Tag Archives: Discussion

On not Writing

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Erika Gisela Abad has a Ph.D. in American Studies, and works at Center for Puerto Rican Studies investigating intersectionality, cultural experience, and oral history among Puerto Rican communities and families.  In this post, Erika reflects on how her research in Puerto Rican Chicago sparks tension and memory in dialogues and debates with her mother.  

I struggle with not writing. Sitting with my mom after a long day’s work watching ridiculous TV shows on streaming media. I do this in the midst of professional uncertainty when my conscious tells me it is important to, well, send out applications. A woman struggling with the invisibility of her work, of her motherhood, closing the computer allows me to make her visible in the mundanity of the everyday to which we’ve arrived.

A mixed class Latina the second to finish college, the first PhD, I got this degree because making a living as a writer a mentor once told me, was going to be difficult. In the place many predicted the MFA would land me, I sit with my mom because of the reasons I write:

To heal, to release anger, to get to truths neither speaking nor working reveal. Drafting and talking through to forgive what moments trauma doesn’t want to let go. As I once wrote a mentor, it’s about getting to the table and trying to write what the other person coming to the table could or would look like. It’s about practicing with characters and metaphors how to listen through the trauma, whether the trauma be colonial, patriarchal or material – whether the trauma be that which has been named or that which must be kept invisible. Sometimes the struggle to survive demands struggles be kept silent. Human suffering, as inevitable as it is, often gets lost in the pursuit of fantasy as well as forgetting. Coming to the table is also about assessing whether the wheel turning revolution can be rebuilt or if the pieces of memory missing – memory missing because of what can’t yet be named – requires so many of us to rebuild it.

And sitting with my mom is about waiting, waiting for memory to reappear. And her memories awaken in the memories of others I record as an oral historian. Memories of parking lots turned into playgrounds, memories of late buses to colleges she never imagined. Memories of drinking Dr. Pepper for the first time, her comfort food, the comfort of being able to know more, taste more than poverty and patriarchy permitted to a young woman growing up where Puerto Ricans were trying to make place. These memories give her life beyond the college she never finished for no other reason than being by herself. Her stories lifting up from computer screens in a voice still weary of helping and reaching, come to life beyond the place of making meaning of leaving that requires returning, overwhelmed by isolation.

And I sit with that, when our skin color differences do not write away the sameness of racism we experience. A paleness that encourages forgetting that my brownness writes on the page, for the stage in ways that have her admit—not to me—that the fight continues. Responses to racism are coded in the traumas we share. Retorts and resistance colored by the adverse childhood experiences that divide us. Sitting is all she wants at the end of the day, at the end of days running, at the end of years climbing to find stable ground in which to root, in which to lift me, among her other children higher. My hands race and wring, legs twitch because work, all the kinds, exige movement.

And I struggle to not write in those moments: moments where the cogs in my head turn too fast for her to keep up; when the questions she asks receive huffs and stomps out looking for roads bigger than the rooms we occupy. In those moments where the grumbles she makes about the car driver who works when she doesn’t, because the car that is freedom to her and is more work to me in ways that put her back on the bus, on the train to move because her fixed time challenges the time that, for me, remains in constant question. The need for work fuels us in speeds and codes the other doesn’t understand.

It takes seconds to remember a woman speaking of a girl ashamed and strained by the laundry she carries on the bus. And I see my mom there, then, aching and taking days off to not have to, again cross the street with bags and baskets. She bought to own to never again walk or rent or borrow. She works to have the luxury, luxuries she couldn’t have back then, then when Puerto Ricans were beginning to make meaning, Puerto Ricans who form the history I collect. Her life fills up in the margins of those stories, of those whose mark on Puerto Rican Chicago get printed in newspapers, shine in their awards, appear on screens to see. Those Puerto Ricans now, in between arguments and questions, spark her to remember her story. Histories she lived differently, differently for reasons the more I learn from others, the more she reveals.

So I stretch and listen and sit still, waiting, waiting till she’s asleep to pull out the books, to open the pc, to take out the pen and paper to write. Because writing is still needed to heal, to move, to forgive, to let go, to uncover, to remember. But not writing—not writing in those moments I steal from reason, from economy—allows me to say thank you, thank you the only way a struggling writer knows how. By counting the wrinkles in her face, the sighs in her stories, knowing that, in between them, remain moments and movements to keep me writing.

Incorporating Underrepresented Populations in Teaching and Research

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In this post, the Write Where It Hurts editorial team reflects on their experience advocating strategies for teaching to and about marginalized populations often left out of mainstream educational materials, research protocols, and data sets (see our recently published Teaching Sociology article on this topic here) in hopes of facilitating dialogue about the incorporation of marginalized and otherwise underrepresented populations in teaching and research.

As people who belong to, write about, teach, study, and engage in advocacy related to varied populations marginalized or otherwise often left out of mainstream education and scholarship (i.e., donor conceived people, adopted people, transgender and non-binary people, people managing chronic physical and / or mental atypical experiences, etc.), we have become intimately aware of the limitations or missing elements within much existing scientific data and educational resources. At the same time, we know all too well the structural and ideological barriers that slow alteration and revision of existing educational rituals, traditions, and structural patterns in concrete settings. As we did in our recently published Teaching Sociology article focused on strategies for inclusive teaching about gender via the use of survey data that often does not explicitly measure the gender diversity of our shared world, we would like to encourage our colleagues to consider strategies for overcoming existing structural and ideological traditions in hopes of continuing dialogue about methods for creating greater diversity and inclusivity within and beyond scholarly and educational materials.

As we note in our recent article, many data sets called “representative” and used to make far-reaching claims often do not contain and / or do not explicitly measure people like us. If, for example, Xan seeks to learn about social patterns related to donor conceived or agender people, such data sets offer no answers despite the use of such data to “represent” national or other whole populations. Likewise, if J seeks to learn about the experiences of transgender, adopted, or sexually fluid people, all ze will learn from data is that such people are not part of the representation of this society. Similarly, if Lain seeks to ascertain attitudes concerning or held by genderqueer and / or bisexual people, most data sets called “representative” will only offer a “representation” wherein such groups do not exist in any identifiable manner. Despite these “missing” populations, researchers, teachers, and advocates will often utilize these sets to make claims about, for example, families, gender, and sexualities that – we would guess unintentionally – ultimately reproduce existing power structures as well as the marginalization of the groups left out of the official representation contained in the data. In fact, we can see similar problems for other marginalized groups including but not limited to homeless people, neuro-atypical people, and multi and inter racial people despite the use of such data to make claims about housing, mental and physical health, and racial dynamics on a regular basis.

Alongside growing recognition of issues with calling limited collections of people and measurements “representative,” we have heard some advocate doing away with these data sets while establishing more inclusive and diverse forms of data collection, measurement, and sampling. Doing so, however, would require massive changes structurally, ideologically, and institutionally, which will likely take much time, debate, and discussion to accomplish. At the same time, we have heard others advocate for maintaining existing practices or rituals while seeking to explain away the limitations or problems with existing data collection, measurement, and coding practices. Doing so, however, would require accepting the ongoing marginalization and erasure of many sections of the population from official representations. In our article, we propose a middle ground between these two extremes wherein we utilize the existing limitations to illustrate important patterns, power dynamics, and structural issues in contemporary society while continuing to push for revisions in existing data collection, measurement and sampling procedures and encouraging scholars, teachers, and others to talk about such data sets in more inclusive ways within publications and classrooms.

