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Reviewing and repurposing: the next iteration of ROC

Progress is enchanting. I felt its charms when I learned that I would be the next editor of this journal, news that I took as proof of personal and professional growth. I have embraced its aspirations while setting goals for my term: making the journal’s new format a success, increasing its readership, assembling an inspiring board of editors, and showing the potential of its online format. The promise of progress shaped these and my primary goal: to affirm the value and legitimacy of my colleagues’ work in the face of claims that the academic project declines whenever it modifies its traditions. Progress is the sense that we are moving in a clear direction with actions that order, correct, repair, right, shed, and expand. I find those actions deeply satisfying, and they will not achieve the goals I have set. Holding space for difference requires a different set of movements. It has not and will not compromise the academic project to include work by and about people of color, women, people with disabilities, and people who identify as transgender, queer, lesbian, gay, or pansexual. Neither is securing space for that work a matter of progress. In a 1999 special issue of Communication Theory on enchantment and disenchantment with academia, Brenda J. Allen, Mark P. Orbe, and Margarita Refugia Olivas shared mixed feelings about the profession and questioned “the appropriateness of what is normalized at the center of the academy,” including “the common deprecations and institutionalized isolations.” Their discussion dispels the sense that now—the present moment—is one step in a linear progression toward a more inclusive project; that we can look back at the field of communication studies 20 years ago and see great strides leading up to today; that we can see each step forward drawing more and more people from the margins to the center; or that our current trajectory will lead to even greater gains for all. These beliefs, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing explains, rest on “the assumption that the trope of progress is sufficient to know the world, both in success and failure.” But progress, and its blueprints, Tsing goes on to say, “is not the only plan for making worlds.” Indeed, the academic world-making that Allen, Orbe, and Olivas propose looks less like inclusive strides forward and more like a complete re-orientation. They draw a distinction, for instance, between centering diversity and “doing difference,” and they locate their own disenchantment in their experiences with colleagues who support the former but who see the latter as threatening or simply unworthy of scholarly attention. Academic institutions and associations only reify their traditions when “progress” means the celebration of firsts without acknowledgment of lost opportunities, expansion without change to framing assumptions, or inclusion instead of “something entirely different,” to borrow a phrase from Karma R. Chávez. These alternative measures of diversity—acknowledgment of lost opportunities, changing framing assumptions, and expecting something different—suggest ways of re-orienting or re-directing academia as Sara Ahmed has theorized those terms. They offer, for instance, a starting point from which to take up the aims of this journal and re-view communication. I believe those measures might become practice were we to adopt the same expectations of editorships that we have for scholarship, were we to not assume that white, able-bodied, heteronormative, gendernormative people working behind closed doors will hold ourselves accountable to stated commitments to equity and inclusion, and were we to stop equating