invitation : relation

notes on peer review

When I was in Standard 5, the class teacher told us to exchange our exercise books with classmates, read us the answers for the assignments, and told us to mark each other’s work.¹ This practice continued through the rest of primary school and in high school. It was my first experience of what I would now call peer review: an authority provided answers and we assessed each other based on those answers. Peer review changed slightly when I was an undergraduate. In writing and literature classes, we were taught to exchange papers, and to provide peers with feedback. As far as I recall, we were not provided with much guidance, beyond being instructed to look for structural elements: the paper had sentences, paragraphs, a thesis statement, topic sentences, an introduction, a conclusion, and a bibliography. Though it might seem that this approach to reading papers differed from what happened in primary and high school, it was part of the same structure. We looked for and pointed out mistakes.

I open with these scenes from primary school through undergraduate to indicate how we learn to practice peer review. I would like to nudge against the common understanding that we are never taught how to review peers. While it might be true that those of us who move through graduate school and act as peer reviewers for professional journals may not receive any formal instruction in classes about how to peer review—how to peer review was never mentioned in any of the 16 courses I took for my Masters and PhD coursework, for instance—it is equally true that educational processes teach us how to interact with academic peers. It might be that there’s a gap between the term peer review and the practice of reviewing peers, and I will be trying to stay in this gap during this writing, to see what it permits and impedes.

If, like me, your education is primarily competitive, then you understand your peers as competition. Kenya’s education system was a bottleneck: primary school students competed against each other in national exams to secure places in secondary schools. In 1999, for example, 495,469 primary school students were enrolled in Standard Eight, presumably all candidates for the Kenya Certificate of Primary Education (KCPE) national exam. In the same year, 221, 874 students were enrolled in Form One, students who had sat for KCPE the previous year (2002: 21). If we assume that approximately the same number of candidates sat for KCPE in 1998 as in 1999, then roughly 50% moved from primary to high school. Yet, it was not enough to simply attend any secondary school. We were taught to aspire to national schools, a small group of about 25 schools that accepted about 100 students each.

The bottleneck got worse during secondary school. If I am remembering correctly, the public universities admitted about 10-15 thousand students who had achieved high scores, and the places for especially socially and economically desirable programs—law, medicine, architecture, engineering, pharmacy—were even more narrowly policed.² Those were courses for the Best and Brightest, those destined to be economic and social elites. This bottleneck system taught us to think of peers as academic rivals. We might study together, but we knew academic spaces were limited. In many ways, this competitive structure continued during and after graduate school. In graduate classrooms, we jostled for position, hoping to prove to potential advisors that we were clever enough to work with them. We applied for competitive fellowships to get time off to research and write. And we even competed to work as teaching assistants for particular teachers. All of these experiences taught us—taught me—to think of peers as rivals.

Thinking of peers as rivals generates a particular orientation toward peer review. Peer review is treated, first, as a scene of cruel pedagogy: reviewers relish in pointing out errors, from substantive ones about concept and method to minor ones about punctuation and spelling. The overwhelming effect of such reviews is to diminish enthusiasm. I do not know how many people have received cruel peer reviews and decided not to pursue particular projects or, even worse, felt that they had to leave the academy. I have certainly abandoned article projects after receiving such reviews.

Second, peer review is treated as a competition. If a reviewer has published with a particular journal—often, one is asked to review after they have published with a venue—they might treat the work they are tasked to review as competition, imagining that it reflects on their own work. They might imagine that an article they don’t consider brilliant will diminish the value of the journal, and, as a result, diminish their own work. Or, they might imagine that an article they consider excellent will dim the brilliance of their own work. I will not spend time on the psychology of this. I will only point out that a lot of petty psychic stuff happens. At stake for some reviewers, is not only the scholarly item—a book or article—but whether they consider the—usually anonymous—author worthy to be a peer. In part, I am naming how my training taught me to be a particular kind of peer and peer reviewer.

