Epistemic injustice and the task of ‘staying with the trouble’ in academic publishing: A conversation with Rebecca Lund

Abstract

On a sunny autumn afternoon in Copenhagen I sat down with Dr Rebecca Lund to talk about her incoming group editorial tenure for NORA: The Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research. Dr Lund is a post-doctoral fellow in Gender Studies at the University of Tampere in Finland. The conversation traversed many facets of academic publishing and I have chosen to call on Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘staying with the trouble’ (2016) as an appropriate theme that linked many of Dr Lund’s insights to her feminist publishing agenda. As a feminist academic activist now tasked with the editorship of a prominent Nordic feminist academic journal, Dr Lund explores her ethical obligations to provide a platform that is inclusive and makes some kind of intervention to the edifces of patriarchal power so embedded in the academic publishing space. Dr Lund provides an interesting account of how her own research focus on epistemic injustice can be refexively used in the academic leadership role of editorship by engaging ‘head on’ with the prominent debates and challenges facing Nordic academia around intersectionality, race, gender, class, and the political economy of gender politics. As Haraway insists, ‘staying with the trouble’ involves the ability to face challenges head on while also recognising the importance of working together, ‘in unexpected collaborations and combinations … we become-with each other or not at all (2016, p. 4). Dr Lund provides a wonderful demonstration of a feminist approach to collaboration in academic publishing and the importance of insisting all voices can be heard and visibilised on and through the conventional platform of the academic journal. As the frst issue of the new editorial collective in WSJ, Dr Lund’s experiences and hopes ft well with our own feminist agenda of continuing the political work of academic publishing in these often ‘troubling’ times.