1. Introduction: Demystifying the Publishing Landscape in STS
As Early Career Researcher (ECR) representatives for the EASST and 4S councils, we, Sarah Rose Bieszczad and Pouya Sepehr1, organized a panel at the EASST/4S Amsterdam conference. With a lot of valuable help from other ECRs in the Science & Technology Studies (STS) community, the session addressed a central and often fraught aspect of academic life: publishing. In interdisciplinary fields like STS, publishing can feel like an opaque and exclusionary system—especially for ECRs navigating it for the first time.
How does one select the “right” journal? What are the unspoken expectations of a “first” submission? How should we interpret rejection or major revisions? And most crucially, how does publishing influence the trajectory of an academic career? These questions, though common, are rarely openly discussed in formal academic settings. Recognizing this gap, we curated a session titled “Demystifying Publishing Landscapes for ECRs” to create a space for candid dialogue.
Our goal was twofold: to break down barriers to academic publishing, and explore how STS publishing practices might be reimagined. Could STS publishing be more diverse, experimental, or collaborative? Could ECRs push the boundaries of the dominant formats to reflect the field’s interdisciplinary richness? To reflect on these questions, we invited a range of scholars—Kean Birch, Sarah Davies, Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner, Julien McHardy, and Paul Trauttmansdorff—to share insights from their experiences from a wide range of publishing platforms at various career stages. The session sparked a lively discussion on rejection and resilience, peer review and publishing norms, and the possibilities for creative scholarly outputs that sit outside of established norms.
2. Five Lessons on Publishing in STS: Insights from the ECR Panel
In what follows, we distill some key lessons from the panel. Rather than recounting each speaker’s contributions separately, we describe five cross-cutting themes that resonate with broader conversations in STS and academic publishing. These lessons are both practical and political—offering ECRs navigational tools and critical questions to consider as they find their voice within, and sometimes against, dominant publishing systems.
2.1. Publishing is Emotional—So Acknowledge the Economy of Fear
Publishing is both an intellectual and emotional practice. Julian McHardy described the “economy of fear” pervasive in academic writing—made up of fears of rejection, of not being good enough, or of not securing future employment. These anxieties can manifest in defensive or rigid writing styles that dampen the expressive and exploratory potentials of scholarship.
The panel emphasized that publishing should be viewed as a collaborative and iterative process, not a moment of judgement. Peer review, approached with care and reciprocity, can be a site of mutual support. For ECRs, building peer networks—spaces of trust where drafts are shared, ideas tested, critiques generous, and failure normalized—is essential for resisting isolation and cultivating confidence.
2.2. Rejection is Normal—And Valuable
Rejection and failure are not detours from the publishing process, but integral parts of it. Kean Birch reminded us that even the most polished papers often face multiple rejections before publication. His pragmatic advice: never reply to a rejection immediately. Allow time for reflection before re-engaging.
Framing peer review as an important part of any “community of practice,” Kean encouraged ECRs to embrace feedback loops by seeking early comments, workshopping drafts, and revising iteratively. Persistence, not perfection, is the key to publishing success. Rejection becomes generative when it is reframed as a lesson, rather than a personal failure.
2.3. Know the System—And Learn How to Work with (or Around) It
Paul Trauttmansdorff highlighted the importance of strategic decision-making in the early stages of an academic career. While the idea of turning a PhD thesis into a book is appealing, ECRs should consider whether journal articles—currently more heavily weighted in academic evaluations—may be more advantageous. Both have their own advantages and drawbacks.
Yet publishing strategy should not be reduced to career pragmatics alone. Understanding the supports publishers offer, from editorial help to Open Access pathways, is essential. Paul and others urged ECRs to actively involve supervisors and mentors in these decisions, while acknowledging the often frustrating realities of Open Access funding.
2.4. Push the Boundaries—But Start with the Basics
Several panelists reflected on the dominance of the standardized empirical research article format in STS journals. Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner noted how publishing formats have become increasingly uniform since the 1990s, crowding out more experimental, reflexive, or dialogical styles of writing.
