Yesterday I woke up to a really great email. The journal, Anarchist Studies, has accepted a paper of mine for publication.

I started 2020, as with every new year, with all kinds of grand plans. Like everyone, Covid-19 has fucked up a great many of them. Case in point: as I sit in my garden writing this blog post, my phone’s calendar reminds me my wife and I were supposed to be flying out to America today. She’d planned out an elaborate three week road trip for us towards the end of last summer. We would start in LA, drive to Vegas via the desert, and then out into the wilds - national parks, lots of canyons, and a world of adventure and fun until we ended up in Denver, Colorado to fly home after a night spent at The Shining’s inspiration, The Stanley Hotel. Instead, America has become a seething petri-dish of coronavirus as public health failings across the country somehow manage to put even our own disastrous approach to Covid-19 here in the UK to shame. The simple act of wearing a mask to protect others has become ensnared in the reductive culture wars and the unashamed commitment to individualist capitalism that has caused so much systemic suffering to so many for so long has been lain more obviously bare for all to see than at any other point in history: Trump, and many Americans, would rather people died unnecessarily earning a sub-minimum wage living than be given financial support and free healthcare. It’s disgusting. And even as a citizen of the country I am finding it hard to imagine any time in the near future when, even if Covid-19 is vanquished, I see myself wanting to spend too much time there again. The stupidity of people there, and selfishness, the sheer commitment to inane fictions and damaging myths, makes it feel like vacationing in the US right now would be an act of complicity in something horrific. Hopefully November’s election may make me change my mind, but I suspect it may be more likely to break my heart even more. If Trump is still President by the end of January 2021 it may be time to consider turning in my passport.

But I digress… we’d be lucky to get to 2021 at this rate. Here in the UK people seem to have forgotten that nothing has changed in terms of the virus and its ability to infect us. There is no vaccine, no cure, and the “easing” of lockdown neither means lockdown has ended or that we can be any less cautious today than we were in March. Yet my social media feeds are full of people I know ignoring social distancing advice, not wearing masks, shopping and going out as if everything was fine. I don’t want to poop on people’s party...but there are literally some people having fucking parties again!

But as I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, I had plans for 2020 and then Covid struck, the world shut down, and all plans went on the back burner. Except, for me, I realised that normal life slowing down gave me time to push ahead with one of my plans I had originally thought would be put off until the summer: writing a philosophy paper.

My book coming out - and how thankful I am that despite a global pandemic it still did, even if promoting it has proven challenging under such circumstances - had me thinking since last October, when discussions about it began, that it would be nice to return to more academic work, even if only as a background hobby when I’m not teaching. And if, indeed, I wanted it ever to be something more than a hobby, I would also need some publications under my belt. The book helped, but strangely in the academic world books are not looked upon as favourably as journal articles. It comes from a history of university assessment frameworks often counting the number of publications instead of the quality of the published work, and even when that evolved to become more about the impact of the work (how often it is cited, etc.) that still didn’t help the value of a book. Not only could a focus on smaller papers mean an academic could publish multiple pieces of research across a year instead of putting all their considerable efforts into a single tome, but the new idea of impact - to be quantifiable - meant often citations only counted if they were done via known academic platforms, making the journal citation still the holy grail. Better to publish a paper in a specialist journal known by all in your field and the likely destination for people searching for quick and relevant reads to cite in their research (and where they too will hope to publish for that citation to be counted) than write a book people may dismiss as “populist” and not academic enough even if the book may ultimately reach a wider audience of non-specialists.

It is a bizarre game, brought about, like all bad things, by pseudo-accountability measures and targets, and the criticism should not be seen as a criticism of the articles or journals themselves, which are often excellent. However, it is a criticism that it tends to leave academics talking largely to themselves instead of to the wider world. Most journals are prohibitively expensive, usually being subscribed to by institutions instead of individuals, and the articles published behind paywalls - again, accessible by universities and researchers who pay subscription fees, but not to anyone. Even when collections of papers are published in book form, these academic books are often also ridiculously expensive, some going for near-to, or even over a hundred pounds. Again: the target market here is university libraries, not individuals, but as you can see, this means that far from disseminating knowledge and ideas across society, many academics disseminate it merely to themselves. Papers are given at conferences, to fellow academics, and published in journals read only by a handful of specialists, and even some academic books may only exist to live on a dusty library bookshelf and as a citation in an internal review. But that is the beast. That is the game. If I had any thoughts of dipping my toe back into academia i would need to be prepared to play it again. My book alone would not be enough. I wouldn’t be taken seriously as an academic, despite my PhD and book, unless I also had something published in a proper journal.

