The story behind the Social Science for Social Justice series
By Delayna Spencer (she/her), senior commissioning editor
When I began work on the Social Science for Social Justice book series, I knew it had to begin from a place of accepting that systemic inequalities exist, that they are a fact of life, and that no author should feel compelled to convince readers of this, nor justify why they may be writing about this. This systemic oppression is very much a part of the academic publishing ecosystem, where academics of colour have had their voices inhibited and have faced the mental and physical stress of surviving within an institution which was not created for them.
This series is a direct challenge to traditional academic frameworks that have forced people of colour to exist on the fringes, to have their voices diminished, overwritten, or clipped to fit within an agenda of exclusion.
The homogenous makeup of those involved within academic publishing (whether editors, academics, journal boards, societies, peer reviewers) has allowed for gatekeeping to exist within the sector. A certain group of people is deciding what is the “right” kind of research, methodology and writing. Texts are overly theoretical to the point where academic work is speaking inwards, rather than trickling down to a wider audience. Academics of colour are told that speaking from personal experience is not “correct”, and yet we know that ethnographic research is perfectly acceptable when a (white) outsider enters into a community to extract data. We are told that an expert is a white man who has sat within academia their entire career and understands social phenomena through data and quotation. We are told that successful titles are those that follow the trends of the (majority) market and that anything outside of this is not commercially viable.
These are broadscale problems that Sage, like other academic publishers, will have played a role in perpetuating. This series alone cannot fix all of this, nor is it the only effort Sage is making to tackle these problematic histories. What the Social Science for Social Justice series does is respond to and challenge the Ivory Tower of academia by not only spotlighting students and academics at all levels, but also activists, independent researchers, and journalists to redefine the idea of what an "expert" is and present the scope of people who contribute to the social sciences. Importantly, it doesn't pigeonhole authors of colour "over there" so we can go back to ignoring the issues at hand.
What I envisioned for this series was a social science of the personal, where voice could be maintained and amplified rather than edited and diminished for the sake of pre-existing notions of what academic writing should be. The books are free of academic jargon, making them accessible to everyone, and just as at home in the references of an academic article as on the personal bookshelf of someone outside the academic world.
This series is a radical intervention from Sage, offering a vision of what academic publishing can be: accessible, inclusive and working towards a shared social justice, which benefits all.