Greetings from your new DSQ Reviews Editors, Amy Vidali and Margaret Price. We're excited to begin reviewing for DSQ, and we want to briefly share some of the innovations we plan to bring to the reviews section, and provide some basic guidelines for new and veteran DSQ reviewers. We hope you will enjoy our first set of reviews in Winter 2011 (next issue).
DSQ has a rich history of timely and inclusive reviews, and we'd like to expand the scope of what DSQ reviews to consider the exciting and cutting-edge work in disability studies that appears in formats other than print books and articles. In addition to reviews of print works (we want those too), we'd like to encourage reviews of film/documentary, television, blogs, websites, audio works, news events, and the like. In doing this, we hope to capture the many vibrant aspects of disability art, culture, and scholarship, and to recognize the multi-sensory and multimedia nature of disability itself. Initially, we plan to include one or two multimedia reviews in each issue.
Encouraging multimedia reviews does pose some challenges. One challenge will be ensuring that readers of DSQ can access the original text — we hope that the subject of the review is something that DSQ readers can access and consider on their own, hopefully because they are encouraged (or discouraged) by a savvy review. We plan to deal with such issues on a case-by-case basis, and for now, we hope you will be in touch with ideas for multimedia reviews.
As new reviewers, we'd also like to include reviews that take up more than one work at a time and place such works in social, political, historical, or other scholarly contexts. This may mean taking up two texts from a similar genre (such as two disability memoirs), or two texts that are similar in topic but inhabit different media (for example, a book and a blog, or a film and an edited collection). That said, reviewing multiple works is not mandatory, and there will certainly be reviews that necessarily focus on one text.
Finally, as DSQ has done in the past, we'd like to encourage reviews that stand as essays on their own and engage the questions and controversies that enrich our discipline. We're interested in critical reviews that move beyond only summary, though the approach taken will vary based on the disicpline of both the work reviewed and the reviewer.
Below, we've included some "Guidelines for Reviewers" — we hope these are helpful, and that you'll be back for our first reviews section in January!
Margaret & Amy
Guidelines for Reviewers
- Interested reviewers should send an initial query to the editors (rather than a completed review). Include references to the work(s) you wish to review and a short note about your background and areas of interest (CVs are welcome). Note that works older than 18 months are typically not reviewed, although if there's a good reason to make an exception, let us know.
- Reviews should be written in language that will be accessible to readers across all disciplines. Discipline-specific language should be fully explained. In general, we are looking for complex ideas couched in straightforward prose.
- Reviews should place the work(s) in larger scholarly/activist contexts; try to avoid only summarizing the work (though some degree of summary is needed). Reviews should comment on the significance of the reviewed work to the larger world of disability studies.
- Reviews should be approximately 800-1,800 words, although this will depend upon the scope of the work(s) reviewed.
- Approved reviews should be sent as .doc files to both amy.vidali@ucdenver.edu and price.spelman@gmail.com, and include a full citation of the reviewed work(s).
