CALL FOR PAPERS
Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge
Submission Deadline: April 1, 2008
Editor of the theme-based Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge (ISSN: 1540-5699) seeks scholarly papers (about 20-35 pages), short essays and commentaries (5-15 pages) or book/article reviews (3-5 pages) in sociology and from across the disciplines on the following themes for three of its upcoming Volume VI issues. Initial abstracts and/or brief letters of intent or inquiry regarding the thematic relevance of proposed submissions are highly encouraged and should be emailed as early as possible to the journal editor mohammad.tamdgidi@umb.edu. The submission deadline for all the three themes is April 1, 2008.
I. Comparative Sociological Imaginations: The Asiatic Modes of Liberation and the Engaged Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh
II. Peer Reviewing Peer Review Regimes in Light of Critical Social Theory: Hi/stories, Structures, Contradictions, and Renovations of an Academic Interaction Ritual
III. From the Classroom: Scholarships of Learning and Teaching the Sociological Imagination
For submission guidelines, peer reviewing policy, and further elaborations on the issue themes, please read further below.
Human Architecture is published online free of charge, in hard copy, and as book, the individual issues being also assigned ISBN numbers. Contents are compiled in Sociological Abstracts and in Ebsco’s SocINDEX with Full-Text, accessible in subscribing academic libraries worldwide.
Mohammad H. (Behrooz) Tamdgidi, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Editor, Human Architecture
Department of Sociology
University of Massachusetts Boston
100 Morrissey Blvd.
Boston, MA 02125
Office Phone: 617.287.3954
Email: mohammad.tamdgidi@umb.edu
Website: http://www.okcir.com
Submission Guidelines
The editor adheres to a firm scheduling timeline in order to compile and publish the issues of each volume during and by the end of every summer. Given the scheduling constraints, there will not be time for revision/resubmission considerations. Papers will be selected on accepted or rejected basis ONLY. For this reason, submissions need to be final, as far as BOTH content and form are concerned, and therefore it is possible that a paper may be rejected purely due to technical reasons such as significant grammar and spelling errors, structural shortcomings, inadequate citations, or inaccurate bibliographic data.
Given scheduling considerations, authors will not have a chance to reread any galley proofs and the editor reserves the right to correct any obvious grammatical, spelling, or other errors or shortcomings to expedite the annual publication schedule. In regard to citations, as long as authors are consistent in using their preferred disciplinary styles, they will be acceptable. However, if possible and in doubt, please use the ASA Style Guide, a brief summary of which can be found online at http://www.calstatela.edu/library/bi/rsalina/asa.styleguide.html.
Please submit papers only electronically as a Microsoft Word attachment set in Times 12 font. Include in the same file a title page stating full institutional affiliation(s), a specializations/publications bio of about 50 words in length, and email, academic, and (if available) web addresses. Papers should be accompanied, in the same file and after the title page, by an abstract of about 100-150 words in length. Please double-space all text except for the abstract, foot/endnotes, bibliography, and any quotations blocks—which should be single-spaced. There is no need to send blinded versions of the file. If there are figures, please provide them as part of the Word document and separately, as a jpeg or standard graphic file (Tiff or eps, for instance) set at medium resolution.
All submissions should be sent as email attachments to the journal’s editor mohammad.tamdgidi@umb.edu. Contributors whose papers are selected and published will receive a complimentary hard copy of the journal upon publication. Authors are solely responsible for obtaining copyright permissions for the quotes, figures, or any other material borrowed from other sources; authors submitting to the journal will be assumed to have obtained such copyright permissions and can furnish them upon request.
Human Architecture is open to the republication of previously published articles provided written permissions are sought and furnished from the original publisher(s). Contributors publishing in Human Architecture are welcome to publish their papers elsewhere for further exposure to other specific target audiences; if so, acknowledgment of previous publication in Human Architecture is not necessary but will be appreciated. Authors retain copyrights to their works and share the same with Human Architecture for hard copy and online publication and databasing of their contributions.
Peer Reviewing Policy
Papers published in Human Architecture pass through rigorous initial selection by the editor (in consultation with the editorial board if needed) in regard to their thematic fit, coherence of argument, innovativeness, and quality of writing, in consideration of the scope, nature, and intended purpose of the journal. Efforts will be made to accommodate as many qualified submissions as possible in the online publication of the journal while the publication in hard copy may be more selective, depending on the volume of submissions received. Rather than subjecting contributions to blind and one-sided pre-publication peer reviewing mechanisms, Human Architecture advocates and practices ongoing post-publication peer reviewing models taking advantage of new electronic technologies. Efforts in further establishing such post-publication peer reviewing mechanisms for the journal are under way and will be made available by the time of publication of the current volume of the journal.