Sarah Davies likewise questioned how genre conventions in academic publishing constrain our ideas about what counts as legitimate knowledge. Yet both speakers acknowledged that experimentation requires skill and confidence—and that smaller journals and alternative platforms may be more hospitable to non-standard formats. Julian McHardy suggested a pragmatic path to innovation: first master the conventions, then subvert them. On this telling, ECRs should begin by understanding the rules before finding creative ways to bend or break them.
2.5. Books Still Matter—Yet Context Is Key
While journal articles may dominate evaluation metrics, books continue to offer distinct intellectual value—especially for sustained arguments or collective scholarly projects. Kean Birch and Julian McHardy shared their experiences of publishing books, including the challenges of dissemination and recognition relative to journal articles.
Julian framed books as invitations to build communities of interest—through open peer review, launch events, and post-publication engagement. Yet the decision to pursue a book project should be grounded in clear intentions and realistic expectations of the impediments and affordances imposed by time constraints, institutional support, and career stage.
Supplement: Reflections from the Room
The panel created space for expert reflection with the audience, many of whom shared questions and concerns about publishing. Several themes from the discussion resurfaced during these exchanges—particularly the emotional terrain of publishing, tension between conformity and creativity, and desire for more open-ended, experimental formats.
One recurring concern was the standardization of the academic article in STS. Despite the field’s interdisciplinary richness—which draws on insights from a wide range of fields from political economy to feminist technoscience—panelists and participants noted that the empirical research article remains the dominant form in most journals. As Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner explained, this reflects a broader managerialism in academia, where knowledge must be “packaged” into measurable, replicable outputs. While this offers clarity, it also flattens the genre diversity that once defined STS publishing.
Participants asked: How can we innovate without risking our credibility? How do we keep our writing accessible without diluting its analytical edge? One audience member worried that veering too far into theory or genre experimentation might alienate readers—or reviewers. In response, Julian McHardy emphasized that experimentation need not be radical from the start. Rather, it can emerge gradually from a firm grounding in the conventional format.
Rejection—another constant companion of scholarly publishing—was openly acknowledged as part of the academic process. Sarah Davies and Kean Birch sought to normalize this experience, reminding ECRs that even established scholars encounter harsh peer reviews and desk rejections. What matters, they stressed, is not the avoidance of failure, but learning how to translate failure into revision, growth, and resilience.
The most hopeful parts of the conversation centred around community. Several panelists highlighted the importance of building and sustaining peer-to-peer networks by exchanging drafts, reflecting on reviewer feedback, and sharing publication strategies. These informal structures provide practical support and emotional solidarity, helping ECRs reframe publishing as a shared, iterative journey rather than a solitary battle for legitimacy.
In short, the panel stressed that the struggle to publish is not merely about writing well—it is about finding your place in a shifting, sometimes unforgiving system. But with peers to lean on, mentors to consult, and space to experiment, the publishing process can be one of discovery, collaboration, and transformation.
5. Conclusion: Reimagining Publishing as Collective Practice
The panel made clear that academic publishing for Early Career Researchers (ECRs) in STS is not merely a technical hurdle, but a deeply situated practice shaped by institutional norms, emotional labor, and evolving expectations. While the current system may feel rigid—dominated as it is by standard formats and metrics— cracks often appear where creativity and transformation can emerge.
ECRs today face a double task: to learn how to navigate the publishing system effectively, and remain attentive to its limits. Success may depend on persistence, strategic thinking, and openness to feedback—but it also requires imagination. Our panelists suggested that publishing can be a space not only for output, but also experimentation, collaboration, and meaningful engagement with peers.
This work cannot be done alone. The future of STS publishing depends on our ability to build and sustain communities that support diverse and generative scholarly practices. From pre-submission peer groups to journals open to non-traditional formats, from informal mentorship to formal reform—publishing becomes more than a rite of passage; it becomes a shared site of possibility.
