1) While I think both Ilana’s and Nate’s comments suggest, the software is not the problem, we seem to forget that each and every aspect of our work these days gets automated: In classrooms, lectures and materials are put online, teaching via digital tools increasingly in blended/online-only formats; feedback is on forums increasingly not facilitated by the faculty who design and teach the class; and some teaching is outsourced; and a lot of teaching is also outsourced, sometimes to tutors subcontracted by companies. In research our communication is mostly on skype, not only in big transnational projects, but also people who work across a corridor hold skype meetings online because we are ‘too busy’; processes of paper submission and feedback are automated – to save ‘time’ and make the process ‘anonymous’ (whereas specialisations are so narrow and you can google the title of the paper and see its author in the matter of seconds); and we end up in systems and systems of hot-desks, call centers, email communication and what not just to ‘give us more time’… which in this case, we see, has clearly backfired. So this whole debacle really calls for the reassessment of the degree to which we can allow an automation of the anthropological and academic profession. Sure, everybody is busy, but the fact that a big list of people who gave their names to this journal, never came together face-to-face in this capacity in some on- or offline format to discuss the issues at stake, is quite frightening and telling.

2) While I agree with Madeleine and Ivan that we should speak more about the hidden pleasures of self-exploitation and charisma-by-association in search of career progression routes, I think using this as a reason to say ‘let’s focus back on the toxic personality’ makes little sense. Without the normalised structures of knowledge production that feed off free work and self-exploitation to sustain academia, this guy couldn’t have taken and exploited the HAU opportunity for seven years with absolute and total impunity! So yes, his case has to be audited, but so do many others that are happening in our own workplaces while we’re speaking. And especially those in structurally secure position (“we’re all precarious”, I know the trope, but some are much more vulnerable than others…) have to intervene, take a stance, challenge both individual predators and predatory structures. But from what I see, most colleagues are remaining complacent, be it because they are ‘too busy’, or because they are closing ranks and washing their hands to protect departments and sub-disciplines.

You raise an important problem and one we’ve discussed but not addressed (yet). I am mindful of the concerns raised by some that #hautalk is sucking in tangential subjects and losing focus on the original accusations of abuse. To avoid taking focus from this discussion, I’d invite you to open this issue on the PKP Community Forum. You can tag me there (@NateWr) to get my attention. Or if you prefer a more neutral forum I’m on twitter under the same handle.

Thanks Nate. Thanks @pkp! Since you and your colleagues are following some of the current discussion, here is a #hautalk use case to note in this context.

I know I am not the strongest OJS user (despite my love for it) but I think I have this right. In the current disciplinary effort to make sense of HAU and its dynamics there is interest in what we might call “historical mastheads.” In print publishing, one could, if needed, always go to an old paper issue to see who all the people involved in a journal were in a given moment. When a modern digital journal publishes whole issues with old-school look and feel (PDFs with pagination, etc.) they can sometimes present their print or print-like masthead and provide the same service, but the OJS default is to present item level content with item level metadata but not to present the current-but-soon-to-be-historical journal level metadata. Put more simply, you can look at an old article but you cannot generally know who the editorial board, etc. was at the time the article appeared. The only ways around this (and I will start using them myself) are to publish a masthead in the issue (or alongside any content release) or to create historical data on the masthead or with a supplementary (linked) page. Used without thinking about these dynamics in the ordinary way, OJS erases the historical masthead with whatever the latest one is. (Right?) This is made worse if it (as with HAU, it seems to me) cannot be fished out of the Internet Archive. Unless it were published, it also would not be captured preservation efforts focused on content and its metadata. I welcome your thoughts.

This seems super wonky to talk about, but anyone trying to assess, for instance how many scholars of color or women were involved in a journal in a particular moment would want to access the historical masthead of a journal. When someone says that they were removed from the masthead in a controversial moment, how can we find documentary evidence of this? If one wanted to consult with past staff or participants in a journal, how would one know who they were? In general, masthead listings are how people prove, when questioned, the role that they filled at any given moment.