Human Architecture adheres to the peer-reviewing principle for advancing scholarship, but aims to design and build new scholarly avenues to meet this requirement—seeking mechanisms that foster openness of inquiry and transparent evaluation; mechanisms that invite constructive judgments subject to free, open, and mutually interactive, not blinded and one-sided, peer reviewing practices; mechanisms that can be employed as widely and dynamically as possible among specialist and interested scholars in the field who value the need for the proliferation of new, critical, and innovative personal and global insights and transformations.
To meet the highest standards of scholarship, liberatory editorial practices need to transition from static peer reviewed to dynamic peer reviewing models that de-couple publication from defective pre-publication peer review requirements, and engage in alternative peer review practices that remain open to all those wishing to review a manuscript at any time in the post-publication phase—encouraging expanded and deepening exchanges among scholars, authors and readers alike. They need to invite critical thinking about prevailing and dominant paradigms and inflame creative spirits to forge new scholarly horizons and intellectual landscapes. And they need to embrace the subaltern voices in the academia and beyond, voices of those who have been deprived of cultivating their sociological imaginations through traditional scholarly publishing avenues.
Post-publication Peer Review Conferencing: Upon publication of each volume, contributors whose papers have been published will be requested to initiate peer reviewing of at least one other contribution (as volunteered and/or proposed by the editor) from the same journal issue in which their own contribution appeared. Such de-coupling of the peer reviewing process from publication decision considerations is aimed at substantive enrichment of peer review and interaction in a constructive, open, transparent, and widespread dialogical environment undertaken online. As “Conference Preceedings,” publication will then be regarded as a first step in an ongoing post-publication peer review conferencing.
Human Architecture warmly invites contributors and readers to peer review the articles published in its hard copy and online pages and to openly share their critical and constructive insights with one another in the future chronicles of this journal. (For further elaboration of the journal's current perspective and policy regarding peer reviewing, please visit here.)
I. Comparative Sociological Imaginations: The Asiatic Modes of Liberation and the Engaged Buddhism of Thich Nhat Hanh
… Break the chain, … be free, ... O boy!
How long will you remain that gold's toy?!
Say you have oceans, but how can you pour
All oceans in a single day's jar, more and more?!
The greedy's eye-jar will never fill up;
No pearl, if oyster's mouth doesn't give up. …
—Rumi, from The Song of the Reed
Karl Marx developed, borrowing from Hegel, his rather derogatory concept of the static Asiatic mode of production as one determined by the arid conditions thought to have characterized the landmass spanning west, south, central, and east Asia where the need for channeling water to cultivate the land necessitated the building of massive structures that in turn laid the economic basis for the rise of highly centralized states dominated by despots claiming god-like status. Given the materialist, secular, atheist, antireligious, and orientalist frameworks shaping the classical Marxist view of the East and of Asia, it was not surprising to note its minimal appreciations of the conceptual and intellectual innovations brought on, in religious form, by the often inaccessible and esoteric mystical traditions emergent from the region—traditions that were themselves often shaped in distinction from the more visibly dominant political, cultural, and economic milieu of the world-systems housing them.
The inner subjectivist, culturally determined, and enchanted modes of liberation informing Asian mysticisms in their diverse regional forms—such as esoteric fountainheads of Buddhism in east, Hinduism in south, and Islam and generally monotheism in west and central, Asia—subject the global, politico-economic, and scientific/secular frameworks of modern antisystemic thinking and movements to critical scrutiny. As such, they can provide opportunities for fostering new conversations in favor of infusing the complex geographies of inner experience into the largely global and world-historical geographies of what Immanuel Wallerstein has called utopistics (simultaneous exercises in politics, morality, and science) in favor of its more inclusive and comparative variant utopystics (integative explorations in utopia, mysticism, and science).
Western discourses on the nature of the just society have often oscillated between arguments for private or collective property ownership; in the mystical traditions, by contrast, the very possessive and “attached” attitude toward things (be they physical things, ideas, feelings, sensations, relations, or processes, etc.), individual or collective, is the very factor that is problematized as being the source of much of the human suffering. In one the purpose is a “world to win,” in another, it is to lose habitual attachments to it. In one the earth belongs to humanity, in another, humanity to the earth. One may choose to interpret this difference in the narrow sense of a distinction between asceticism and world-embracing behavior. But in a different vain one may regard such a consideration in terms of the awareness of the limits the human propensity to habituation sets on the development and application of human creative powers to understand and transform the inner and broader human social landscapes in favor of a just global society.