As we look ahead, we are left with a generative question: What kinds of knowledge—and what kinds of STS publishing—do we want to make possible? For ECRs especially, the challenge is not only to succeed within the current system, but to reshape it in ways that reflect the values of inclusivity, reflexivity, and creativity that define the field at its best.
From the Editors’ Desk: Reflections by Kean Birch and Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner
In addition to the main lessons from the panel, two of our speakers offered extended reflections. These contributions—one in Q&A format, the other an analytical essay—provide further insight into the shifting terrains of STS publishing from an editorial perspective.
Kean Birch | Q &A on Publishing in STS
What are the challenges and benefits of publishing a “typical journal article” in so diverse a field as STS?
STS is diverse in terms of the analytical perspectives we all bring to the table, whether that’s through sociological, anthropological, political-economical, feminist, or other lenses. Personally, I think this means that we end up getting stuck within disciplinary canons, writing about the same issues year after year. It also means that we often face difficulties in talking to one another within STS. Despite our diversity, research I’ve done with Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner and others shows that we’re converging on a “typical” publishing format, at least in journal publishing. Most STS journals, whether generic or specialist, centre the research article as the main output they publish. This can limit the options for alternative publishing formats—such as the more reflexive and ironic publications redolent of the 1990s—but at the same time it provides everyone with a clear standard to which we know we are all evaluated. Here, it’s important to distinguish between ‘standard’ and ‘standardisation’ by emphasising that the former helps us identify what criteria we want to guide our publishing in the field, while the latter can be more problematic for defining exactly what we should publish. It’s the equivalent of identifying a line we all need to cross versus a square-box we all need to fit into.
What are your top three key recommendations for ECRs to publish in this global field? Should ECRs push boundaries, and if so, how can they advocate for positive changes to the “typical journal article”?
First, ECRs should pay close attention to a journal’s aims, scope, and guidelines—usually writing with those specific requirements in mind. It might seem easier to write first and find a journal to publish in second, but I’d say this rarely works out as smoothly as you imagine. Second, get feedback on drafts before you submit. Supervisors are supposed to provide feedback to ECRs, so they’re the first people you should talk to. Then, share your work with people you know. And finally, present your work at conferences and workshops. Wherever you ask for feedback, make sure you ask for constructive criticism, not just validation. You need people to take apart your writing in a careful and thoughtful manner. Once you’ve got feedback, actually address it in rewriting your paper. Last, the greatest strengths ECRs have is their empirical work; it’s new, fresh, and insightful. Unfortunately in STS, we all encounter far-too-many overly theoretical papers and talks where someone is trying to be the next Latour or Haraway but fails to do so. I’ve tried to do the same myself! Working within the typical format will help you here. Once you’re comfortable with that format, think about what else you may want to do in your writing and start experimenting; sometimes this means writing for people outside academia and other times it means stepping across disciplinary boundaries. Both can be scary, but they are also rewarding.
From your experience on editorial boards, how open are journal editors to “non-standard” formats?
Generally, I’d say that editors are not averse to non-typical formats; it’s just that researchers rarely produce good examples of these formats for the simple reason that we don’t practice writing them enough. A lot of journals welcome non-typical formats, such as commentaries or engagements or interventions or review essays, but the effort expected of authors to do them well is often greater than the effort taken to write a research article—largely because we’ve got more training, experience, and practice writing a typical article. Consequently, any desire editors have to expand these formats comes up against workload issues, for authors, reviewers, and editors. Perhaps STS needs a journal dedicated to non-typical formats, focusing on them to the exclusion of research articles.
Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner | STS Publishing Forecast—cloudy with a chance of desk rejection
I admit I struggled when asked to give advice to ECRs about thriving, or at least surviving, in the current STS publishing landscape. I often find blanket advice about publishing and academic careers problematic, since it can rationalise and perpetuate the status quo by instilling anxiety (“if you don’t do x,y,z, your professional ambitions will fail”).
