Hypatia (journal)

Hypatia has its roots in regional meetings of the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP), established in 1972. One of SWIP's earliest ideas was that it would set up a philosophy journal.[7] The thought of "a journal of our own" was very powerful, according to Kathryn Morgan (Toronto), speaking in 2009 on the history of Hypatia.[5] At the time, according to Linda Martín Alcoff (CUNY), president of the Hypatia Inc. board of directors since February 2018,[14] philosophers who wanted to write about gender-related issues were being silenced in a discipline "riven by unabashed bias and vested interest, inflicting its own form of unapologetic mob violence".[15]

Azizah Y. al-Hibri, 2012

SWIP decided in 1977 to set up an editorial board to plan the journal; the first board was put together by Ann Garry (Cal State LA) and Jacqueline Thomason (UMass Amherst).[7] At a meeting in Denver in the spring of 1979, the board agreed that Azizah Y. al-Hibri (UR) should be the founding editor.[7] Al-Hibri began work on the journal in 1982, after she had completed her PhD in philosophy and just as she was starting her first year of law school.[5] The philosophy and women's studies departments at the University of Pennsylvania offered support in the form of an office and research assistance.[16] Women's Studies International Forum agreed to publish the new journal as an annual "piggy back" issue of its own, which it did for three years,[5] and distributed 10,000 brochures to its mailing list advertising it.

The group led by Al-Hibri decided that submissions would be fully reviewed and that substantive comments would be offered, rather than the usual brief rejection, to help authors improve their work and to contribute to the field's development.[15] Donna Serniak (Penn) was responsible for the first issue. It was first published independently of Women's Studies International Forum in 1986.[7] In 1984 the Board accepted a proposal by Margaret Simons to launch Hypatia as an autonomous journal, with Simons, who was guest editor of the third (1985) issue of Hypatia at WSIF, as Editor. The editorial office at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville would handle production as well. With the enthusiastic support of SWIP members who voted to include journal subscriptions in their membership dues, contributed papers, and guest edited special issues, the new journal was a success. In 1990 Simons stepped down as Editor, after negotiating a contract with Indiana University Press to handle production and subscription fulfillment, thus allowing the editorial office to move easily to another campus. [17]

The journal is named after Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician and philosopher who was murdered by a mob in 415 CE. Al-Hibri said that the SWIP editorial board chose the name to reflect that women have "deep roots in philosophy".[16] According to Linda López McAlister (USF), the idea for the name came from Sue Larson (Barnard) during a meeting of Eastern SWIP in 1973. Sandra Harding (UCLA), who was at the meeting, objected, thinking it awful to name a feminist-philosophy journal after a woman who had been "stoned to death for telling the truth".[18] [19] The first suggestion was Hypatia: A Journal of Philosophy and Feminism, rather than A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, because at the time it was unclear what feminist philosophy might be.[20]

In 2019, Hypatia's editors wrote, in "The Promise of Feminist Philosophy":

The journal's editors have often addressed questions of disciplinary pluralism, demographic exclusion and marginalization, and the journal's own role in setting the agenda for feminist agitation or compliance within the academy. ... The special issue structure has sometimes allowed Hypatia to create space for scholars who are subjected to the most persistent forms of marginalization in the discipline, and for intersectional feminist work, even as Hypatia as a whole has been justly criticized for the underrepresentation of such work. ... More recently, the development of Hypatia clusters (a set of two or more articles on a single theme in an open issue) offers another avenue that might be employed to highlight work that is marginalized in the larger discipline. ... We understand Hypatia to be one of those precarious spaces of resistance, where intentions and outcomes do not perfectly mirror each other. We see Hypatia as aspiring to a critical practice that must be vigilantly maintained even as it remains open to radical transformation, as new historical and material conditions present themselves.[21]

Hypatia became involved in a dispute in April 2017 that led to the online shaming of one of its authors, Rebecca Tuvel, an untenured assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis.[27][28] The episode pointed to a breakdown of communications within Hypatia's editorial team, and to a rift within feminism and academic philosophy.[29][30][11]

The journal had published Tuvel's article, "In Defense of Transracialism", in its spring 2017 edition after the standard double-blind peer review.[29] Comparing the case of Caitlyn Jenner to that of Rachel Dolezal, Tuvel argued that "[s]ince we should accept transgender individuals' decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals' decisions to change races."[31] On 28 April the article was criticized on Facebook and Twitter, and Tuvel became the target of personal attacks.[32][33][34] The following day an open letter, listing a member of Hypatia's editorial board as its point of contact, urged that the article be retracted.[27][35] By 2 May the letter had gathered 830 signatures.[36] The journal distanced itself further from the article on 1 May when an Hypatia associate editor apologized on the journal's Facebook page for the article's publication, on behalf of "a majority of the Hypatia's Board of Associated Editors".[37][38][lower-alpha 1] The editor-in-chief, Sally Scholz, stood by the article, and the board of directors, led by Miriam Solomon, confirmed that it would not be retracted.[29]

In July 2017 Scholz resigned as editor-in-chief, along with Shelley Wilcox, editor of Hypatia Reviews Online. The board of directors announced that a task force would restructure the journal's governance, and that anyone in an editorial or non-board position with Hypatia would be "required to sign a statement of adherence to guidelines issued by COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics".[40][41][42] According to a statement from the associate editors, whose role was to choose the next editor, the board of directors asked them, on 17 July, to resign or the journal's governance documents would be suspended, which would remove the associate editors' influence. Eight of the associate editors resigned. In their resignation statement, they wrote that the current controversy was "grounded in long-standing differences and tensions within the field." They argued that feminist philosophy had an ethical commitment to transform philosophy into "a discipline that honors the perspectives and welcomes the scholarly contributions of historically marginalized groups, including people of color, trans* people, disabled people, and queer people."[43][44][45]

The board appointed interim editors, and in November 2017 Sally Haslanger, Serene Khader, and Yannik Thiem were named as the governance task-force co-chairs.[46][47][48] The five-person board of directors, including Solomon, was replaced in February 2018.[14] Linda Martín Alcoff and Kim Hall, two of the associate editors who resigned in July,[43] became president of the board of directors and chair of the search committee for the new editorial team, respectively.[14][49]