How do disciplines such as political science, public policy, and international relations understand, adapt to, and potentially reform gendered processes of knowledge production and dissemination? And within Asia, are there special or specific aspects of this question that merit closer consideration and concern? We wanted to confront and engage with these questions regarding a particular aspect of how scholarly practices are gendered: the ways in which gender-based differences lead to biases in academic publishing and subsequent long-term career success. With a generous grant from the British Academy (grant number WW21100175), we convened a series of writing workshops for early career researchers (ECRs) in the social sciences from and based in Southeast Asia from 2021 to 2022.
Titled “Beyond Essentialism,” the writing workshops took as a motivating objective to encourage, help develop, and eventually showcase scholarly works of female ECRs from Southeast Asia in the social sciences regardless of whether the works themselves touched on or engaged with issues of gender. We wanted to move beyond long-standing assumptions, in the social sciences and within Asia, that female scholars study issues related to women and gender, traditionally come from disciplinary backgrounds such as sociology and history, and orient themselves to particular methodological approaches and fieldwork environments.
The primary goal of these workshops was to help our ECRs learn about the academic publishing process from editors and established scholars from, working in, and/or with expertise on the region. A complementary goal was to help expand their understanding of related processes such as grant-writing, seeking tenure and promotion, developing regional partnerships, balancing different work commitments, and achieving their desired work–life balance. The first two workshops, held virtually due to ongoing restrictions from the COVID-19 pandemic in June 2021 and February 2022, consisted exclusively of female ECRs alongside both female and male editors and established scholars. The third and final workshop, held in person in Manila, the Philippines in September 2022, consisted of a mixed-gender group of ECRs alongside both female and male editors and established scholars.
Our primary and complementary goals were not based on exclusively gendered considerations. The idea was not to provide women ECRs confidential information that male ECRs could not also benefit from, although there are certainly some common gender-based differences facing ECRs that we addressed, such as managing academic career demands alongside the social expectations associated with caregiving and raising a family. Instead, the design of all workshop spaces was intended to achieve gender inclusivity in recognition of the fact that female ECRs often incur significant disadvantages that may be easier to rectify in spaces largely or nearly entirely comprised of women. In shor