It had been a while since I had even considered writing something like that and I worried I might be rusty. Even as an aspiring academic during my PhD years, I was so focused on getting the doctoral thesis done (and dreamt of turning it into a book) that I didn’t really try too hard to get anything smaller published. I sent off the odd thing but without success. I much preferred speaking at conferences and the more informal approach they allowed than turning my papers into something publishable. Ultimately, back then, I had three years of funding for my PhD and no intention of spending any longer than that completing it. Any time spent not working on my thesis and writing papers for journals was time wasted, especially as I began to realise I didn’t want a career in academia anymore and began looking elsewhere for my next steps. But now it was twelve years later, the last properly academic writing I had done was probably being during my teacher training year a decade ago. Ironically the job of writing my book had been to de-academic the argument of my PhD thesis to make the work readable for a general audience, so even writing and publishing that work of political philosophy this year hadn’t really been an experience of writing something academic from scratch which would be suitably rigorous. I was excited to give it a go but knew it would take a lot of time. I had therefore earmarked the summer to maybe start thinking about it seriously, but had started working on something, inspired by one of my Philosophy Unleashed posts, and doing a little reading around the subject in my spare time from about February.

In March, however, suddenly with a lot of new free time on my hands and trying to turn the lemons of coronavirus into lemonade, I decided to step up the thinking about it seriously and start writing in the academic style now to see if I still could. Happy with what I had produced, and the paper having a decidedly anarchist take on a particular issue in education I was concerned with, I decided to send it off to Anarchist Studies to see if they were interested.

I thank Twitter for what happened next, as I am not used to the process of publishing in journals, hadn’t attempted to do so for over a decade, and even when I had tried to before had never got past the first stage of rejection. It was on Twitter that I saw many academics I follow lamenting the frustration of reviewers asking for significant changes, often multiple times, before publishing, or even rejecting, the piece. The most funny byproduct of the blind peer-review process usually tweeted about being when reviewers criticised the writer for not mentioning the work of a particular philosopher in their feedback and the philosopher in question being the author of the piece, asked to exclude any personal references from their work when submitting to ensure the peer review remained blind.

Therefore, when I got a response from the reviewers in May, I understood that the invitation to “rework the piece for re-submission”, while not a guarantee of future acceptance, was genuine, and not merely something said out of politeness. This was a common thing: journals asking for revisions. No one seemed to get things published straight away without any. I was happy to take the advice on board and give it a go. Suddenly, after being a teacher for ten years, I finally knew what my students felt when they handed me in the EPQ projects they’d spent all summer working on only for me to point out all it’s many failings and show them how much work there still was to do before the winter deadline arrived. It was now my turn to take the constructive criticism and rise to the challenge of making necessary improvements. So that was how I spent my half term - a lot of reading, reviewing and revising - and although the work was hard, the paper I had at the end of it was much improved whilst still maintaining the elements the original reviewers had called “valuable and timely”. I resubmitted and crossed my fingers.

May became June, and June became July. I was starting to doubt things would go my way and prepared for the inevitable rejection. The last day of July I got a response from the journal. The reviewers had liked the revised version of the paper! But…they still had a few further changes for me to consider.

Twitter, and my own years of giving feedback to my students, had warned me this could happen, so I was prepared. Another round of revisions, but the changes either made sense, or were part of a misunderstanding which required some clarification on my part within the paper. Once more I did a little reading, a little reviewing and revising, and on Tuesday this week I sent off the new version, telling the editor I hoped would be the “Goldilocks” edit.

It was. Thursday morning I got the email I had hoped for at the start of 2020 but could not have anticipated becoming a reality so soon into the same summer I had originally anticipated would be where I would start this journey: “many thanks for submitting your revised paper, which I am delighted to tell you has now been accepted for publication”.

And the best thing about it, besides being a forthcoming publication to my name in an awesome academic journal which I actually do subscribe to and read, is that now that paper is finished I can start thinking about the next one.

And I have already started doing the reading…