Skip to main content

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).
Manuscripts should be submitted via email to Devika Chawla at: chawla@ohio.edu.
Final manuscripts will be uploaded to Scholar One with assistance from DCQR’s editorial team.


Popular posts from this blog

The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe

  The Haka, the Hurt, and the Work We Owe An Indian in Aotearoa reflects on resistance, complicity, and the solidarities we have yet to build Mohan Jyoti Dutta I watched the haka. I watched it several times, in fact. Each time, I tried to sit with what I was feeling before reaching for what I was supposed to think. Let me be honest about who I am in this conversation, because that matters. I am an upper caste, upwardly mobile Indian man. I am a professor at a university in Aotearoa. I carry the accumulated privileges of Brahminical socialisation, of English-medium education, of institutional access that was never designed for the communities I now write about and alongside. I say this not as confession but as orientation — because where you stand shapes what you see, and I have learned, through years of working with communities at the margins, that the refusal to name your own location is itself a colonial habit. The haka directed at Parmjeet Parmar did not offend me. It ...
Read more

Whiteness, NCA, and Distinguished Scholars

In a post made in response to the changes to how my discipline operates made by the Executive Committee of the largest organization of the discipline, the National Communication Association (NCA), one of the editors of a disciplinary journal Rhetoric and Public Affairs (RPA), Professor Martin J. Medhurst, a Distinguished Scholar of the discipline, calls out what he sees as the threat of identity (see below for his full piece published in the journal that he has edited for 20+ years, with 2019 SJR score of 0.27). In what he notes is a threat to the "scholarly merit" of the discipline, Professor Medhurst sets up a caricature of what he calls "identity." In his rhetorical construction of the struggles the NCA has faced over the years to find Distinguished Scholars of colour, he shares with us the facts. So let's look at the facts presented by this rhetor. It turns out, as a member of the Distinguished Scholar community of the NCA, Mr. Medhurst has problems with w...
Read more

The Suit Walks the Corridor

  The Suit Walks the Corridor At ten past nine on a Monday the corridor on the top floor of the administration building fills with the sound of expensive shoes. The carpet up here was laid in the last refurbishment and still gives slightly underfoot, the way a good hotel lobby does, and the doors along it close with the soft, well-engineered thud of a German car. Along this carpet, in the direction of the lift marked Executive, comes the suit. It comes in navy and in charcoal, in the odd daring pinstripe, in the female version too, a tailored jacket over a silk shell, and heels that announce themselves on the tile of the lift lobby a full three seconds before the person arrives. The suit carries a flat white from the good cafe, the one that closed the student cafe to open, and a lanyard that swings with the confidence of a thing that opens doors. The suit passes the framed founding professors, who were photographed in gowns and look, at this distance, like a row of disapproving pe...
Read more