Let me instead start by making three short observations of the status quo in STS publishing, drawing on my recent research with Kean Birch, Maria Amuchastegui and Thed van Leeuwen. For one, it is striking how uniform STS publishing has become in recent decades. In the 1980s and 90s, STS journal articles were characterised by omnipresent experimentation with writing styles, publishing formats, and authorship. This experimentation was in the service of making a theoretical point, namely to performatively demonstrate the social constructedness of knowledge. Since then, the diversity of STS articles types has decreased significantly, and experimental writing has largely given way to the standard social scientific article format.
This development is not only due to poststructural theory falling out of academic fashion. It also derives from our concern with proactively managing the impact of our research activities in a competitive and metrics-saturated academic environment. Increasingly, an STS journal article is not only a means of engaging with readers and communicating research but also a unit of anticipated output around which we plan and our grant applications, project work, and collaborations. And since planning and managing are much easier with standardised units, this trend tends to homogenize the implicit mental templates with which we conceive and narrate our research—and, ultimately, the forms of knowledge we create.
Secondly, publications are part of an ever-fiercer competition for attention among academics. Thirty years ago, it was still possible for STS scholars to maintain an overview of the entire field. Everyone read a small number of journals cover-to-cover when a new issue came out, such that every article was virtually guaranteed a measure of attention. There was even a norm of not publishing too early in one’s career, for fear that readers would permanently associate one’s name with an underdeveloped or unconvincing argument. By contrast, the field is much bigger now, and individual scholars publish more than they used to. Today, ECRs often worry—are made to worry—about having a sufficient amount of publications to stand a chance in the postdoctoral job market. The resulting competition for attention gives rise to writing practices akin to search engine optimization. For instance, trying to coin concepts in such a way that they can be easily found, taken up, and cited by others. This is not, perhaps, problematic per se. But the perceived need to ‘sell’ our papers may lead us to be less reflexive than we would otherwise like to be.
My third observation is that submissions to STS journals continue to grow at a pace that threatens to outgrow the supply of peer reviewers. In reaction to this, journal editors tend to screen more strictly and issue desk rejections more often. While necessary to protect an already stretched reviewer pool, these trends can also mean that a substantial volume of work does not get a chance to be reviewed in the first place. This particularly threatens unorthodox submissions, and submissions from regions where STS has a relatively weak institutional presence.
With all this in mind, what can I offer in terms of (not so) straightforward advice? Most importantly, I propose that we stop thinking about publishing practices as individualised career problems, and instead as collective epistemic choices that affect the kinds of knowledge we are able to produce. While I realise that this sensibility is a form of luxury, I strongly feel our discourse on publishing is painfully pragmatic by default. Many STS scholars tend to view the current publishing system as something akin to the weather. That is, a natural given that we occasionally complain about, but cannot influence. To overcome this detached view, it could be useful to ask some simple personal questions. In what ways do current publishing practices make me feel alienated from research I otherwise care about? What would my writing ambitions be if I didn’t pre-emptively subordinate them to my career?
Footnotes
- Authors names are alphabetical and do not reflect authorship contribution: both authors contributed equally to the preparation of this panel and article. ↩︎
Author biographies
Sarah Rose Bieszczad is a PhD candidate at Leiden University and, at the time of this panel, the Early Career Researcher representative for the EASST Council. Her transdisciplinary research combines STS and human geography to examine the futures of the deep sea through ethnographically situated explorations of speculative fabulation, the right to opacity, and the blending of historical and contemporary narratives of scientific exploration and research at depth. She is committed to supporting emerging scholars through community-building, and creating spaces for STS activism in-and-outside of academic life worlds.
Pouya Sepehr is a postdoctoral researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London, and a lecturer at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His work sits at the intersection of STS, urban governance and environmental justice. As an ECR representative on the 4S Council, he supports initiatives that foreground inclusive knowledge practices and alternative scholarly futures.