The events in Burma (Myanmar) more recently, and those surrounding Tibetan struggle for independence during the past several decades, have highlighted the socially engaged role Buddhism is playing and/or can play in world spirituality and politics. However, one of the most sociologically instructive, conceptually distinctive, and philosophically innovative traditions in Buddhism today that has for decades made simultaneous self- and social knowledge and engagement a centerpiece of its spiritual practice, is that associated with the teachings of the Vietnamese Buddhist and long-time peace activist, Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay) who was nominated in 1967 by Marin Luther King, Jr., for a Nobel Peace Prize.
In this issue of the journal the aim will be to comparatively visit Thich Nhat Hanh's philosophy and spiritual theory and practice from a sociological and social scientific vantage point, in order to highlight the significance his teaching bears for the development not only of a self-reflective, but also a globally humanist, as well as environmentally concerned, sociological imagination. Particular attention may be devoted to Thay’s notion of “interbeing,” of his sociology of meditation as a moving (and not just sitting) “mindfulness” in the midst (and not in retreat) from life, as well as the extent to which these and others of his conceptual frameworks and practices acquire their true meaning in the midst of the “engaged Buddhism” advocated and practiced by Thich Nhat Hanh throughout the past decades.
Another important dimension of the theme explored in this issue will be to set Thich Nhat Hanh's contributions to theorizing and practicing alternative spiritual and social emancipatory strategies in a comparative context. This is to be pursued both in terms of enriching the notion and practice of the sociological imagination as introduced by C. Wright Mills in a cross-cultural context, and in terms of exploring the extent to which other mystical traditions associated or not with Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American Spirituality, etc., overlap and/or contrast with the hybrid self and broader liberatory concerns as developed and practiced in Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching.
While the focus will be on the comparative study of Thay’s teaching to the extent possible, papers dealing with the broader theme of the issue will be welcomed and considered as well.
II. Peer Reviewing Peer Review Regimes in Light of Critical Social Theory: Hi/stories, Structures, Contradictions, and Renovations of an Academic Interaction Ritual
“The problem with peer review is that we have good evidence on its deficiencies and poor evidence on its benefits. We know that it is expensive, slow, prone to bias, open to abuse, possibly anti-innovatory, and unable to detect fraud. We also know that the published papers that emerge from the process are often grossly deficient. Research presented at the conference [Third International Congress on Peer Review held in Prague in 1997] showed, for instance, that reports of randomised controlled trials often fail to mention previous trials and do not place their work in the context of what has gone before; that routine reviews rarely have adequate methods and are hugely biased by specialty and geography in the references they quote …; and that systematic reviews rarely define a primary outcome measure.” (Richard Smith, “Peer Review: Reform or Revolution? Time to Open Up the Black Box of Peer Review,” British Medical Journal, 1997, 315:759-760) (http://www.junkscience.com/news/bmjpeer.html)
The peer review process is an essential and vital mechanism in scholarly production and distribution of knowledge through which a given manuscript (prospective article, book, etc.) is subjected to the consideration, evaluation, and vetting of peers (“referees”) who specialize in a given field. The objective and hope are that in the course of the review process a general consensus may appear (or not) regarding the value of the topic, substance, methods, style, coherence, relevance, and significance of a particular research/report in the context of others preceding it.
A significant requirement of any serious scholarship, however, also remains that of subjecting all things, ideas, processes, and mechanisms to critical reassessment—and not accepting them in an a priori fashion as gospels of truth. Especially in social scientific and sociological inquiry, it is essential to maintain a critical attitude toward reified social constructs and practices, which in this case should include the prevailing mechanisms of peer reviewing. This is especially important, since peer reviewing is itself the mechanism using which the scholarly nature of the knowledge production process is itself determined.
Problematizing what we take for granted as established norms and practices in the academic everyday life, and awareness of the subjective considerations that shape “objective” decisions made by academic social actors, are important scholarly practices that in fact should directly arise from sound sociological applications of phenomenological and symbolic interaction theories in sociology. Why is it that despite accumulating facts and new technologies in the Age of Information, traditional forms of peer reviewing mechanisms are not subjected to institutional self-evaluation, problematization, and transformation? What front-stage and back-stage dynamics and considerations also characterize the dramaturgy of prevalent peer reviewing practices as an academic interaction ritual? Are prevalent peer review mechanisms in fact conducive to scholarly and scientific endeavors or do they fetter them?
