Barbara J. Risman, a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, will become the next Editor of Gender & Society, the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society, in August 2019. Risman will follow the journal’s Current Editor, Jo Reger, Professor and Chair of Sociology at Oakland University. Risman says this editorship feels as if she is coming full circle, back to her original intellectual home. Her first article in a sociology journal was the first article in the first issue of Gender & Society, under the editorship of Judith Lorber.
Risman is very excited to become the next Editor of Gender & Society and to be working with an amazing team of Deputy Editors that includes Silke Aisenbrey, Mignon Moore, Kristen Myers, Smitha Radhakrishnan and Sheryl Skaggs. The Editorial Team’s composition insures broad coverage both substantively (e.g. from family to sexuality to workplaces and from culture to economic inequality) and methodologically (including expertise in both quantitative and qualitative techniques).
Risman intends to continue many of the current practices of Gender & Society, which has a history of strong and effective editorial teams. They will continue to strive for a short turnaround time for submissions, only awarding a revise and resubmit to manuscripts that have a strong possibility of publication after revision, continuing the work to create a high digital visibility, and the production of high quality teaching related materials. As has been the case with their predecessors, the editorial team is committed to providing reviews that provide feminist mentorship for manuscripts whether or not they are accepted for publication. They also remain strongly committed to intersectional feminist scholarship and intend to continue the tradition of welcoming integrative “thought” pieces in the journal.
The Editorial Team will emphasize the inclusion of multi-methodological research, as well as research from every methodological tradition, qualitative, quantitative, experimental, and social historical. They will further build on the internationalization efforts of the journal. One of their ideas for doing this is to create a space on the website for international colleagues to give a “state of feminist sociology” in their countries, to be published on the website concurrently in their own language and English. This should encourage more international conversations, and hopefully eventually submissions.
The team has two plans for increasing the use of research published by Gender & Society for feminist social change. First, they will actively seek scholarship that highlights how scholarship can support the creation and implementation of effective feminist social policy and inform movement efforts, as well as to study such things. The team hopes this will inspire and inform intersectional feminist policy conversations.
Second, the editorial team will build on the current editor’s work to translate appropriate articles for a public audience. Such dissemination will include press releases, online symposia on topics of interest to the public, blog posts, and the development of relationships with key journalists. Risman will work closely with graduate students to help them develop these skills.
Professor Risman is a public intellectual whose editorials have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, CNN.com, and the Huffington Post. She is frequently quoted in the press including in the Economist, LA Times, New York Times, and the Atlantic. Risman has been awarded the SWS Mentorship Award and the SWS Distinguished Lecturer Award, and has served as President of Sociologists for Women in Society. She is a former President of the Southern Sociological Society and former Vice-President of the American Sociological Association. Awardsinclude the 2011 American Sociological Association’s Award for the Public Understanding of Sociology and the 2005 Katherine Jocher Belle Boone Award from the Southern Sociological Society for lifetime contributions to the study of gender. In her new book, Where The Millennials Will Take us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure? (Oxford University Press, 2018), Risman revises her theory of gender as a social structure explicitly addressing how cultural meanings can be differentiated from the material dimension at each level of the gender structure.
Gender & Society 