With this information in mind, we invite dialogue, commentary and discussion on strategies for inclusive teaching with existing data limitations and issues. Whether one seeks to join this conversation on this site or in relation to our call in Teaching Sociology or in any other space, we invite and appreciate other educators’ perspectives on these matters. To this end, ask yourself what do we say to unrepresented populations when we call data sources devoid of their presence or measurement representative of our world? What institutional and structural steps might we need to take to make our data sources and educational materials more inclusive of marginalized, underrepresented, and otherwise “missing” populations? Why do we push so hard for generalizations instead of seeking to empirically map the complexities, nuances, and diversity of our shared world, and is this pursuit of “representative” or “generalizable” claims worth the potential negative effects such practices may have on marginalized populations? While we will not pretend to have some “right” or “absolute” answers to these questions, our experiences to date within and beyond classrooms tell us these questions might be incredibly important and useful in many ways. Thus, we encourage members of our intellectual and activist communities to engage openly in these (admittedly challenging) conversations in order to move us closer to truly understanding the complexities of our social world and challenging the inequalities that exist within it.

The Transgender Religion Survey

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In this post, J. Sumerau discusses the motivations, contents, and goals of a survey effort seeking to document and amplify the voices of sex and gender groups typically missing from social scientific surveys about religion and nonreligion in American society.

In the past few years, contemporary religious and nonreligious commentators have begun to issue formal and informal statements concerning sex and gender diversity. As transgender women and men, intersex people, non-binary people, agender people, genderqueer people, and other groups of people who do not fit neatly into “male/female” and / or “woman/man” sex and gender binaries gain more recognition in American society and continue to fight for equal rights and representation in this country, some of the largest religious traditions in the country – including but not limited to the Southern Baptist Convention, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Catholic Church – have started issuing official statements about these groups of people. While some of these statements have been positive (such as the recent changes occurring within Reform Judaism to incorporate greater recognition of sex and gender diversity), many of them have been negative (such as the Southern Baptist Convention denouncing transgender, intersex, and non-binary existence).

At the same time, debates have emerged (especially online) within nonreligious communities about these populations and their place in American society. Like their religious counterparts, some of these examples have included positive depictions of such communities and calls for greater recognition, inclusion, and support of sex and gender diversity in America. However, some other nonreligious leaders and lay people have taken the opposite side while adopting and repeating negative stereotypes and condemnations of these communities. If the historical experiences of various marginalized people and communities offer any clues to these patterns, one may assume that religious and nonreligious statements about sex and gender diversity will only increase, that such statements may have far ranging effects on policy, politics, and the everyday experiences of many people, and that politicians (as presidential candidate Marco Rubio did earlier this week) may seize on these statements to justify opposition to equal rights for all people regardless of sex and gender status, identification, and experience.

As we watched these patterns unfold over the last couple of years while doing research and teaching concerning sex and gender groups and statuses often missing from traditional research agendas, measurement strategies, and protocols, some supportive colleagues and I became interested in what sex and gender groups typically missing from existing surveys might say about these patterns, the statements religious and nonreligious people made about sex and gender diversity, and their own religious and nonreligious experiences. To begin exploring this question, I began explicitly asking transgender, intersex, and non-binary people I encountered at various events for their opinions on these topics, for advice about incorporating these opinions and experiences into scholarship, and for advice concerning the best way to create a questionnaire or survey capable of capturing such opinions for scholarly dissemination and publication. While I initially only went to events and meetings I already attended occasionally or was already acquainted with, I gradually began to find and attend other meetings and events in hopes of gathering the most diverse array of advice, opinions, and suggestions I could. Specifically, I sought out people in each of these groups who experienced life in varied racial, class, regional, community, and political contexts in hopes of developing a study that could be as inclusive as possible of the immense variation contained within any common sex and gender status, group, or community categories.

Overall, the lesson I learned from all these informal inquiries was that if anything characterized the groups experiences of and opinions about religion and nonreligion it was diversity. People in each group agreed about many things, disagreed about many other things, and accomplished both of these options from question to question at times. As a result, I decided to fashion a survey that would allow people to self-identify and self-define their selves, experiences, and attitudes concerning religion, nonreligion, and other elements of American society. With this goal in mind, I turned to a supportive colleague with extensive experience designing surveys, and we further recruited another colleague who did their master’s work on sex and gender diversity and worked with us on other pieces on these issues related to religion. The three of us developed survey questions that allowed for a lot of variation in terms of responses, and then I took these questions back to people I had consulted previously to evaluate our efforts.

Over time, this process of construction and revision led to a survey instrument wherein respondents who choose to participate may define themselves (via multiple options or written in their own words; for example the gender identification question has 17 multiple choice options and an open-ended other response respondents may write in) in varied ways on every single variable, discuss their experiences and attitudes in their own words via open-ended options tied to questions about religion, nonreligion, and other social institutions and categories (for example, rather than assuming an experience with sex status, there is an open-ended question where respondents can share and define such experience in their own words), and wherein respondents may answer questions commonly offered on other religion and nonreligion surveys that generally do not have sex and gender measurements or only allow male/female or man/woman options for sex and / or gender.

Recently, we launched this survey online, and we are currently in the process of recruiting and gathering respondents through social media, conversations with national organizations, and through word of mouth in various communities. With recruitment under way, I wanted to use this space to discuss the details of the survey for anyone who may be considering participation. Simply put, the survey is a combination of multiple choice and open ended questions focused on religion, nonreligion, and other social institutions in contemporary America. Anyone who participates will have the opportunity to self define (either through the selection of one of many options provided in the survey or by writing in their own self identification in their own words) their own gender, sex, sexuality, race, education, income, religious or nonreligious affiliation, year of birth, state or region of residence, employment status, healthcare access, and political views. Respondents will also encounter a series of questions ascertaining religious, nonreligious, and other social experiences, attitudes, opinions, and beliefs (most of these also include open ended options for response and / or elaboration). Rather than assuming anything about the populations eligible for this study, we have specifically designed the survey itself to allow people to identify in their own ways, and discuss their own opinions, experiences, attitudes and beliefs.

Since our goal here is to document and amplify the experiences and opinions of sex and gender populations typically left out of surveys concerning religion, nonreligion, and other social institutions, anyone who identifies or exists in ways that do not fit neatly into “male/female” and / or “man/woman” binaries is eligible for participation in this study. As such, the focus of this survey rests upon comparing and contrasting the variation, diversity and complexity of sex and gender groups typically missing from previous surveys concerning religion, nonreligion, and other aspects of social life.

As part of contemporary institutional research processes, we developed a shorthand  label for describing and explaining the project to audiences and reviewers beyond the target population. After consulting with various members of different sex and / or gender groups, we decided to name the project the Transgender Religion Survey for official purposes because this option received the most support from members of these various social groups.

Especially considering that many sex and gender groups do not necessarily use or identify with the term “transgender” and many spiritual, nonreligious, and even some religious people do not necessarily use or identify with the term “religion,” we recognize that this name is not perfect and understand the perspectives of people who might prefer other names or not use or identify with these terms in daily life. However, for the purposes of this study and following the lead of some other large scale efforts to incorporate sex and gender groups often marginalized and erased in contemporary American society, we use transgender in the official survey documentation as a broad umbrella term for anyone who does not fit neatly into societal assumptions about binary sex and / or gender status, identification, expression, and / or display. Likewise, for the purposes of this study religion is defined as of or having to do with assumptions, beliefs, and practices regarding the supernatural.

While many people who fit within the broad definitions noted above identify in a wide variety of ways, shift and change language and identification terms and definitions over time in varied ways, and have very distinct experiences, beliefs and characteristics, we selected these terms as broad descriptors for the overall effort. Within the survey itself, respondents will define themselves in terms of sex, gender, and religion, and our analyses and use of this data will be built upon the ways people self identify and describe themselves, the variations and distinct experiences shared by the varied populations, and the representations respondents select for their distinct lives, groups, and experiences with religion, nonreligion, and other social phenomena. Rather than attempting to pick a definition for this or that group, we thus allow people to define themselves, and we will utilize their self definitions to compare and contrast variation among sex and gender groups concerning religion, nonreligion, and other elements of contemporary American society.

