Reading Peer Review

This Element presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which the authors had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core

Suffering and pain: Racialized immigrant women’s use of mental health services in Lethbridge, Alberta

NADrawing on in-depth interviews with 13 racialized immigrant women, this research explores experiences of using mental health services in Lethbridge, Alberta. The women’s narratives serve as a thread linking psychiatric, neoliberal, colonial, patriarchal, and other power relations. The treatments focused on the women’s concerns as individualized; the resulting prescription of antidepressants and psychotherapy required self-colonization to relieve their pain, complicating several women’s experiences of using mental health services. Some women found medical interventions beneficial to their wellbeing, while others resisted psychiatric knowledge at various points because of the embodied suffering they faced, and their reliance on conflicting cultural beliefs and healing systems. By analyzing these women’s experiences, I offer a rethinking of the biomedical conceptualization of mental illness as a natural and universally occurring pathology. Ultimately, I argue that current framings of mental illness obscure the intersectional power relations that played an important role in contributing to these women’s distress.N

Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia

How do you change the world of academia and what insight can peer review provide into this question? The study of academic peer review is often difficult owing to the confidentiality of reports. As an occluded genre of writing that nonetheless underpins scientific publication, relatively little is known about the ways that academics write and behave, at scale, in their reviewing practices. In this book, we describe for the first time the database of peer review reports at PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world, to which we had unique access. Specifically, this book presents the background contexts and histories of peer review, the data-handling sensitivities of this type of research, the typical properties of reports in the journal to which we had access, a taxonomy of the reports, and their sentiment arcs. This unique work thereby yields a compelling and unprecedented set of insights into the evolving state of peer review in the twenty-first century, at a crucial political moment for the transformation of science. It also, though, presents a study in radicalism and the ways in which PLOS’s vision for science can be said to have effected change in the ultra-conservative contemporary university

Interview on Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia

An interview for the New Books Network about Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academi