Not all forms of publications are valued the same. Some offer high status, have a large impact in terms of being offered permanent positions and make it easier to obtain external research funding. Others are less important. According to Karen Kelsky, author of The Professor Is In (2015), recognizing the hierarchies in publication constitutes one of the crucial differences between established academics and PhD students. The former know what counts and act accordingly. The latter grope in the dark.
In particular, Kelsky advises her readers not to get published in the form of book chapters in edited volumes. For anyone wanting to work in academia, these kinds of chapters, as well as book reviews, represent a waste of time and energy. The focus should instead be on peer-reviewed journal articles (“the gold standard”) and, in book-based fields such as history, publishing monographs with renowned publishers. Such articles make you competitive for being given a tenure-track position, while a book gives you tenure. Book chapters represent a way of burying your research and hampering your career.
If Kelsky is right, then the majority of Swedish historians are doing it wrong. Here, a large amount of research is published in the form of edited volumes. In fact, some fields and research environments are created around these. What would media history look like had it not been for edited volumes? What would the research field related to historical cultures look like? Obviously, the individual academics in these fields have also published journal articles and books. But edited volumes have played a key role in terms of creating larger conversations and networks. Collective book projects bring people closer together and create shared points of reference. It’s hard to overemphasize the value of this, in particular in the long run.
As far as I am concerned, I have had good experiences during the last couple of years working in and with various edited volume projects. A particularly successful example here is the newly published Efterkrigstidens samhällskontakter (2019) edited by Fredrik Norén and Emil Stjernholm. For the editors, this was a side project they were engaged in at the same time as they were finishing their respective theses. Many supervisors would advise against doing this, but I would argue that it represents an excellent way of preparing yourself for life as a postdoc. Being an editor offers you experience, contacts and visibility – three things that play an important role in making the transition from PhD student to postdoc as smooth as possible. In addition, it offers skills in relation to juggling several projects at the same time. And such skills are critical after you receive your PhD.
In my view, Efterkrigstidens samhällskontakter is an excellent book. I hope it gets a large number of engaged readers. But even if it’s not read, discussed or used all that widely, it will have played an important role simply by coming into being. This is because the process leading to a finished book has been exemplary. It started with a symposium in the fall of 2017, continued with two workshops in 2018, and simultaneously with the final work in 2019, the book has been presented at a number of conferences. Some individuals have participated in all of these steps. Others only in some of them. Without a doubt, however, all of these seminars, lunches, coffee breaks and dinners have resulted in a group of people getting to know each other reasonably well.
This social function, I would argue, is the most important function of the edited volume genre. In this regard, these books do something journal articles and monographs do not. They help create the social networks upon which scholarly conversations are based.
Sure, it is possible to organize workshops, symposiums and seminar series without these resulting in edited volumes or a special issue. In my experience, however, collaborations are strengthened when working toward some form of joint product. This involves a great deal of work – especially for the editors – but for the scholarly community as a whole, it represents a deeply meaningful endeavor.
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