Special Issue: “Merit, Whiteness, and Privilege”: Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (DCQR)
Departures in Critical
Qualitative Research (DCQR)
Special
Issue:
“Merit, Whiteness, and Privilege”
Co-Editors:
Elizabeth Desnoyers-Colas (Georgia Southern
University); Mohan J. Dutta (Massey University); Amardo Rodriguez (Syracuse
University)
Hard
Deadline:
July
1, 2019
Submission
Length: 1500-2000 words
The Communication Discipline has a racism problem. In
fact, the discipline has long had a racism problem, silenced by overarching
structures that deploy the language of civility to erase conversations. These
racist undertones of the discipline, written and co-opted into the
articulations of diversity, equity, and inclusion came tumbling out on June 10,
2019, when an editorial written by a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline,
Martin Medhurst, for his edited journal, Rhetoric and Public Affairs was widely
circulated. In the letter, Professor Medhurst rehashed the oft-used trope of
“diversity and merit” to attack the democratizing processes being built by a
new leadership of the National Communication Association, responding to the
ongoing organizing of scholars of color to protest the insular and exclusionary
processes of select of the distinguished scholars in the discipline. The
subsequent decision by the National Communication Association to release the
correspondence between the organization and its Distinguished Scholars brought
to public the letter from the Distinguished Scholars, rife with elitist and
racist undertones, ironically packaged as openness to diversity and inclusion.
These racist responses have generated strong counter-responses from scholars of
colour and White allies, resulting in a letter of protest currently being
circulated alongside strong responses from the various sub-divisions of the
discipline condemning the racism.
We situate our call for submissions for this special
issue, “Merit, Whiteness, and Privilege” in conversation with the anti-racist
articulations emerging across the discipline. The racist formations that
constitute the infrastructures of disciplines are often tucked away, carefully
hidden into articulations of merit. Evaluations of academic work then
systematically draw on narratives of merit to devalue, undermine, and erase
voices from the margins. Merit works to uphold academic privilege that is at
its heart racist, while giving the appearance of neutrality. Whiteness forms
the normative structures of disciplines, written into the norms, protocols, and
structures of everyday life. The messages, “You are not good enough,” “You
didn’t try hard enough,” “You didn’t prepare your application packet” well
enough that often work under the guise of merit to uphold the White structures
of our disciplines. These messages are complemented by norms of civility and
politeness to exclude, erase, and marginalize, as we witness with the
experiences of Professor Steven Salaita, Saida Grundy, and Marc Lamont Hill.
This special issue of DCQR invites submissions that grapple with the politics of
Whiteness, its intertwined relationship with the articulations of merit and the
upholding of privilege. How do elite structures reproduce erasure through
protocols? How do articulations of merit work to disenfranchise academics of
colour? How do frames of academic labour work to silence voices of academics of
colour? What strategies of resistance might we cultivate in dismantling
Whiteness? While these conversations in this special issue respond directly to
the current context of the challenges to Whiteness in the discipline of
Communication, we invite essays from academics in related disciplines that
articulate and give voice to these challenges.
Submission
preparation and submission:
Manuscripts should be prepared in Microsoft Word using
a 12-point common font, double-spaced, and in accordance with the Chicago
Manual of Style, 17th ed. (2017),
endnote style (not author date).
Final manuscripts
will be uploaded to Scholar One with assistance from DCQR’s editorial team.