In recent years, I have  turned to thinking about how invitation can become part of intellectual processes. I turned to invitation because it felt like so many engagements with scholarship felt like obstacle courses: the clever people got it, and the rest did not. I have wondered how to make invitation more explicit. In public talks, I often invite audiences to think with me. I conclude the introduction to my book by writing, ‘I invite you to imagine with me’(2019: 29).

Part of my unlearning this competitive orientation came through returning to Barbara Christian’s “The Race for Theory,” in which Christian invites us to consider our work a “collective endeavor.”³ Christian’s rhetoric emphasizes the collective nature of intellectual work. She writes,

For people of color have always theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic. And I am inclined to say that our theorizing  . . . is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?⁴

From this justly famous passage, I want to draw attention to how Christian invokes and practices collectivity. The passage starts from “people of color” and then moves to an ‘I’ and then situates itself in “our” and “we.” Each of those choices invites readers to position themselves in relation to those pronouns—each one invites readers to gather as part of the ‘we’ and ‘our’. Christian is very clear about the stakes of such gathering: survival with spiritedness, a survival that moves through play and secrecy, world-imagining and world-making.

I have been inspired, too, by the abolitionist Mariame Kaba, who writes, “everything that is worthwhile is done with other people.”⁵ If there is value—perhaps value is the wrong word—in academic publishing, it stems from doing it with other people, from the students who help us articulate our ideas, to friend and colleagues who engage our speaking and drafting, to the peer review and publication process.

Speaking in the context of abolition, Kaba writes, “Community matters. Collectivity matters. To me that’s the whole thing. And if we can’t get along with each other, and we can’t take responsibility for what we do to each other, then what the hell are we doing?”⁶ Am I suggesting that peer review can be an abolitionist practice, one rooted in care and accountability? Why not?

Christian and Kaba teach me to think about the collective work of producing and circulating knowledge. More specifically, they direct me to think about and prioritize the people creating knowledge over field and disciplinary demands. In general, we are told scholarship advances fields and disciplines, but fields and disciplines can very quickly become abstract concepts, and it’s too easy to forget that humans create knowledge; fields and disciplines do not exist independently of the people who create, populate, and sustain them.

Finally, I have been inspired by Christina Sharpe, who calls an audience into being when she writes, “I want In the Wake to declare that we are Black peoples in the way with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death: to think and be and act from there.”⁷ The “we” and “us” imagine and invite a collective, those who recognize themselves in the call. Sharpe teaches me to ask which audiences I hope to gather around my work and what I hope that gathering to do. Foregrounding gathering requires that I think of invitation as method and style, not simply how I write, but how I think about writing.

Peer review is writing, not simply assessment and, perhaps, not even assessment. And I have thought about how peer review can be a process of invitation, a way of welcoming others to a collective practice of thinking together.

Let me offer a polemical claim: We do not review manuscripts–we review peers. This distinction may seem pedantic, and I use it to situate peer review as a relation between authors and reviewers, not between reviewers and manuscripts. Framing the peer review process in this way raises the question of how we regard peers and what relations we hope to foster and sustain, even when the process is anonymised. To be even more pedantic, let me point out that the process is called peer review, not manuscript review or draft review.

Increasingly, two questions drive my engagement with written work: How do you want people to feel? What do you want people to do?

The first question is fraught: writers cannot control how writing is engaged. Even so, deliberate rhetorical and stylistic choices can help to build shared ground. To take an obvious example, when writers use collective pronouns—we and us—or even individuating pronouns—I or me—readers are invited to place themselves in relation to the writerly voice. It may be that one is unable to recognize themselves in the collective invoked or that the I who speaks makes no room for the reader; it may also be that the collective invoked permits the reader to stay with a reading, to feel seen and heard.

Of course, it is not the case that deeply emotional writing will resonate with readers. From James Baldwin through Lauren Berlant, we have been taught about the uneven terrain of sentimentality. But we also know that writing which purports to be neutral and objective is especially alienating for minoritized people, and is not simply alienating, but is minoritizing. Perhaps the best writers can do is to write deliberately, with intention, and to articulate their intentions as clearly as possible. Doing so may create shared feeling, a shared invitation to risk. Doing so may create conditions that allow minoritized people to stay with rhetorically, conceptually, and affectively difficult work, with the understanding that such difficulty is embedded in practices and ethics of care.