As a result, this project does not seek to define the characteristics of specific groups (i.e., what is transgender, what is Christian, what is atheist, what is intersex, etc.). There are many talented and capable activists and scholars engaged in such work at present, but in this case we will utilize the definitions and terms selected and discussed by the respondents themselves. Our goal is thus to compliment the work of sex and gender activists and scholars by incorporating the voices of sex and gender groups typically missing from other surveys into other areas of contemporary scholarship.

In closing, I encourage all eligible people (i.e., anyone who identifies or exists in ways that do not fit neatly into “male/female” and / or “man/woman” binaries) to consider participating in this study. While I hope for the day when all sex and gender groups are regularly recognized, included, and represented in scholarly efforts, I am reminded of how far we have to go to reach this goal every year when I encounter students that learn of many sex and gender groups for the first time in my classes. With this survey effort, we seek to continue and compliment ongoing efforts to increase the awareness and recognition of sex and gender diversity in contemporary society by documenting some ways varied sex and gender groups experience and think about religion and nonreligion.

For more information, official survey documentation noted above, and / or to participate in the study, please visit: http://researchsurveyor.com/surveys/index.php?r=survey%2Findex&sid=568681&lang=en

Ripped Pages, Erased words – lessons from the unintended audience

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A writer across genres and disciplines, this anonymous contributor is playing the professional field. She is debating whether to continue tenure track pursuits or focus on a career that lets her write what she chooses while pursuing advocacy work. She is grateful for the conversation/reflection that inspired this essay. 

There were two times in my life – once as a child, another as a young adult – where I was asked to destroy my words. In both situations, men asked me to get rid of my words – a journal and a blog. As a survivor of sexual assault and a feminist scholar aware of gendered language and silence, it was important for my own journey as a writer to fully name and forgive how I had responded to write as a result of those moments. I write this to remind myself why I write, for whom I write and to face the fears that have emerged in what I could/want to write and publish.

First, the journal writing I was doing as a 10-11 year old was framed by divorce, moving, death of a childhood friend and grandparents’ return to Puerto Rico. In that time period, abstract thought developing in my brain along with a great deal of loss in my environment creo un sentido de rencor, angustia y resentimiento. I was angry at everyone before I was a teenager. I had been lost, confused and I felt worthless given how much consistency I had lost. That anger was private until an elder read it. After reading it, he demanded I throw my words away because of how disrespectful and hurtful they were to the people I was framing in a negative manner. My words, my private thoughts were not protected because the journal was neither locked nor stored in a secret place. As a child I internalized the idea that my words did not belong to me. Once I ripped out the pages, I started writing fiction. Fiction as escape, as release, as an optimism I would not allow myself to find in an environment until I grew to live comfortably as a lesbian in a city located in the Western United States.

Ten or eleven years later, I was still acting and writing ‘straight’. I was writing straight fantasies, very PG, I thought, and the object of my affection demanded I take down the blog. Written without ever thinking he’d see it, I grew mortified that someone would share it, especially given the greater social context in which my ‘feelings’ for him were shared with him and how long it took him to tell me that someone told him. The person I was writing about yelled at me for how I felt, for writing it down and for publicizing it the way I had. Again, my words no longer belonged to me and I had to get rid of them. I did. Within months, I stopped associating with all involved. The wounds of being uncovered, of leaving and all that neither of us understand of each other’s life lay as an ever-increasing gap between us. Not just for the manner in which something public-private had been shared, but, more specifically, for what I understood that to represent at the time.

In both of these instances, I took for granted where I was writing. As a child, I needed locks and I needed hiding to keep my words mine. The uninvited and unintended audiences wanted to alter/erase my words because of what those words meant to them. Those words were not direct weapons against them. For me, in either instance, the words attempted to explore hurt, frustration, loneliness. The losses and change were overwhelming with minimal outlets available compared to the extent so many were suffering. I wrote as a means to escape, to let go of feelings. To have that taken from me, literally ripped out, informed fantasy writing that would sustain me until high school gave me access to password protected writing.

As a college student teetering on living in truth/coming out and trying to find smaller ways to be different, blogging was a way to connect with a handful of friends who had online journals and remained as invisible as I intended to be. Like in my childhood, I wanted a way to have a journal go with me wherever I was, operating on the belief that I was insignificant enough not to be distributed. It served as a way to explore curiosities, questions, internalized hetero-romantic idealism and other ideas that are of little significance to me now. In those moments, they were growing pains on paper/on screen. Growing pains that were mine. A question emerged that I will address after explaining how I viewed those two moments.

Those writings were a necessary process in my journey. Tremendous loss shaped how I perceived family because of how little control we had over our lives and over the affects of others’ choices on my ability to have, what I thought, was a normative childhood. No one wants to lose so much so quickly. Divorce and death shake foundations. Those I grew to rely on dispersed, and, in that, the grief of various communities – blood and peer – overwhelmed me. Grief transformed to hate because I could not bring my friend back. I could not go back to the house I had lived in for ten years. I did not have childhood friends I played with living next to me. I had more than my uncle had at my age, but that more was not something I would understand or forgive until others’ affluence taught me the power and resilience I had gained in that year of intense loss and change.

As for the online journal I kept in undergrad, I wanted to rewrite ownership of my sexuality. I didn’t think I owned it because – whether a gender or a community – I had spent a lifetime internalizing that my sexuality was not my own. Women grapple with this as much as those who struggle with being queer. I only allowed myself to understand that I had to hide, negotiate and perform resistance to the factors that informed the lack of ownership regarding my sexuality. Because of how new I had been to that community, because of the struggle I had relating to and working with cismen (of color), I was terrified of sharing the complex emotions I had around my body. When I did, I felt I was giving up too much too quickly. It has taken me years of poetry, therapy, and journaling to forgive myself and those young men for how naive we were about bodies, power, sexuality and desire.

The ownership others take over words based on their age/gender internalized authority remains a struggle in many communities. As writers, we each contend with the implications of ownership and measurement exercised by those who use social media to factor into whether one will be hired, published in the future, or deemed socially appropriate because of how in/visible we hope to be and because there are members of our audience we do not know. Reflecting over reactions remains key because there is a great deal we learn from ourselves in the process. Those lessons can, when we allow them to, spur our creative, intellectual and spiritual growth. Neither silence nor censorship will control the audience that thieves itself into the words to which we do not invite them. Neither silence/self-censorship will adequately erase the effects of our experiences. Writing is a choice, a demand for those of us who have born witness to suffering brought on by silence.

The quality of our writing can improve with awareness of how we control what we choose. As scholars, we control that which we are most informed. I take this out of my journal to share on this blog out of a need to forgive myself for who I couldn’t be for myself in moments I needed to express myself while protecting the integrity of my right to feel. As I grow as a writer, protection remains key, which is why I choose for this to remain anonymous for now. I want to control where my writing goes next. I want it to go to a place where, in the future, attaching my names to these words will not cause me nor any of the people in this narrative harm.

Comprehensive Exams are a Glorified Hazing Ritual

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The following anonymous guest post is by a doctoral candidate at a public research university in the United States.  In this post, he discusses experience with comprehensive exams often required for doctoral study, and the ways such exams mirror hazing patterns in other institutions and groups.  

As many graduate students know, comprehensive exams (sometimes also called preliminary exams, qualifying exams, prelims, comps, etc.) are often part of the grad school process. I’m sure I’m not the only person who heard horror stories about such tests from senior graduate students and faculty alike from the earliest days of grad school. The stories from graduate students went something like this:

 

“Oh my GOD. The semester you take the test is the worst semester of your life.”

