with authors from different countries did not make this process any easier for anyone. There were times when we did not hear from one of our contributors and couldn’t help but think that the unthinkable had happened. There were times when all we could do was try to act professional and continue to work as if everything was fine; after all, we had signed a contract, we had gotten grants, and the work had to be done. Throughout this whole process, we experienced all of the forces of academia magnified. First by the pandemic, and then by the negative influences of neoliberalism, the cult of busyness, and resilience narratives.
One place where this influence was felt was the peer review process. In general, there is some expectation of anonymity as part of this process, as the anonymity contributes to a sense of safety where the work being reviewed is only being critiqued on the basis of the work and not on the basis of the person. Unfortunately, because some of our grants required that we disclose who some of our contributors would be, it meant that we had to change our peer review process to a single-blind review. Though we did not experience many issues between contributors and reviewers, there is a slight sense that some of the “rigor” that the double-blind process would have afforded was lost. In a way, this is not something that we, as editors, were much concerned about, but knowing that some of our contributors will be using their contributions as part of a tenure and promotion process, there was some pressure on us to provide that additional level of support. Yet, because some of that veil had been removed, we had the chance to introduce a certain level of care to our peer review process. For example, instead of just asking for suggestions and revisions from our peer reviewers, we encouraged reviewers to comment on where the chapter they reviewed was excelling. For our parts as editors, our main focus was to build relationships—not just between ourselves and the documents we received but between ourselves and the people working on those documents. Yet this wasn’t always an easy task, given the state of the world and the limited space for vulnerability that the peer review process allows.3
