This workshop aims to create a collaborative space to share insights on research approaches, reviewing practices, publishing strategies and impact narratives for scholars doing qualitative and quantitative research using gender and education across the educational phases as an illustrative case study. Led by current researchers and editors with substantial experience of publishing in ‘quality’ journals across disciplines, ECER networks, and education levels the workshop is oriented to scholars at the beginning to their careers and those seeking to re-tool their skills. The workshop has a practical focus: to share strategies, exchange information, and build networks. Its goal is to highlight ways to maximize involvement in writing, reviewing and publishing for scholars at any career stage who are striving for equality in education via their research and practice.

Writing journal articles requires craft skills and artistry and is a corporeal mode of mattering in which one’s heart, mind and identity are entangled (Barad, 2007). In considering writing as a craft, this presentation hones in on the nitty-gritty, how-to and what are sometimes referred to as the ‘technical’ aspects of writing journal articles. It analyses the importance of writing titles that are clear, concise and eye-catching in an age of search engines and metrics. It reviews how to effectively structure a paper to maximize the clarity of the argument. It also suggests ways of creating a balance between theory and empirical data. However, writing a good article needs more than craft. It is about having something ‘new’ to say, it is about shaping what it is you want to say in ways which enable the writer to make an original contribution (theoretically and/or empirically) to on-going debates, and it is about staking a claim to enter a particular discourse community.

In discussion of the entanglement of heart, mind and identity, workshop participants will be invited to dispense with the notion that ‘good’ article writing requires ‘genius’ or ‘inspiration’, that writing can only be done ‘when the mood takes me’, or that it requires a long time ‘alone’. Instead, academic article writing as a material practice, a ‘habit geography’ (Dewsbury and Bissell, 2015). This is habit not as stale routine but as a corporeal event of lived importance which releases pleasure and gets the writing done (Author, 2016).

The workshop will provide important insights into the practices that shape writing, reviewing and being published in this journal (as in other journals). The publishing world is rapidly changing, with greater opportunities for informal modes of disseminating scholarship, alongside publication in a wider range of open access journals. However, within this expanding field, established journals hold considerable power. This power is reinforced by international rankings and ratings metrics across neo-liberal, higher education systems, and by institutionally-entrenched performative, accountability structures. These wider forces shape the careers of individual academics and their publication aspirations. Journals which are recognised as the leading ‘quality’ journals are, then, those that early career academics often to aspire to be published in. Such journals provide access to valuable discourse communities and the circulation of new ideas, knowledge and theory; and they are repositories of historical expertise and experience in mapping a field. The workshop is significant in aiming to demystify writing, reviewing and publishing in a ‘top’ international journal. 

Author (2013). anonymized for ECER review purposes. Author and Stevenson, J. (2017) Chapter anonymized for ECER review purposes. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe half way – quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Dewsbury, J. D and Bissell, D. (2015). Habit geographies: the perilous zones in the life of the individual. Cultural Geographies, 22(1), 21–28.