“Get ready to hate everything when you take them.”

“I mean, people have failed before. It’s been documented.”

“Jeez, I don’t even remember half the stuff from the test, but make sure you know the stuff for the exam.”

“They’re so hard. The worst. Ugh I hate them.”

“Take them seriously or else you’ll have to take them again.”

 

From faculty:

 

“You will seriously need to study. Plan on doing nothing else the semester you take them.”

“Your exams are what first demonstrate that you are going to be a scholar in (area X) of (discipline Y). So you need to take them seriously.”

“You need to remember everything from the readings. Yes everything.”

“People have failed them before.”

“Take them seriously or else you’ll have to take them again.”

 

Now, in my particular situation the students were assigned or selected a certain number of texts to read in order to reflect their expertise in a specific area of the discipline. Then over the course of many hours (sometimes in one day, sometimes in two) they sat in a specified room and typed our responses. Faculty then assessed our responses and assigned a score.  Then, we learned our score, but never saw the test again.

For me, as someone who struggles with anxiety, hearing all of this before taking my exams was extremely disconcerting. As I listened to my colleagues and faculty gush about the horror of the tests I started to wonder why we even do them anymore. Over and over again I heard graduate students and faculty alike reinforcing the notion that the tests need to be taken seriously, that they’re intimidating, horrifying, traumatizing even.

In the midst of all this advice, multiple graduate students repeatedly told me that no one ever asked them about the test in the months/years after completing them, so “just get through it and move on”. Each person I talked to portrayed their method of studying as the way to study for these tests. People shared their “survival strategies” with me in what seemed like an effort to soften the blow of this supposedly horrendous process.

When it came time for me to start studying, I kept all these things in mind: the terror of the test, the embarrassment that would come if I didn’t pass, the stress of being a slow reader trying to get through thousands of pages of texts. I woke up in the middle of the night in a fit of anxiety more than once. It seemed my colleagues were right: comprehensive exams are terrible.

“But why?” I wondered to myself. “Why do they have to be terrible if this thing is just a valorized essay test that no one will ever ask me about ever again in my life once it’s over?” it was during this reflection that I realized that all comprehensive exams really are is a glorified hazing process for graduate students.

And I get it, if you think about it as a hazing process it all makes sense:

The tests are framed as the thing that will make you an expert in a field. This framing reinforces the notion that they are not only important, but that if we all really want to be experts then we need to do really well on them. In reality, a completed dissertation or set of publications is more likely to reflect your expertise in a given area, but pointing this out might undermine the ritual of comprehensive exams.

The tests are vaguely framed as scary and something we need to take seriously, even though most people pass, most programs allow you to take them more than once, and no one will ever ask you about them ever again. This fits the guidelines of a hazing ritual perfectly. If we aren’t repetitively told that the tests are scary then maybe we would see them for what they really are: timed essays shrouded in hype. Also, if students are scared into (over) studying for the test, then faculty can say “you must not have studied hard enough” in the face of someone who does fail. In this framework, failing the test becomes a personal failure, instead of a problem with the structure of the examination, and the structure of academia more broadly. Namely how the structure itself is specifically disadvantageous to neuro-atypical, racial/class/gender/sexual minority students who have been told over and over that we aren’t good enough, will never be good enough, and can’t succeed.

“Surviving” makes you one of the team, and then you get to tell future generations how awful the process is. This makes me think of a friend of mine who was involved in Greek life during his time in undergrad. A few years before he pledged his fraternity, their chapter got in trouble for hazing. As a result, they were under serious surveillance from the national office of their fraternity. The brothers who were seniors during his freshman year were the last pledge class to get hazed and were extremely bitter that the incoming class didn’t have to navigate the same emotionally stressful, degrading, “bonding” activities that they did. To these older brothers the initiation of my friend’s pledge class cheapened the meaning of brotherhood.

Comprehensive exams, as they exist now in many programs, operate in effectively the same way: Faculty and senior graduate students who made it through this format get to maintain boundaries between “them” and “us”, those who are “in” on the knowledge and those who are “out.” They do this by engaging in the same, ritualistic scare tactics that they experienced before they made it through the process, and in so doing justify and reinforce the meaning of their own experiences with the hazing process. Otherwise something that they spent a significant portion of their time in graduate school worrying about might be rendered meaningless.

Once you pass them, they don’t really matter. I took my comprehensive exams. I passed. And I’ve never been asked about them since (with the exception of other nervous graduate students who will take them in the future).

Now, to be fair, I learned a lot while studying for the tests, and it was not a total loss. I also understand the argument that we need to have something in place to make sure that people who are getting PhDs are truly experts in a field. I agree, I’m just not convinced that this format of evaluation is it. I also know that not all programs use this format, in fact some of them have (what I think) are much more useful evaluation methods.

For example, in an academic context where publishing is becoming increasingly more important, why not have students review a specific body of theoretical literature, craft a paper that makes a new theoretical contribution, and then submit it for publication? This format allows students to get the experience of reading broadly and deeply across a field, and the written result of all that work isn’t thrown into a vault where their ideas just waste away. Students could also do an archival research project of all the literature in one or two journals that relate directly to their dissertation topic and give an oral or written (but not timed) defense of that literature. Doing this could help students expedite their dissertation proposals and would give them a wide and deep understanding of their disciplinary sub-field/ fields.

I don’t expect changes to the current format overnight. So while what I mention above are just two potential alternatives to this format, I would like to share some thoughts for students who may be getting ready to take comprehensive exams that look like the ones I took:

Do take them seriously, but remember that they are not the end of the world. Yes, these tests do determine when/if you get to move on in the program, but they are not the be all and end all of your worth as a scholar or a human being.

If your program allows you to take comprehensive exams more than once, think about the first time you take them as a practice round. This is easier said than done, especially when the implicit knowledge around one’s department might be that failing is shameful. However, if you can do this it helps put them in perspective – just think, if you have to take them again at least you will know what you’re getting into. Also, you can spend the semester(s) between the first and second time taking them as a chance to work on your dissertation proposal, and then defend your proposal immediately after you (in all likelihood) pass them the next time.

Hey, senior graduate students and faculty, stop treating failing like its shameful. If you passed, good for you, but just because someone doesn’t pass their first time (or ever) doesn’t lessen their value. Help shrink this as a departmental (and academy-wide) norm. Yes, there might be people who fail because they didn’t study, but it can often be significantly more complicated that that. Again, minority scholars specifically are told their whole lives how likely we are to fail at any time. Instead of reinforcing this logic, work to create an environment where students can do better the next time.

Develop your own studying method(s). In the months leading up to comprehensive exams you will likely be inundated with advice on the best study methods. Really, the best method is whatever works for you. Maybe you audio record conversations you have with yourself about the readings, maybe you make flashcards. You could be someone that needs to structure every hour of their day, or a person to whom that degree of structure feels suffocating. Perhaps you discuss the readings with a study buddy over drinks or coffee, or conversely, you might like to study more solitarily. These and dozens of other methods exist – trust yourself to figure out the one that works best for you and run with it.

Don’t lose yourself. Take some evenings off and hang out with friends (or not), allow yourself to watch Netflix between a reading or two, take a long walk and listen to music – whatever feels like a relaxing activity to you, don’t be afraid to do it. In all likelihood that one evening, or one episode of Breaking Bad won’t make or break your experience with comprehensive exams.

All in all, we could seriously use a critical examination of the pedagogical reason these tests exist in this fashion. For now, though, hopefully this framing will help bring the process back down to earth for folks who will be managing this ritual in the future.

