Saying that being cis-gender – i.e. having a gender identity that corresponds with the sex/gender one was assigned at birth – comes with privileges need not mean erasing the lived experiences, real challenges, and specific struggles of cis-gendered people (and especially of those cis-gender people who are otherwise disadvantaged and marginalised in other dimensions). [click to continue…]
From the monthly archives:
December 2024
A few weeks ago, seven political philosophers at my department, who regularly meet to discuss issues related to sustainable futures, met to discuss Hannah Ritchie’s book Not the End of the World. That book quickly appeared on the bestseller’s lists. For everyone who read her book, or is perhaps thinking about reading her book, here’s what we thought about it (which, regular readers of this blog will notice, is an example of Team Philosophy which we discussed here a while ago.)
Our review can be found below the fold.
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Editors of academic journals have been reporting that they find it increasingly hard to secure referees for papers that have been submitted to their journals. When I’ve been discussing this issue over the years with colleagues, I’ve heard a few remarks that made me wonder what our considerations are to decide whether or not to accept a review request. Clearly, there must be a content-wise fit: if one thinks the paper is outside one’s area of expertise, one should not accept the referee request. But then I have heard considerations such as “I decline because I have already refereed for this journal before”, or “I referee as many papers as I receive reports”, or “I referee 5 papers a year”. Are these valid reasons to decline?
Clearly, the answer cannot be that how much we choose to referee is purely a private affair. All academics would benefit if there would not be a shortage of referees, hence it cannot be a purely private affair. Yet the referee shortage takes the structure of a collective action problem. And we know that there are two principle ways to address collective action problems – either by having a collective decision maker (such as the government), which is not a solution available for this problem; or else by way of establishing a social norm.
Solving the referee crisis in academic peer review will require multiple measures, but when it comes to securing that enough people are willing to referee, I propose to discuss the number we should treat as the lower boundary of how much we should referee. Let’s call the number of reports a person writes for journals divided by the number of reports that person receives in response to their own paper submissions a person’s referee-ratio. I want to defend that the referee ratio should be at least 1.2. In other words, for every 4 reports we receive, we should write at least 5 (adjusted for the number of authors of a paper). [click to continue…]
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From back when I was shooting film sometimes:
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