Hi Graphei,
As one of the humanities types to another (okay, I'm an Anthropologist with a background in Comparative Religion), I just wanted to comment on a couple of your points.
SWJ is partly peer-reviewed. Basically, the peer-reviewing comes in when the editor can't quickly decide on the merit of an article using the SWJ protocols. These protocols took a number of years to develop, but the key ones are
- is it timely?
- does it sound reasonable?
- does it (sort of) make sense? and
- will it start a discussion?
I'd estimate that roughly half to three quarters of articles submitted are rejected out of hand, with most of the rest being published and only a few being peer-reviewed. The reasoning behind this was simple: we wanted to put the "peer" back in "peer review" . And, BTW, I'm one of the people who does what little peer reviewing we do.
On the theme / op-ed idea, we looked at that and, for a whole host of reasons, decided to adopt our own variant of it. It's there, but tricky to find as such.
As far as outreach to academic organizations or formal conference attendance, not really. There's very little reason for people to do that if we have other academic credentials. I'm not saying that it isn't done, just that it's not overt.
Ya know, I'm definitely not part of the official narrative It makes it harder to interact in some ways but, really, it's fine once you establish your street cred. Honestly, this is just like joining any community; if you want to go against the generally accepted view, be prepared to defend yourself
Many, MANY electrons could be killed answering those questions....
I'm only going to tackle the "anti-intellectual" culture one, and leave the rest for others. In my experience, the military is not anti-intellectual, it is anti-non-practical. You can be a total eccentric with "insane" research interests but, if you can say "look at X, Y and Z" and show how it has applied meaning, most military folks will accept it.
OTOH, if you have an on-point expertise but tell a commander it's going to take 6 weeks to do a lit review and run focus groups before you can give them any input, you will be tossed aside like used toilet paper. Good commanders have a feel for the intellectuals, scholars and academics they work and network with. Good intellectuals need to develop a feel for working within the military cultures.
Not a bad idea, but the tech may be a touch of a problem since we are dispersed around the world. Hey, if you're in upstate New York, you're closer to me (in Ottawa) than you are to Dave D. who's in Florida. Dispersed podcasts are possible, especially via G+ hangouts, but may not be feasible to do well.
All that said, please do start a series around Islam and religion in general! They can be a lot of fun but can also be a pain to put together well! BTW, I can say that because I'm in the process of putting together a serason of podcasts for War On The Rocks.
Again, we've got the dispersal problem. I do meet fairly often with some of the other SWC people in Ottawa, but.....
Cheers,
Marc
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