Beyond White Canes: Translating Experiential Learning into Student Support

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Building on last week’s post, this week Xan Nowakowski explores importance of supporting and including students with different functional and ability statuses in our research and teaching.  

In my last post honoring White Cane Day, I shared some experiences from my childhood and adolescence that helped me to think about how people with blindness and visual impairment may experience life, as well as the broader importance of taking a proactive approach to accommodating students with disabilities. Today I’ll be sharing a story from early in my teaching career that highlights prejudices and misconceptions students with visual functioning differences often face, ways to address and remove those barriers, and benefits of creating inclusive environments for learning.

I got interested in issues of functioning and accommodation from a young age because my mother, a neuroscientist with multiple forms of visual impairment, helped me to learn about disability both within and outside of educational settings. My own experiences with loss of physical functioning later in life also contributed to this learning, and to my ability to put thinking into practice. These experiences also helped me to understand the rights and responsibilities outlined for students and educators in the Americans with Disabilities Act, first and foremost the idea that people are entitled to “reasonable accommodations”.

So when a graduate student I had just spent 10 minutes on the phone with about participating in a research project sounded hesitant and nervous the whole time we were on the phone, and then said “there’s something else I need to tell you” in a hesitant tone after I expressed enthusiasm for working with them, I certainly didn’t expect the next words out of their mouth to be “I’m blind”. I hadn’t assumed that they could or couldn’t see—this was the first time I’d ever spoken with them—but blindness didn’t seem like a reason to worry that they wouldn’t get the opportunity to participate in research. One of the best scientists I knew had significant vision impairment, and they worked in a highly visual field of study! I had friends with no light perception at all who were engineers, computer scientists, teachers, lawyers, artists, and so much more.

I stayed silent, waiting for the rest, waiting for them to tell me why their blindness might be a barrier to participating in my project that couldn’t be addressed through accommodations, turning the question over in my mind and coming up with nothing. Finally I said, “Okay…I’m sorry for sounding so obtuse here, but why would that impact my decision about working with you?” The silence that followed seemed to stretch on forever before they said “You don’t see that as an issue? I mean, I can’t see *at all*. I have no light perception.”

I didn’t want to dismiss their read on the situation, so I tried to affirm their concerns while also assuring them that they’d be fully accommodated and included. “No. Should I? I’m thinking about what kinds of challenges here could prevent you from participating, and I just don’t know how we wouldn’t be able to work around each one. If you need transportation, that’s easy—you can just ride with me when we go out into the field. If you need assistive technology that you don’t have already, I’ll get it for you or partner you with another student who can do the looking while you do the talking. If you need directions on how to do things that don’t require visual input, I’ll give them to you. And if I screw up any of this, you can be blunt with me about that and I’ll make any needed adjustments.”

My student sounded a little gobsmacked, but accepted my invitation for them and their guide dog to meet with me at my office and get started on the project. I then sent them an email with detailed directions using non-visual landmarks to help them navigate my office building—things like how many paces it takes me to get from the main door to the hallway from my office, when they’d hear a water fountain running, when they’d feel a vent blowing on their face, what the carpeting near my office would feel like beneath their feet. They showed up early, accompanied by a black Labrador Retriever who curled up at my feet while my student and I talked. We went over the key activities for the project, and talked through how we’d approach each one. They showed me their Braille translator, and all the features they liked to use on their computer to read screens and create documents. To this day, I have yet to work with a student who creates clearer or more concise PowerPoint presentations.

My student explained to me that this was a new experience for them—to have a professor show enthusiasm for working with a blind student. This troubled me deeply, and I asked them to promise that if they ever felt even a bit marginalized while working with me, they’d tell me. “If you’re left out in any way,” I stressed, “that’s my problem, not yours, and I have to take responsibility for it. It’s my job to think about what an educational experience is going to be like for you and plan accordingly.” They shook their head. “That’s just it,” they said. “You’re never going to make me feel left out. I already know that. You’re different. It’s like…well, those directions you gave me. It’s like you know how the world feels to me.” Then they paused. “Is that because you have visual impairments too?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No,” I said. “But my mother does. She’s a scientist who built her career on doing incredibly precise and detailed visual tracing of cells in the developing brain. She perceives light, and she uses some different technology than you do, but I learned enough from her to use my imagination. It’s not that hard to close my eyes and think about the input I’m getting from my other senses. And while I don’t have vision limitations myself, I’m losing function in my hands because of an autoimmune disease.” I asked if I could shake their hand, felt them flinch at the icy quality of my skin. “Cold, right? I don’t have much circulation in my fingers. Sometimes they won’t grip and sometimes they freeze up so I can’t use them at all. So I know what it’s like to have a disability and feel terrified that you won’t be able to finish school because of it.”

This seemed to put my student totally at ease, and we got down to real talk about our health conditions and the journeys we’ve taken to manage them. My student showed me one of their glass eyes, painted to exacting perfection. They told me about some of the absurd stereotypes about blindness they had encountered on campus. I thought the strangest one was the anger people had shown when my student wasn’t using a cane to navigate the sidewalks, as if it were their responsibility to wear a sign announcing to the world that they had no light perception. “I’m not about the cane. I have one, but I don’t use it much. Things are so much easier with my dog, so I bring her anywhere I can. And sometimes I just use my hands to navigate. It really depends on the situation and how I feel that day.”

We went over the survey quickly, and agreed to meet up at the formal training for student assistants in a couple of weeks. Having a non-sighted student participate in the project turned out to be a huge win for our team, as well as for their own confidence about what they could accomplish with their graduate degree. Other students didn’t miss a beat, making sure that walking paths in the classroom were clear while also not pushing any assistance that wasn’t desired. My student came prepared with Braille versions of each survey and showed them to the other research assistants. Partnering up wasn’t necessary when the time came to do data collection—we arranged piles of the two surveys at 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock at my student’s station, and they used their Braille versions to read the surveys to anyone who requested help.

My student took the lead on developing presentations to share our data with the community. We’d been learning all summer about health challenges in Havana, a small town north of Tallahassee, and my student excelled in putting all of the data together in a community-friendly PowerPoint. They worked with our other graduate student, who had more quantitative training but did not enjoy qualitative analysis or making presentations nearly as much, to get some statistics for the slides. Both students were invited to speak to the community, but only one accepted—my sighted student hadn’t found their comfort zone yet with public speaking, so I let them take the lead on writing a research report instead while we went out and talked to area residents.

At the meetings, participants were enthralled by the Braille notes my student used to present our results and get feedback from the group. Several people mentioned that it made them feel more comfortable talking about their own health challenges to meet researchers with different functional limitations and chronic conditions. What was a disability in a technical sense became an opportunity in a social one—an indication that people could speak openly about their own experiences without shame or judgment. I had seen this time and again in my own work, but my student said it was a first for them. “It had better not be the last,” I noted. “Your professors and employers have a responsibility to accommodate you for any task that you can safely do.”

It has been a few years since this particular student studied on campus, with or without a white cane. But we have many other students with different types of visual impairments, all of whom go about navigating the campus a bit differently. If you’ve met one person with vision challenges, you’ve met that one person, and you probably met them under a specific set of circumstances where they approached tasks a certain way. Maybe you didn’t know what the world looked like to them, or if it looked like anything at all. But if you asked yourself that question, and really took the time to think about the answer, you performed the most basic task of accommodation and inclusion. As more evidence of that sort of thinking appears on our campus each year, we all have new opportunities to take that thinking to a higher level, and ask ourselves what we can do better in the future.

There’s No Manual for This: Surviving Rape Apologists in the Classroom

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The following anonymous guest post is by a sociology instructor at a public university in the United States. In this post, she reflects on experiences confronting trauma and rape apologists in the evaluation of student assignments.

