publishing in politically engaged pubs

[carlosmarx]

Do publications in politically engaged journals/encyclopedias/readers hurt one's chances at a tt job as a general sociologist?

I heard this before and I was wondering what people here thought.

I'm not talking about newsletters or anything, but the more academic type of publications. Im talking about the New Left Review, a myriad of encyclopedias (of protest, of strikes, of revolution, etc.), journal of social change, etc.

I know these publications don't really help in getting a job, but I was wondering if they actually hurt candidates (making them seem less academic, "scientific," or whatever).

[anon9]

Like with so many other things, I think it's more about the big picture. If your other materials make you appear as though you are more interested in provoking political controversy for its own sake (and not into backing up your claims up via analysis) then a series of publications in the new left review could complete that picture - and this could hurt you at some places. If you come across as a well-rounded scholar otherwise then those kinds of publications would probably help.

The key point is that political polemics can't come across as your "day job"; your day job is research. That's my 2c.

[nhjk]

^ Good advice, although I don't think listing pubs in the New Left Review would ever help one's chances. NLR tends to publish political hackery masquerade as scholarship...not much different than listing a pub in the Cato Journal on your CV (actually Cato probably publishes better work than NLR).

[sugarshack]

if you are worried they will make you look bad, you can always take them off your CV. But it might also help you- a lot of sociologists are into public sociology.

Not that I'm on a search committee or anything, but the only thing that would give me pause is if you listed all these pubs along with standard peer-reviewed pubs under one big "Publication" category, as it would look like CV padding. I would distinguish between "Peer-reviewed articles" and "other publications" and put these under "other".

[hmm]

I don't think it would hurt because it's political work per se, but more because it's something detracting from your academic record. Unless you have numerous academic publications alongside these, a search committee member might wonder: why is this person spending time on these publications instead of writing academic articles?

One of the things search committee members think about is how likely the candidate would be to have a sufficiently strong record when coming up for tenure. (Yes, most dept members want their junior colleagues to succeed in the promotion process unless the colleague turns out to be a problem person, which is probably more the exception than the rule.) But if the CV is filled with political pieces that wouldn't really count toward tenure then that may give pause to the committee.