This British Academy funded Journal Work Academy workshop will support the work of editors and editorial boards and contribute to training the next generation of peer reviewers and journal editors, in collaboration with senior scholars and editors based at African institutions. Format: The Journal Work Academy will involve structured sessions of practical exercises and collaborative work. The participants will be divided into “editorial teams”, and each team will work with one or two editors and with one or more senior scholars. In the simulated journal office, we shall constitute our editorial boards. Each journal team will write a short mission statement that reflects on the chosen theme(s) and will formulate the joint project and members will read and comment on one another’s abstracts (not on the full papers at this session). Scholars will provide guided feedback to one another’s work (following the protocols developed in the Journal Work Academy). Each author will receive detailed feedback from the others in the group, as well as one-on-one feedback from senior scholars and journal editors. This has the aim of improving individual papers, but also of strengthening future scholarly networks and building intra-African networks of collaboration. Outcome: The outcome of the Journal Work Academy will be to create resources that can be adapted to different contexts, enabling tailored capacity building from the ground up. Participants will have the benefit of discussing their work with their peers from other institutions, and to think of their individual projects in terms of networked intellectual debates and future collaborations. The seminar style format encourages collaborative work, and understands journal publishing not simply as a step to career advancement, but as an engaged and contextual scholarly practice. Through the collaborations between journal editors and the African Studies Association of Africa (ASAA) publishing cultures become a central part of a future-oriented academy.