When I began graduate training, I was inundated with advice about how to survive in my chosen profession. Specifically, I received tips on teaching – how to grade papers efficiently, how to foster a meaningful class discussion, how to have boundaries with students regarding grade contestations and office hours while also creating a safe space for learning. I was told to try and grade students’ work as uniformly and objectively as possible. I value all of this advice, yet I was left unprepared for what would happen in the future when I taught a gender class.

It was the middle of the semester and we were covering rape culture. As any Feminist instructor who has ever taught about rape culture probably knows, covering this topic is challenging for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes we encounter students who realize that they’ve been raped who come to office hours looking for resources. Other times, students learn that they’ve actually committed rape, and struggle to reconcile this with their images of themselves as “good people” and “not one of those (usually) guys.” And many Feminist instructors, especially those who are women, know all too well what it’s like to navigate the “mansplaining” of a few of the men in the class who would like to ardently deny that rape culture exists. Such students may make claims including but not limited to the following:

In response to discussions about the fact that what a woman is wearing does not give someone license to rape her, nor does the rate of rapes have anything to do with clothing choice: “but don’t you think what she was wearing is at least a little important?”

In response to conversations about the structural barriers to reporting rapes, and the estimated number of rapes that go unreported: “But why wouldn’t she report it? It’s kind of on her.”

In response to demonstrating the staggeringly low rates of “false reports” in contrast with the alarmingly high concern lawmakers, the media, and the general public seem to have with this artificial trend: “How do you know that it’s really rape?”

In response to pointing out that someone is incapable of consenting if they’re intoxicated:  “Well don’t you think she should have been more aware of her surroundings? Less drunk? It’s kind of her fault.”

In response to the fact that we live in a society that valorizes men’s violence against and dominance over women: “Boys will be boys.”

Every so often, however, male students may present a reasonable shortcoming of the prevailing rape culture rhetoric, such as “Why don’t we talk about when men experience rape? How can we make space for that dialogue without pushing aside women’s experiences with rape and systemic inequality.”

This is a valid question, and the inquiry is on point. We need to make space for men (as well as non-binary people) to share their experiences with rape since the foreclosure of such space stems from the very same mechanisms of inequality reproduction that facilitate rape culture in the first place.

When I encountered a paper that began with this question in my gender class, I hoped the student would take the paper in that direction.

He started by citing a media example of a case where a woman on a college campus raped a man, and how poorly the campus responded. However, I first felt a twinge in my spine when I looked up the source of his story and traced it back to a Men’s Rights Advocacy (MRA) group. “Okay,” I thought to myself, “students use terrible sources all the time, often because they might not have the skills to distinguish journalism from something like an MRA group. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here and make a note of it for the next paper.”

Unfortunately, his “argument” quickly devolved into a tirade claiming – since he presented ONE case where a man was raped by a woman – Feminism is pointless and women are complaining too much about “their problems.” He wrote that men and women experience rape culture in exactly the same way, and claimed talking about gender inequality was just an effort to make men look bad. He said that women brought these things upon themselves by making people, and specifically men, angry and annoyed via conversations about Feminism and rape culture. He did not even feign a presentation of data to back up his argument after the initial example, but rather, he simply ranted against Feminism, women, and open discussions about the sexual violence women regularly experience.

As I went over his paper, I realized that I was reading a paper that sounded word for word like something my rapist would say. And not only did this sound like something my rapist would say, this student fit the same demographic profile as the man who raped me – White, college male, between the ages of 18-22.

I got up from my desk and went for a walk. I couldn’t concentrate. I had plans to read a book later that afternoon, which were shattered by being thrown back into a pit of traumatic, fragmented memories by this student’s paper. I was furious at the fact that, as an instructor, I was expected to take his paper seriously, and scared of what he might do if he didn’t like his grade. Although I knew it was unlikely that this student would literally try to rape me, his words felt so familiar that I began having trouble distinguishing him from the man that did. Their words were so frighteningly similar that the “rational instructor” side of my brain could not overpower the “trauma survivor” part of my brain.

None of my training or experience prepared me for something like this, not even advice from the few Feminist scholars I have had the pleasure of knowing. I was in a position where I had to take this student’s words seriously, evaluate their merit, and provide a percentile score based on how well I thought they fit the parameters of the assignment.

“ZERO! YOU GET A FUCKING ZERO” I literally screamed at my computer screen. I decided that I wasn’t ready to return to grading papers yet so I got up and went for another walk.

I felt irritated that in two pages of (poorly written) ranting this student was able to undercut whatever authority I thought I had as an instructor. Authority that, especially as a female instructor, I worked hard to establish and maintain. I imagined him sitting on the other side of his computer screen laughing at my pain, joking about my distress. I imagined him being friends with my rapist (though the man who raped me is now significantly older than this student, he is frozen in the 18-22 age bracket in my mind). How, I wondered, could I possibly evaluate this student’s work in an “unbiased” fashion? Such a request would involve me living an entirely different life than the one that I’ve had.

I returned to my computer late that night. I pulled up his paper, took a deep breath, and began to read it again. No one ever advised me about how to grade a paper that sounds like something my rapist would say, so I suppose I will have to train myself. After all, I am certain that I am not the only instructor to have to navigate this dynamic, and I’m sure this won’t be the last time I have to navigate it.

Our Peers, Ourselves: Introspective Tips for Insightful Reviews

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This week’s post is the final in a four part series where Xan and J share experience and tips managing academic publication and reviewing.  In this post, Xan provides tips for being a good reviewer.

Hello readers! Xan here again for our second of two posts on peer review. Last week I shared my thoughts on how peer review often goes wrong, as well as some general discussion on how it can go entirely right. This week, I’m following up with specific strategies to help you write awesome peer reviews that will support your fellow scholars in doing great work while also building your reputation as a professional.

Becoming a great peer reviewer is first and foremost about finding meaningful ways to connect with and support your fellow scholars when you can’t show your face or tell them your name. To do this effectively requires remembering one thing first and foremost, which brings me to my first suggestion to help you become the best reviewer you can be.

  1. Remember that today’s peer reviewers are tomorrow’s authors…and vice versa.

We all dream of receiving kind, thoughtful reviews that help us get to the top of our game as writers and thinkers. We can also probably point to at least a few examples from our careers where reviewers did exactly that, regardless of what the journal editor’s final decision was. Those reviews are the real game-changers, yet they are unnecessarily rare. It’s easier to write a thoughtful and constructive review—especially in cases where you have serious concerns about the methods or findings in a paper—if you remember that the authors truly are your peers. It’s easier still if you stop to think that tomorrow the tables may turn, and the same people might be reviewing one of your own papers. Model your reviews after the kind of feedback you yourself wish to receive!

  1. Read every word of the manuscript with care and consideration.

In academia as well as the applied world, we are often required to read and digest huge amounts of text in small amounts of time. This is a great skill to have, but there are some specific ways to apply it that will help you get the most out of a first manuscript reading so that you can write a really dynamite review. Ordinarily I am the supreme overlord of reading electronically, but I never do this for a peer review. Why? Reading in hard copy helps me to savor every word of the manuscript as if I were reading a favorite poem, and to think about all the ways in which I could possibly interpret each phrase.  This is crucial to writing excellent peer reviews, not only because it gives you a phenomenally solid grasp of the manuscript content, but also because it makes giving authors the benefit of the doubt much easier. How many times have you received a review in which you were asked to do something that you’d already done quite explicitly in your first draft—or worse, attacked for not doing that thing? Don’t be that reviewer. Instead, be the reviewer whose comments are accurate and precise. Editors and authors alike will appreciate your efforts!

