Lots of political scientists know stuff, but sometimes have a hard time getting their message across to journalists, politicians, and policy makers. Not every political scientist wants to be quoted in the newspaper or appear on television, but many do. How do they break into the commentariat?
Our July issue features a marvelous essay by the board members of “Women Also Know Stuff” that provides one model. We asked this group of scholars to consider writing an essay because their initiative provides valuable object lessons not just for other underrepresented groups, but for any political scientists who “knows stuff” and is interested in talking and writing about it in public forums. We’re pleased they agreed to write their reflection essay.
Their essay discusses the origins of the Women Also Know Stuff initiative and its success in promoting women within the discipline, and in both traditional and social media. Their insightful discussion of the challenges and accomplishments of #womenalsoknowstuff also provides a useful template that other academics may want to follow.
Their essay provides us an opportunity to repeat our call for members who may want to consider submitting Reflection essays. A longer description of the requirements for Reflections is contained on the APSA website. Our intention is to provide an outlet for informal essays and commentaries on political science scholarship, teaching, and the profession. These are still subjected to peer review, while recognizing, in most cases, these essays will be non-anonymized.
We also continue to encourage proposals for Spotlights. Our experience since creating the Spotlight content category is that there is some confusion about how a Spotlight differs from a Symposium.
Spotlights provide an opportunity for groups of scholars to address timely issues within the pages of PS on a single topic or related topics. We welcome Spotlight contributions on topics that originated as conference roundtables, a series of blog postings, or even informal discussions on social media. Spotlights are intended to be short (each essay between 750–1,000 words) and non-technical. Perhaps the best model for a Spotlight would be a thematic set of essays that regularly appear in the Monkey Cage, but a bit more formal, more structured, peer-reviewed, and let’s be honest, published in a format that you can list on your c.v. (Our “Ebola Spotlight” originated, in fact, with a number of blog postings on MC.)
When we took over our editorial responsibilities, we were reminded that PS featured Spotlights in the past, but they had never been institutionalized as a content category. We worked to rectify that, largely in response to what we viewed as disciplinary interest in a print outlet for timely and accessible commentaries.
Just to complete the discussion, a Symposium consists of a group of full-length articles organized around a common theme. This model is well-established and well understood, as this issue illustrates.
We welcome Symposium proposals, but you may consider whether a Spotlight might be more appropriate. And we continue to encourage nominations from Organized Sections for articles under the From the Sections banner.
Let’s shake things up a bit, Political Science!
We describe all of these content categories, and our standards for submission and review, at the APSA website: http://www.apsanet.org/ps.
