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April 4, 2002

A closer look at some selected Books & Journals: Joan Leach/Social Epistemology

Joan Leach earned her Ph.D. through Pitt's rhetoric of science program, went to England for seven years as assistant professor at the University of London – Imperial College, and came back to Pitt as a faculty member this January with a controversial journal in tow.

Leach is executive editor of Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy (Taylor and Francis Ltd.), which now is housed in Pitt's Department of Communication.

Leach says the quarterly journal departs from custom in several respects, including being international, multidisciplinary and open-debate oriented, often exposing clashes among academicians bent on defending their disciplines.

The journal is now in its 15th year; Leach has been at the helm for five years. She says she weeded out about half of the editorial board she inherited because its leanings were too American.

"I have a real commitment to international publication, to move away from strictly American academics, which can be quite parochial," Leach says. "Being in England brought that to the fore for me."

A recent edition (Vol. 15 No. 3 July-September 2001), which focuses on the theme: social epistemology and knowledge management, demonstrates that commitment. Scholarly submissions come from Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, and include academicians in business, sociology, philosophy and communication.

"Social epistemology is how knowledge is produced and circulated in different social communities. It's supposed to be of interest to different disciplines," Leach says. "But that's been tremendously controversial.

"The term epistemology comes out of philosophy, although, interestingly, the term social epistemology was actually coined by a librarian. Something as basic as the concept 'knowledge' — philosophers talk about it in completely different terms from the terminology they use at business schools. So even though themes are conceptual, the way we talk about them doesn't have to be in the idiom of philosophy."

Leach says that essays in the journal have sometimes stimulated the kind of turf wars that academic disciplines undertake. A good example, she says, was an issue of the journal on the theme "the idea of the university."

"I expected it to be controversial and political, and it was, but I was surprised at the stake different disciplines have in seeing the university in a particular way. For example, there was a strong response by social scientists, who see the university as providing a particular kind of structure.

"Here in humanities, we're all typing away in our office at our computers, but in the social sciences they have small collectives, and business schools have group techniques, so even one's conception of the university is in a way underwritten by peculiar philosophical commitments. There are vested interests in funding decisions, the concept of a department, or a research group, or defining what exactly is the unit producing knowledge.

"But this can be a productive tension," she hastens to add. "As academics we have few places to talk about these things. We can argue about it as a political phenomenon at a University Senate meeting, or it might come out in the London Times higher education supplement or The Chronicle of Higher Education here as a topic area, but there is no place to study that academically. And that's what I'd like the journal to be: a place to have a debate, a dialogue about knowledge and how it's distributed, and not just politics."

In addition to teaching full-time and doing research, Leach coordinates journal correspondence from her long, narrow temporary office in the Cathedral of Learning, which she has dubbed the "bowling alley."

"It is very time-consuming work," she says. "You're always kind of doing it. And there are publisher's deadlines and schedules to meet, so there is time pressure. But I enjoy it. I enjoy working with authors. And it helps me keep up to date on the field."

Leach counts on her collaboration with the journal's founding editor, Steve Fuller, professor of sociology at the University of Warwick, who taught at Pitt for a year and helped Leach finish her Ph.D. here. "We don't always agree, but it's friendly disagreement, and I rely on his advice quite a bit."

Leach says her experience with the journal informs her teaching as well. "I find myself mentioning to undergraduate students: 'One question a researcher might ask here is….' And for graduate students, I can give them a feel for what areas people are now doing work in, where I'm getting a lot of submissions from, what's going on out there."

Teaching students about the publishing process, including peer reviews and how an editor coordinates criticisms between reviewers and authors, also is valuable, she says, especially for students who wish to pursue academic careers.

While some issues of the journal focus on particular themes, more typical are editions with a variety of formats.

"I like to have three or four articles that have been through the peer-review process, but I like to include other things. Sometimes book reviews, for example, though not as a high priority. I like to do a synthesis or a dialogue between two academicians arguing out a thorny issue, maybe with two or three exchanges. Or we'll publish one paper and publish maybe four people reviewing that paper in the same issue," something she says is not typical for journals.

"Actually, it's radical and crazy!" she says. "Most peer reviewing is one-sided argument: The reviewers are anonymous to the author, the forms are mostly unsigned, the authors aren't allowed to directly respond."

On the other hand, simultaneously publishing a paper and by-lined reviews may reveal biases of reviewers supporting their own disciplines, or may show simply that reviewers are writing at cross-purposes or using different terminology from the author of the reviewed paper.

"There is a body of literature that critiques the peer review process and a movement to make that process more open, to make it dialogue instead of a judgment rendered," Leach says. "In science, it's been suggested opening up the review process to stakeholders who are not necessarily fellow scientists, like environmentalists, for example."

Feminists authors, independent of discipline, have complained that editorial boards and peer reviewers are predominantly men, she adds.

In a journal on social epistemology, expanding the traditional journal format is fair game, Leach points out. "One of the things we're doing in the journal is producing and distributing knowledge, so to reflect on that a bit in our own format we thought was incredibly important."

Will there ever be a department of social epistemology?

"I would hate that if it happened, because then we become just another department, instead of a spot for real communication and synthesis and debate and dialogue, and then we'd probably come up with our own esoteric jargon," Leach reasons.

"That's why I'm in the communication department, because the people here are committed to understanding debate, dialogue, that kind of thing, so in a sense they're intellectually friendly to what the journal is trying to do."

–Peter Hart


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