Are class, gender, “race”/ethnic, belief, age, and other forms of diversity effectively and fairly accommodated in an allegedly “blinded” peer review system? Is “blinded” peer reviewing in fact possible and has it ever actually existed, given the role played by editors in selecting peer reviewers and finally judging their reviews with full knowledge of the identities of both authors and referees? And if “blinded” peer reviewing were possible, would the practice of mechanically separating an author’s work from her or his intellectual biography and socio-historical context and background run counter to some of the basic findings of the sociology of knowledge and science, and the needed appreciation of social and biographical groundedness of scientific and scholarly discourse? Can bias really be entirely eliminated, or is it not the point, as Karl Mannheim reminded us, to become consciously aware of the social groundedness of thinking in others, and, more importantly, in oneself? Does the expectation of anonymity and “blindness” in peer reviewing run counter to C. Wright Mills’s invitation to cultivate our sociological imaginations by making it our very purpose to explicitly and consciously investigate how our personal troubles and public issues constitute one another?
Rational choice decision-making and social exchange and networking considerations, also highly central to the issues explored in social theory, seem to be of particular relevance to the peer review decision-making process. Macrosociological theories of (neo)functionalism, conflict theory, and postmodern discourses in sociology and social theory should make us highly sensitive to and aware of, for instance, the manifest and latent functions prevailing mechanisms of peer review serve in scholarly publishing; how the process can be subjected to socio-economic, political, and ideological factors and interests both intra-academic and in relation to the publishing industry externally; and how such taken-for-granted mechanisms in scholarly knowledge production can be problematized and deconstructed in favor of designing and building alternatively functional, transparent, and open procedural frameworks more conducive to innovative scholarship. In what ways are prevailing peer reviewing mechanisms obstructive of fostering diversities of viewpoints and perspectives in the marketplace of ideas as found in formal academic publications? Do such mechanisms (inadvertently) allow for the possibility of academic censorship and obstruction of free speech? Why are the viewpoints of referees automatically empowered in the decision making process and not equally subjected to peer reviewing and evaluation by others (for instance, by giving an author, as a matter of procedure, a chance to respond to referee comments before editorial decisions are made)?
This issue of the journal will be dedicated to chronicling and publishing diverse viewpoints, pro or con, on the prevalent peer reviewing practices in academia in general, and the social sciences and sociology in particular. The aim is to compile a comprehensive resource and collection of perspectives, studies, data, and opinions to facilitate further institutional reflections and considerations for fostering procedural innovations in peer reviewing practices. Historical narratives and field experiences, structural analyses and reflections on the consistencies or contradictions of the prevailing systems, and innovative efforts already in progress or proposed in fostering alternative peer reviewing regimes are solicited for publication in this issue of Human Architecture.
III. From the Classroom: Scholarships of Learning and Teaching the Sociological Imagination
Human Architecture has had a solid and continuing commitment to publishing outstanding undergraduate and graduate student papers as scholarships of learning. As noted in the founding statement of the journal, “Human Architecture provides a forum for the exploration of personal self-knowledges within a re-imagined sociological framework. It seeks to creatively institutionalize new conceptual and curricular structures of knowledge whereby critical study of one’s selves within an increasingly world-historical framework is given scholarly and pedagogical legitimacy. The journal is a public forum for those who seek to radically understand and, if need be, change their world-historically constituted selves. It is a research and educational microcosm for fostering de-alienated and globally concerned, self-determining human realities.”
For this issue of the journal, outstanding papers by undergraduate or graduate students aimed at cultivating their sociological imagination are solicited. The sociological imagination according to C. Wright Mills is a quality of mind that enables its holder to relate his or her own and others’ personal troubles to the ever larger public issues facing society and humanity as a whole. It is the ability to relate reflections on the here-and-now dynamics of one’s everyday life and personal troubles to the larger social issues of the prevalent society, of the times, and in the context of ever wider world-historical landscapes.
Outstanding papers will be regarded as those making serious and innovative efforts at developing the author’s sociological imagination in dialogue with scholarly sources, relevant theoretical frameworks and concepts, and various other texts such as films and works of art. Quality of writing and expression, and observation of the basis protocols of writing and citation will be considered in the selection process.
Solicited also are papers by teaching faculty who self-reflectively explore their strategies for the cultivation of sociological imaginations among their students (and in themselves) regardless of the disciplinary field in which courses are taught. Papers may include as appendices exemplary syllabi used, but these only as an aid to the narrative explorations and presentations of the pedagogical approaches invented and used by faculty in the course of their teaching career. Faculty-student co-authored papers will also be especially welcomed.
Student papers previously published in Human Architecture are regularly used as required or recommended readings in course instruction. For examples of student and faculty-student co-authored papers published in earlier issues of Human Architecture please visit the website of the journal (at http://www.okcir.com) or consult the Sociological Abstracts or SocINDEX with Full-Text for more systematic search of the journal contents.