  1. Take good notes and save them until a final decision on the manuscript has been provided.

To help you make those accurate and precise comments that will get you to the top of your reviewing game, take concise but thorough notes in line with the text that you can then use to write a point-by-point review. I suggest coding these notes with symbols that tell you where in the review to incorporate each piece of feedback.   Your specific system will vary depending on the precise structure you prefer for your reviews, but most editors will suggest that you offer some distinction between major issues with the manuscript and minor points for improvement.

  1. Consider that something being new or different doesn’t automatically make it wrong.

To be clear, major issues are things like conclusions that aren’t supported by the data, unclear relationships between the literature cited in the “front matter” and the content of the later sections, or weaknesses in the research methods that fundamentally call the findings into question. Some things that are *not* major issues include: need for English-language editing services, typographical or grammatical errors, unconventional choices of pronouns or identity labels, etc. Reviews often become a hotbed for microaggressions towards people who differ from ourselves in one or more ways. It’s much easier to keep the focus on the content when you take careful, detailed notes about why you think something is an issue and what you’d suggest the authors do about it. In cases where there really is a serious issue with the research, it’s also much easier to back up your concerns when you have a detailed record of your thinking.

  1. When you feel tempted to pass judgment on something, ask a question instead.

In my experience as a reviewer, for every paper with such severe flaws as to suggest problematic motives on the part of the authors, there have been numerous others with shortcomings owing more to clarity of expression or thoroughness of explanation than to conflicts of interest. When reviewing a paper that raises “red flags” in your mind, think about how you would want a fellow scholar to respond if they had similar concerns about your own work. Would you want them to eviscerate you on the spot for the possibility of your work not being honest, or would you want them to ask thoughtful questions and encourage you to share the facts before passing judgment? Give your authors enough rope to hang themselves. In most cases, you’ll find that said rope quickly becomes a lifeline that can rescue a sinking argument. And if you still have questions after the final version of a paper appears in print, why not write a thoughtful letter to the editor in response, and net yourself an additional publication while promoting constructive scholarly dialogue?

  1. If you make a suggestion, substantiate it with specific strategies and helpful resources.

I don’t know about all of you, but I love those reviews where someone suggests a change and then offers a citation or two to help me make it. That’s a great way to get yourself noticed as a constructive reviewer, and to make a great impact on the final published research. Humans are remarkably like other creatures in that if we can see a path of least resistance, we are likely to take it and do so gladly. Offer your authors a clear path to greatness and encourage them to follow it! To frame your comments, think about the most helpful and encouraging feedback you received from your mentors in school, whether at the undergraduate or graduate level, and try to emulate that. Point out the precise reasons for which a specific item needs improvement, articulate a concrete strategy for making those improvements, and affirm that the end product will be stronger for the authors’ efforts in implementing your feedback.

  1. Know that being a great reviewer means both speaking thoughtfully and listening attentively.

As reviewers and as writers, we are stronger together than we are individually, especially when we take the time to look out for one another as we do for ourselves. This means not only sharing our own ideas, but also taking the time to consider the insights and perspectives of others whose experiences and contexts may differ substantially from our own. So I’ll put my money where my writing is and turn the floor over to our readers. What tips do all of you have for writing spectacular peer reviews? What lessons have you learned during your time as a peer reviewer that you’d like to pass along to others?

We encourage all of you to share your experiences in the comments—let’s make this one of those supposedly rare Internet postings where it actually *is* a good idea to read the comments—and spread that wisdom around to your colleagues. Writing Where It Hurts about your experiences with peer review makes it easier for all of us to review where it helps!

Doc Eat Doc World? Thinking Differently About Peer Review

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This week’s post is the third in a four part series where Xan and J share experience and tips managing academic publication and reviewing.  In this post, Xan discusses the elements of being a good reviewer and some ways to capitalize on reviewing opportunities in terms of careers and networks.

Hello readers, Xan here! Over the last couple weeks, we got some great tips from J on how to publish a whole bunch – see here and here. This week, I’m offering some insights on sitting at that other side of the publishing table: being a reviewer! I’ll follow up this first post next week with my own top tips for writing awesome peer reviews, and building your reputation as a scholar in the process.

Writing peer reviews is a great way to support your fellow scholars and have a hand in getting good research published. There’s a lot of good research floating around out there in peer review, so this is a very important task! Serving as a peer reviewer also provides you with the opportunity to strengthen manuscripts that are merely okay with suggestions that help the authors make them truly great.

It also certainly doesn’t hurt that writing peer reviews for a diverse array of journals looks great on your CV. If you’re Writing Where It Hurts on the regular by doing scholarship and outreach on controversial topics, or if you occupy a marginalized social location within academia, or if you just want that promotion so badly you can taste it, writing awesome peer reviews can help you get there! Being a peer reviewer helps you to shine not only by diversifying your record of professional service, but also by increasing your own chances of publishing in the journals of your choice.

As J pointed out earlier this fall, publishing a lot is very much about building strong relationships with editors at your target journals. Offering your services as a peer reviewer and writing thoughtful, constructive reviews is a wonderful way to accomplish this. There are certainly others, of course, but being a dependable and affirming peer reviewer is one of the best.

Editors absolutely do take notice of the content and quality of reviews you submit. And if you’re writing good ones, odds are you’ll receive more than a few emails from editors expressing gratitude for your excellent work, and urging you to submit your own work to that journal. Here at Write Where It Hurts, we get a lot of these emails, and we’d like to spread that good fortune around to as many people as possible.

Making an editor’s day with a really excellent manuscript review hardly requires a doctoral degree—indeed, it’s something all of you readers can do even if you are still in graduate school. Writing good reviews isn’t about the particular credentials you hold, but rather the critical thinking skills and spirit of curiosity you brought with you upon matriculation.

Of course, if you’re in graduate school right now, you’re probably also hearing a fair few horror stories about the peer review process. We all have them, and if you’re looking to publish a lot, your best bet is to treat them like literal horror stories—i.e., macabre entertainment. A certain neuroscientist whom I admire greatly once regaled me with tales of how a peer reviewer told her that her manuscript “should really be two papers, neither of which should be published”. She went on to publish the paper in another top journal.

J has given you plenty of excellent ideas for turning garbage into gold when receiving spiteful or just plain incoherent peer reviews. I’ll give you my own detailed perspectives later on how to write a truly golden review, even in those cases where you may think that a paper is absolute garbage. I have had this thought precisely once in the course of many years as a peer reviewer, and approached reviewing it from the perspective of coaching the research team in salvaging the paper if at all possible. The review earned me lengthy accolades from the journal’s editor, who in turn strongly encouraged the authors to incorporate my feedback for future submissions.

So I speak from experience in saying that the secret to writing good peer reviews is first and foremost to remember that we are all in this together. Although our perspectives as scholars may differ dramatically at times, we are ultimately part of a shared community of learners and teachers. We do our best work as members of this community when we remember that we do not stand in it alone, and that anonymity does not equate to null consequences for our own behavior. Even anonymity itself is a fantasy, of course. While the authors may never know who wrote that petty and vitriolic review, the editors certainly do, and they will remember.

Perhaps the more important question here, though, is why anyone would *want* to hit their fellow scholars below the belt in the first place. It’s a question I can’t answer with a high amount confidence because the correct response likely varies by individual, but I can certainly make some educated guesses. The hateful peer reviewer is academia’s equivalent of the Internet troll, a person whose only socially acceptable outlet for rage, which likely owes to a fair amount of perceived marginalization in their own life, is ranting into the abyss.

I suspect every person reading this article has experienced marginalization on at least one occasion in their life, and in turn entered a sort of “sneaky hate spiral” in which they eventually lose their composure and all semblance of social graces over a seemingly innocuous exchange. I’ve been there myself, and look back with a mixture of regret and empathy at those times where I’ve chewed out a customer service representative or scathingly silenced a grocery bagger for asking one too many questions about my personal life.

