New Book Review Editors Ebru Demir and Elisabeth Olivius On Writing Book Reviews for IFJP
By: Ebru Demir and Elisabeth Olivius
During the fall of 2019, we have gradually taken over the reins of the IFJP Book Review section. Over the years, we have both read IFJP with great interest and drawn on the scholarship published in the journal in our own research, so we could not be more excited about joining the IFJP team!
As Book Review Editors, we look forward to contributing to the journal’s purpose of fostering critical, engaged, and multi-disciplinary feminist dialogue, debate, and scholarship. We believe the Book Review section has an important function in this regard, as it provides a space where a broad range of feminist scholarship can be discussed, made visible, and brought into conversation across established disciplinary, spatial and discursive boundaries. Our book reviewers make significant contributions to our intellectual community through identifying emergent and innovative literature and analytical directions, and through contributing to thoughtful and critical intellectual exchange. Book reviews are widely read, and can be a great way to contribute to feminist scholarly debates, and they are also important as a way of making sure that all the great feminist books that are published each year gets the visibility and impact they deserve.
Starting our journey, we are committed to continuing to build on what our predecessor, Justin De Leon, has already done to broaden the scope of the section and of the journal. We would like to provide a Book Review section that is representative, open to dialogue, and inclusive of non-Western perspectives. To that end, we would like to increase the number of contributions that review feminist scholarship published in other languages than English, and in other parts of the world than Europe or North America. With the aim of fostering a truly global feminist community of scholars, we find it very important to include English-language reviews of these works in the Book Review section and to make sure IFJP readers can learn about and benefit from feminist scholarship representing diverse positionalities and perspectives.
We welcome three types of contributions to the book review section: book reviews, review essays, and essays that rethink the canon of feminist, global and political scholarship.
Book reviews engage with an individual, recently published piece of work, briefly describing its content and critically evaluating and locating its contributions to global feminist scholarship and to particular bodies of literature. Check out this review as an example of this type of contribution..
Review essays discuss several texts on the same theme and bring them into conversation with each other, aiming either to explore a recent debate or emerging research field that has generated a range of new publications, or to survey the best of the literature covering a more established area of research. Check out this essay to see what we have in mind.
Essays that rethink the canon aim to critically rethink and reassess the established canon of feminist global political scholarship and its boundaries, and provides space to engage with books that are not recently published. These essays may aim to rethink the established literature on a particular topic in light of recent events – for example, an essay could revisit literature on sexual harassment in light of the #MeToo movement. An essay may also rethink feminist classics on a certain topic in conversation with a newly published book. Moreover, rethink-essays can engage with books that have been marginalized by existing disciplinary boundaries, language barriers, or global academic relations of power and privilege, and explain why these ought to be essential reading for feminists working on global issues. Check out this essay as example of what we are looking for in this type of contribution.
These types of reviews all contribute towards the goal of making the Book Review section a space for lively, critical, and global feminist debate and dialogue that can both shed light on emerging directions in the research field and challenge its established boundaries and point to areas in need of further debate and new research. However, the one type of submission that has most rarely been featured, although the label is not a new invention, is the rethinking the canon-essay. We believe this type of review allows space for the reviewer to be quite creative, and thus offers great potential for exciting and thought-provoking texts that contributes to make the Book Review section the kind of space for lively intellectual exchange on the nature and scope of global political feminist scholarship that we would like to see. Therefore, we have tried to make sure information about all three submission types we are looking for is readily available online as well as in the print journal, and would like to encourage potential reviewers to unleash your feminist creativity and consider submitting rethink-essays as well as book reviews and review essays. Please, do not hesitate to get in touch to discuss any ideas for contributions to the book review section!
We are grateful for the opportunity to be part of and contribute to build the IFJP global feminist community in the years to come, and look forward to hear about your ideas and read your submissions to the Book Review section!
Dr Ebru Demir holds a PhD in Law from the University of Sussex and an LLM in International Law from the University of Nottingham. Ebru previously worked as an Associate Tutor at University of Sussex, School of Law, Politics and Sociology. Her research interests are international human rights law; gender, armed conflict and international law; transitional justice; Women, Peace and Security.
Elisabeth Olivius is an Associate Professor in Peace and Conflict Studies at Umeå University, Sweden. Her research focuses on how gendered relations of power are produced and reshaped in processes of conflict, displacement and peacebuilding. In ongoing projects she explores the role of diasporic women’s organizations, and the politics of international gender expertise in peacebuilding in Myanmar. As a member of the Varieties of Peace research network, she conducts research on how local and regional forms of peace in Myanmar are manifested and experienced amidst and alongside ongoing war in the country.