Maybe there are existing techniques in OJS for this issue. I will keep exploring it, but #hautalk has made me much more mindful of the need to address this historical function.

Secondly, I think that the focus on precarity and predation that Allegra and others rushed to underline, has to be balanced with a clear sense of what people got, or were promised to get, by turning a blind eye when participating in HAU. Yes, the system fed on precarious situation of young scholars, but – does one who is truly falling through the cracks volunteer their work for an academic journal? Or do they do it in hope of boosting their CVs? Don’t get me wrong, the latter is in the function of the former, of course, but the extent to which precarity is used as an unreflected explanation in the academia astonishes me. The system promised and presumably, gave many (im)material rewards – association and prestige that Reeves describes – and I imagine it was this that was the key to many complicities, high and low. Patronage gives and takes in both directions, and no simplified narrative about the ‘exploited’ workers, or heroic calls for expelling the bully, will be enough to redeem us from the wider field of dependency and complicity that just transpired.

Focusing on the institutional and digital systems that allowed the parcelling of tasks and the elimination of oversight brackets off the organisational culture that let a pyramid become a pyramid, an Editor become an Editor-in-Chief, prospectively, for life, or to let bullying pass unchecked as the price to pay for getting this big and beautiful thing off the ground. This is not about our journal interfaces (as Ilana points out, OJS could have a plateau at the top; it could also allow for rotation), or even about the difficulties of formalising an initially informal project that was running on enthusiasm and hard work, but about recognisably social dynamics that are also a mirror of our discipline and that allowed a pyramid to become catastrophically top-heavy: the power of patronage, of favours, of name-dropping, of prestige-through-proximity, of endorsement through association. As ethnographies of pyramid-schemes have shown, after all, such schemes thrive on enchantment: on the excitement of participation in this social thing; on the promise of future rewards, on the belief that it must be OK behind the scenes because, well, why could so many people be wrong?

In this respect, calls not to focus on ‘personality’ miss the point. Because HAU was fundamentally a charismatic project in which the institution became inseparable from the person of the EiC-for-life. This, too, should give us pause, because, like the cell-culture that Ilana describes, this tendency to trade in the politics of personality and charisma-by-association is endemic to our field: it is engrained in our casual vocabularies of expertise (‘A-list academics’, ‘elite departments’, ‘rising stars’), but also in the politics of citation, of invitation, of hiring, of publishing; of the valorization of certain kinds of scholarly practice (capital-T Theory) over others; the privileging of certain centres of knowledge production over others. The working practices of HAU need to be *independently scrutinised, yes (and urgently, too, if the project is to survive). But we also need to take this as a moment to bring our tools of critique to our own academic communities and the forms of scholarly patronage that they reproduce.

I didn’t read it as an attack on OJS. I think the mutually constitutive dynamic of what you describe came through clearly. I shared it with our team and we really enjoyed it. If all discussion of our software was as thought-provoking and carefully considered, we’d be very lucky. In fact, we _need_ more reflexive conversations like this.

It also highlights some deep contradictions in our attitude to formality. Academic life is full of “difficult” colleagues, and most often we find work-arounds to accommodate often very problematic behaviour. Hierarchical imbalances don’t help, but even peer-to-peer confrontation can easily create quite explosive situations. The decision to move a problem into a formal register requires a lot of bravery, even in institutional settings where procedures and support are available. Where they’re not available it’s obviously even worse. But anthropologists’ self-perception as loose and unbounded folk who don’t “do” formality doesn’t always help when unboundedness starts to hurt other people.

I agree, it is possible to use OJS productively for decades without ethical harm to anyone, it all depends on the social organization that accompanies the platform.

I am so glad that you wrote this comment, and hope that people reading my blogpost will also read what you say. I tried so hard in my discussion not to blame OJS for how this journal was run. People can take an affordance in a technology and do something with it that no designer could ever anticipate. As an anthropologist, I normally delight when I see this happen, because it proves that people are more imaginative than one could ever predict. Not this time.