But likewise, I’ve tried to use those moments as an opportunity to understand what makes us find so much satisfaction in cutting down someone who has no power over us in the first place—and to use them as a means of connecting meaningfully with them and others afterwards. Beyond the world of academia, this has led me not only to apologize on the spot if I’ve snapped at someone, but also to explain what led me to do so. Without fail, the other person has responded with appreciation and compassion.

So what if we could do the same as peer reviewers—or better yet, simply jump ahead to the territory of sharing and connectedness? In my experience, we can and sometimes do…and it’s easier than we might think. Tune in next week for some tips on bridging the gap between criticism and critique by exploring our own thoughts as we examine those of others.

All the Pain Money Can Buy: How Far We Haven’t Come with Pain Control

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Editor Xan Nowakowski, whose own experiences with a painful chronic disease have inspired much of their own research, reflects on seven years of scholarship on clinical pain management, and what they have learned from lived experience along the way.

When I started doing pain management research as a graduate student at Rutgers in 2008, it was an exciting time for the field. New technologies as well as off-label uses of less recent ones like the Interstim device seemed to hold tremendous promise, and intrathecal pumps and ambulatory catheters were achieving significant penetrance among a variety of service populations. Especially in the world of post-surgical pain management, new reasons to envision a bright future were cropping up all the time.

In the long-term pain management field, pharmaceutical companies were racing to develop drugs to address underlying causes of chronic pain. At the time, I was taking one of those drugs—Elmiron, the much-lauded “wonder drug” for management of interstitial cystitis. Those of us with chronic conditions dared to hope a bit too, even as we rode the capricious waves of hope and despair that living with persistent illness always seems to bring.

The summer of 2009 was a watershed time for me. I was completing my Master of Public Health fieldwork, preparing to finish the program, and thinking about my next moves. Though I did not know it at the time, within six months of completing my research I would make the life-changing decision to move to Florida. I would leave behind the place where chronic pain had brought me to the brink of suicide, and where I had learned firsthand why pain and post-traumatic stress so often go hand in hand.

I drove all around New Jersey that summer, interviewing hospital providers and administrators about the pain management modalities they provided, and the barriers they encountered in offering alternatives to opioid narcotics. One of the most instructive aspects of my own experience with chronic pain had been the Scylla and Charybdis choice I faced for over a decade, trying to reconcile my fears of opioid dependency and functional disability with my equally pervasive fears of ultimately losing my will to continue living with intractable agony. I would later learn that I was hardly alone in these fears.

The hospital personnel I interviewed were many, representing about 35 percent of all hospitals in New Jersey. They held a variety of advanced degrees and came from a variety of backgrounds, with differences in beliefs and practices that reflected the variations in their training. But what stood out most to me was the levels and awareness and compassion I consistently observed in the people I interviewed. Every single person I talked to viewed chronic pain as a serious problem worthy of serious clinical attention.

Likewise, each and every one of them reported feeling frustrated with insurance companies’ lack of willingness to pay for non-opioid treatment modalities. According to my study participants, this was the most prominent barrier to providing what they viewed as truly effective and responsive pain management in accordance with national guidelines. We shared those frustrations—I told my story to many of those providers after we wrapped up our interviews, and learned a lot of things “off the record” that have informed much of the work I have done since.

The people I interviewed shared my frustrations over care practices not being able to keep pace with scientific innovations as a result of funding barriers. Predictably, these problems were often worst in hospitals with a high charity care population. Some of these hospitals found creative solutions for their patients with chronic pain from conditions like sickle cell anemia by working with local Federally Qualified Health Centers. But as often happens in low-resource communities, need for these services greatly exceeded clinics’ capacity to provide them.

We still had plenty of reasons to hope, though. With so many new medications and technologies hitting the market and starting to permeate best practice recommendations for clinical care, there was ample justification for thinking about a pipeline effect in which impactful innovations would reach more and more health care users with each passing year, becoming more affordable in the process. The promise of affordable health care legislation from the Obama administration gave additional weight to this vision.

The summer of 2015 is now drawing to a close, and once again I am wrapping up a study on clinical pain management. This time I had a partner in research and less driving to do, and a ready team of MPH students and undergraduate research assistants eager to assist. We conducted semi-structured interviews with university health care providers, working excitedly to fill a gaping hole in the published literature on pain management. We had a wonderful experience getting to know one another and completing our study, and I loved every moment of watching my students shine as they enhanced their key informant interviewing and qualitative content analysis skills.

Yet as we finish coding our data and begin writing up our findings, my happiness has become increasingly bittersweet. My students’ achievements mean everything to me, and always will. Their thoroughness, however, has proven to be a double-edged sword. What my students unearthed in their probing of our study participants was an old familiar tale that rang all too true: lots of good options offered up by science, but no functional translation of these modalities into affordable clinical care for people with chronic pain.

It is 2015, and I still have to carry a bottle of opioid medication everywhere I go. This mostly achieves the purpose of quelling the crippling fear of not being able to control my pain if nothing else works. Indeed, the literature suggests that often the most helpful aspect of opioid medications is their ability to confer a sense of mastery to people who live with painful conditions. I feel this restoration of personal agency quite a bit when sitting in relative comfort as I am now, typing away on an article or blog post that makes me feel like my own experiences are gifts that yield professional insight.

I do not feel it as much during those times every few weeks when I lie curled up beneath my desk, praying into empty air that my medication will kick in. I do not feel it when phenazopyridine stains the edges of the toilet bowl, or when bleach fumes rise into my nostrils as I wipe away the evidence of how far we haven’t come in providing real options for people like me.   I especially do not feel it when the phenazopyridine fails to enhance the effect of the diphenhydramine I have already taken, and I have to reach for the bottle of narcotic tablets that I still associate with defeat.

I also do not feel any mastery when I remember why I stopped taking Elmiron—the surreal moment of standing in my parents’ kitchen holding an absurdly dainty gingham-topped jam jar of my own urine, staring in suspicion at the rubbery threads of unidentifiable discharge that had started appearing with alarming frequency. I had a moment where I realized that urinating through a tea strainer to catch “specimens” was about my limit. One is perceived as deviant enough when one lives with a mysterious autoimmune disease, even without making a habit of urinating in jars to inspect the contents.

I should interject that these shortcomings in the field are not entirely the fault of insurance companies. As the Affordable Care Act was being developed and organizations like the Institute of Medicine were continuing to refine their recommendations for best practices in clinical pain control, a storm was brewing that set the field of innovative chronic pain management back substantially. The retraction of some two dozen published studies on multimodal analgesia crippled other clinicians’ efforts to incorporate integrative approaches using new therapies into their own programs of care. As predicted, the field has yet to recover fully.

Of course, when you live with a painful chronic disease, you learn quickly that you never truly recover. Your body changes; your life changes; and your brain changes right along with them. Illness management becomes the name of the game—one that often feels like Whac-a-Mole rather than a game in which one defeats a series of bosses and wins. Good science, conducted by people with curious minds and compassionate hearts, is one of the best weapons we have in this game. But abuses of research ethics—even by scientists who may have the best of intentions in mind—can leave us fighting fisticuffs against enemies we cannot hope to vanquish on our own.

Later this fall, I will be doing a follow-up post here about the 2009 multimodal analgesia scandal and its broader implications for ethics in medical research, adding a perspective of lived experience to the insights offered by other clinicians as they reacted to the news about Dr. Scott Reuben’s research fabrications. In the meantime, I know that when many of you Write Where It Hurts, you are doing so in the most concrete and literal sense possible! So I encourage all of our readers to share stories and insights about pain management, including any research you have done on the topic and any lived experiences that inform your work.