Scholarly Solidarity: Building an Inclusive Field for Junior and Minority Researchers

ABSTRACT

The goal of this reflective essay is to highlight challenges that junior and minority political communication researchers face and to advocate for scholarly solidarity practices, defined as actions that maintain social ties between researchers. I discuss four ways in which we can practice scholarly solidarity: solidarity in support, solidarity in responsible open science, solidarity by acknowledgment, and solidarity in the professional pipeline.

KEYWORDS:

• Solidarity
• early career scholars
• minority researchers

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my academic village for encouraging me to pursue this writing. In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Yunkang Yang, Dr. Meredith Pruden, Dr. Anita Varma, Dr. Yini Zhang, Megan Brown, and Dr. Martin Riedl for their feedback on earlier versions of this piece.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. International students experience additional barriers. For example, they may be limited in the numbers of hours they are able to work or may have to pay extra international student fees.

2. To be clear, this does not refer to solidarity with companies, but solidarity with researchers working for those companies.

3. The practice of giving feedback that recommends an author consult with a “native English speaker” or assumes the national or ethnic identity of the researcher is outdated and should not be used.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Netgain Partnership.

Notes on contributors

Josephine Lukito

Josephine Lukito is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Journalism and Media. She is also the Director of the Media & Democracy Data Cooperative and a Senior Faculty Research Affiliate for the Center for Media Engagement.