Decolonizing Peace Education Knowledge Production: Equitizing the Academic Publishing Process

• In Event: Building peace through Higher Education

Proposal

By questioning and then decolonizing the academic knowledge production process, can we protest and transform the academic publishing industrial complex in higher education and K-12 schooling contexts? How might we decolonize knowledge production in peace education as we co-create and foster ideal futures.? The core theme and focus of this year’s Comparative and International Education Society Conference is “The Power of Protest.” Under the subtheme of theories, methodologies, and protest, critical questions are asked that motivate this proposal, namely: What is the relationship between power and protest?; How can we understand contestation, resistance, struggle, defiance, and compliance in education work?; What theoretical resources might we use to understand protest?; and how might we decolonize these resources under conditions of coloniality? This proposal aims to use content analysis research conducted on published articles in the Journal of Peace Education published from 2004-2021 (Author et al) as a foundation to both critique the academic publishing process and to offer spaces and examples of contestation, resistance, and transformative potential.

The academic publishing industrial complex, defined here as the business and system that ensconces, promotes, and exploits the knowledge production processes occurring in global institutions of higher learning, is a multi-billion dollar global industry. Various sources indicate that the world revenue for academic publishing is between $19-28 billion per year, depending on the source, with 50% of the earnings attributed to five major companies: Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, and SAGE (Academic Publishers Statistics Available at; https://wordsrated.com/academic-publishers-statistics/#:~:text=The%20worldwide%20revenue%20from%20academic,%2C%20Springer%20Nature%2C%20and%20SAGE. Often the intellectual power that fuels this system is unpaid or lowly compensated intellectual labor of academics who serve as editors and reviewers in academic peer review systems, a system of peer evaluation of the quality, merit, and publishability of academic work. Tangible economic and intangible benefits are afforded to academic institutions in the form of prestige and potential student enrollment based on reputation and desires to work with published academics at those institutions. One could easily analyze this with a lens of structural violence–economic arrangements that exploit intellectual labor with very little or no monetary compensation to laborers. Additionally, who gets included, represented, studied, silenced, and celebrated in the publication process is another critical question to consider when decolonizing the knowledge production processes, specifically within the field of peace education.

Decolonizing peace education knowledge production requires intentional scrutiny of the academic publishing industrial complex and processes therein. In this presentation, a critical examination of the power, representation, and colonial dynamics inherent in various stages of the academic publishing process will be offered. These stages include the following: input processes; production processes; dissemination processes; and end use processes. In terms of input processes, who steers and forms research questions is vital to ascertain equity, fairness, and justice is vital for decolonizing peace education knowledge production. For example, are peace education research questions generated by academics in isolation for schools and communities in subject to object relationships, or in collaboration with schools and communities? What forms of knowledge are valued in the input processes of research, or in other words, what “counts” as valid knowledge, as “data”? Are oral histories, written historical records, stories, observations, and/or statistical data privileged over other forms of knowledge? Are Tsosie’s (2022) “Six R’s of Indigenous Research,” namely relevance, relationships, responsibility, reciprocity, representation, and respect honored in co-constructing peace education research questions and processes? In terms of journal article production processes, where are research studies submitted, who reviews the work, is there diverse representation in the review process, and how are authors treated in the peer review processes? Whose voice is mostly widely published and who is missing? This is where data from a content analysis of the Journal of Peace Education from 2004-2021 will be examined to shed light on inequities and future possibilities. Lastly, this presentation will examine dissemination and end use processes, namely: 1. Who gets access, how, and why to published work in the field of peace education? and 2. Who benefits from the research/how do communities studied benefit from the research?

This presentation is both data driven and exploratory, with the intention of sparking questions that illuminate the power of critical questioning, protest, and resistance in creating spaces for honoring and valuing diverse voices and diverse ways of knowing in peace education research. Peace education research without just processes that illuminate diverse voices, researchers, topics, regions, disciplines, and methodologies reproduces the status quo and leads to unjust outcomes. Deeply ingrained knowledge production processes need to be examined in order to make space for amplifying diverse voices, honoring diverse ways of knowing, and equitizing and advancing the field of peace education. Various concrete, positive efforts associated with the Journal of Peace Education will be explored as pathways for hopeful change.

Author

• Edward Brantmeier, James Madision University