Ruth Osorio and I organized this panel for Computers & Writing to reflect on our attempt to legitimize messy, multimodal chaos as digital activism in editorial labor.
Access copy of my part of our talk below.
Soliciting and publishing multimodal mess as digital activism
Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Computers & Writing, Greenville, NC
May 1, 2022
Hi, I’m Vyshali, co-editor of this special issue, and I wanted to reflect on our self-care processes in the editorial process itself. Our CFP asked for writing that occurred during the pandemic, and so we received submissions full of potentially retraumatizing content, such as the deaths of children, parents, or siblings; academic ableism; medical trauma; job insecurity; anxiety and depression; and so on. Our contributors were sharing a great deal of pain. We wanted to ensure, as much as possible, that we didn’t reopen our own old wounds while reading, so in an editorial meeting, we took stock of our own capacities—for instance, as my grief over my Appa’s death remains fresh, “parent death” was an important warning for me—and we agreed that we should approach these pieces with not only an editorial perspective, but with each other in mind. We already had a spreadsheet listing titles, authors, and genres, so to this end, we assigned descriptive tags to each piece as we read, anticipating each other’s needs. These tags served as both content warnings and broad categorical themes for us as readers and editors, including labels such as infant loss; parent death; grad student; pregnancy; cancer; disability; depression; racism; NTT faculty; hospitalization; infertility; family; suicidal ideation; online teaching; anxiety. We didn’t set out with a master list of tags; rather, we originated tags as needed, borrowing wording from previous tags for the sake of consistency.
In true archival logic, our tags likely speak volumes about us as human beings with similar experiences and/or fears, in addition to illustrating our personal needs as readers. Editing and copy-editing requires close and careful attention to a given piece, and when that piece contains triggering content, the act of editing becomes a minefield. While we each read all of the submissions, assigning tags to each piece allowed us to divide our editorial labor in ways that centered our comfort and well-being. I could not, for example, engage closely with submissions that dealt with the death of a parent or with medical trauma, and so Ruth and Jessie took on those pieces, while I took on pieces with themes that were difficult for them.
This system of mutual care foregrounded us as human beings with messy lives and experiences instead of machinic, unfeeling editors with hard deadlines. Crip time, which we already value and set our clocks by, became even more important in this process: that is, we honored our pain in reading these pieces by slowing down when needed. In Zoom meetings and Twitter DMs, we discussed how we felt about the pieces that hurt to read, which, I think, aided our editorial perspective as well.
Making space for the trauma of others—many of whom are colleagues, friends, conference acquaintances, strangers—is profoundly painful. Even with content tags and carefully divided labor, it was hard to balance editorial distance with empathy, and harder to resist taking on our contributors’ trauma. Ultimately, I think it came down to this deceptively easy realization: caring for our contributors’ work could only occur if we enacted self-care and mutual care. Openly discussing our capacities, assigning content tags, and making space for each other are only some ways of coping, and as we continue to work through these submissions and their impacts on us, we’d love to hear other approaches from any of you.
Thanks so much, and next up is Jessie.
