Four Years of Editing Feminist Criminology (2014-2018): Lessons Learned

• DOI: 10.1177/1557085118786138
• Date: 01 October 2018
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Editorial

https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085118786138

Feminist Criminology

2018, Vol. 13(4) 355 –358

© The Author(s) 2018

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DOI: 10.1177/1557085118786138

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Editorial Farewell

Four Years of Editing Feminist

Criminology (2014-2018):

Lessons Learned

As Feminist Criminology’s fourth editorial team, we pause to reflect on how far the

journal has come since its inception in 2006, and over our brief four year term. When

we started our term in 2014, our goals were fairly simple: we wanted to continue to

implement the founding goals of the journal, encourage high quality submissions and

reviews, increase diversity within the journal, continue the journal’s good track record

in publishing international articles, as well as creatively disseminate the articles pub-

lished (Barberet, 2015).

As we went about trying to fulfill these aims, we learned more about the publishing

process, and tried to plan how we would achieve them, step by step. Therefore, as we

attempted to increase the diversity of the submissions, we focused more on interna-

tional manuscripts in manuscript recruitment. This was done not only through publi-

cizing the journal at international conferences, which the editor routinely attends, but

by paying special attention to international topics in domestic conferences—which the

managing editor took on as part of her task list while attending the American Society

of Criminology (ASC) conference and reviewing the programs of other conferences.

Figure 1 details our results in continuing the good record of the journal in publishing

work from outside the United States.

As we thought about how to increase the quality of reviews, we realized that it is

rare that any of us are taught to review articles as new scholars. Thus, along with the

editors of Violence Against Women (Claire Renzetti) and Women in Criminal Justice

(Frances Bernat), we started offering a Division on Women and Crime (DWC)-

sponsored Reviewer Training Workshop at the American Society of Criminology

(ASC) annually, mainly for graduate students and junior faculty. Participants receive a

certificate of attendance, and have given us good feedback on the quality and useful-

ness of the workshop, not only for producing good reviews but for producing good

manuscripts themselves. This workshop attracts between 15 and 30 attendees yearly at

the ASC. In the spirit of refining the skills of newer reviewers, we have increasingly

considered junior scholars as reviewers for manuscripts. As a result of this workshop,

we have bonded with both Claire Renzetti and Frances Bernat, and routinely partici-

pate in a “Meet the Editors” session with them at the ASC as well. Like-minded jour-

nals have a lot to gain from supporting each other.

We also thought it important to internationalize and diversify the editorial board.

We thus added editorial board members from outside the United States, and ensured

that the editorial board had more representation from African American and Latina

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