The second question–What do you want readers to do?—attempts to imagine the life and afterlife of reading, and, as with “How do you want readers to feel?”, it asks that writers be deliberate in their intentions. At times, writers are very specific in their demands. La Marr Jurrell Bruce opens How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind by writing, “Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is unruly.” This direct address is startling and welcoming. It invites the reader to linger. Other writers will instruct that their books are not arranged sequentially, so readers can start with any chapter or section. And, yet, others will offer reading instructions, specifying how each section builds on the next. These are useful reading instructions.

Yet, reading extends beyond an individual experience. Readers can act in many ways. Those in institutions can order books for their classes; other readers can gift copies of books; other readers can recommend books for libraries to purchase; and yet other readers can form reading groups centered on particular books; and reading groups can invite authors to address them. What you want readers to do is not simply about how a book will be marketed. It asks the author to contemplate the lives of their writing.

In Dionne Brand’s Theory, the unnamed, jaded, perpetual graduate student claims, “One has no friends in academia. One has colleagues. One has assassins.”⁸ This assessment follows a description of academic hurdles, which I quote at length:

I had anticipated being done by now, but what with one thing and another, not the least of which were my personal entanglements, here I was at thirty-four with my dissertation incomplete. ABD. All but dissertation. In the academy, you get caught up in the cut and thrust of theoretical argument and theoretical doubt and before you know it a year has passed, and then another. I had been attacked by some colleagues who were jealous at my production. Naturally, these attacks were not open—but I had several theoretical knives in my back administered by the same people I was sitting with now. They sneered at the speed with which I produced papers, implying that my work was slipshod. I had failed to mention Guattari here, I had not cited Lacan there.⁹

Cruelty can feel like getting stuck, with the unfortunate academic—or graduate student—a modern Brer Rabbit stuck on a tar scarecrow. Each attempt to struggle ensnares one even more. Demands for rigour—cite this or that European or North American thinker—can often be ways of unlistening to emerging ideas, with the effect of creating hostile worlds. In this passage, I am struck by the intimacy of those who harm: those wielding “theoretical knives” are “the same people I was sitting with now.”

It need not be this way.

I learn from Black feminism and abolitionist practice that peer review can be a way of forming and sustaining relation. At its best, peer review can model generosity and extend invitation. At its best, peer review can be a practice of care and interdependence, rooted in Mariame Kaba’s wonderful observation: “Everything that is worthwhile is done with other people.”

1. The original version of this writing was solicited by friends for a journal issue on peer review. After I drafted it, I realized that I had given away too much of myself in that writing, and it felt unsafe, so I withdrew it. Here, I offer what I can.

2. In 1992, 138, 702 candidates sat for the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) national exam. Of those, 16,438 (11.9%) achieved the minimum grades required for university admission (Economic Survey, 1993: 186). In 1993, 141, 922 candidates sat for KCSE. 26, 392 (18.6%) achieved the minimum grades required for university admission (Economic Survey, 1994: 191).  10, 189 students enrolled at Kenya’s five public universities for the 1992/1993 year and 9, 215 enrolled for the 1993/1994 year (Economic Survey, 1994: 193). Here, it’s worth noting the disparity between those who achieved the minimum required grades for admission—16,438 in 1992, for instance—and those who enrolled—9, 215. Given Kenya’s calendar year and delays in admissions, candidates from 1992 would have enrolled in 1993/1994.

3. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Cultural Critique (Spring 1987): 53.

4. Christian, “Race for Theory,” 52.

5. Mariame Kaba, We Do This' Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. Chicago: Haymarket, 2021. 178.

6. Kaba, "We Do This, 175.

7. Christina Sharpe. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 22.

8. Dionne Brand, Theory. 66

9. Brand, Theory, 65-66.