they could take one of these 4 research projects and interpret it in their own way, while following the basic protocols and methodologies that I’d already gotten clearance for them to use.  Two did their own projects (one on roller derby leagues in Sydney and another on the Miss India-Australia beauty pageant); the rest of the class slotted into the projects I’d gotten pre-approval for.  With ethics approval mostly taken care of in advance, the students in 2008 were able to start their research right away.  We still had extensive discussions about research ethics, facilitated by the online ethics training module (see section 2 above), but this time students didn’t see research ethics as a tedious bureaucratic requirement, but rather as an area of intense current debate in anthropology.

They all did great work.  Most of them have submitted their papers to journals.  Several are under review, and so far one has been published (Elisabeth McLeod’s study of mobile phone use amongst Baby Boomers in Sydney in the International Journal of Emerging Technologies) and another was just accepted for publication (Vanessa Gamboa Gonzalez’s thought piece on conceptions of the body and health in Second Life for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research). I’m over the moon about this. (I wish that I’d thought about my essays for class in graduate school as articles to submit for publication.  Then maybe I would have had more than 2 obscure publications when I finished my PhD.) These are the exciting possibilities when students are doing their own research instead of writing about the research of others.

–L.L. Wynn