We are pleased to announce that the Qualitative Research Journal (vol. 26, no. 4) has published the special issue “Reviewer 2 Must Be Stopped: peer review, knowledge production and the politics of ‘catching up’ in global academia — toward a tender reviewer perspective,” edited by Joanna Mizielińska and Agata Stasińska of the Faculty of Sociology, University of Warsaw.
The issue reads peer review not as a set of individual failings but as a mechanism that reproduces global hierarchies of knowledge, organised around three axes: English as a tool of gatekeeping, the positioning of scholars outside the Anglo-American core as informants rather than theorists, and the assumption that non-Western contexts are simply catching up with the West.
It gathers nine articles written from the Global South and the semi-periphery: autoethnography by two Peruvian psychologists, a critical discourse analysis of sixty-five actual reviews received across forty-four journals, and a study of the systemic barriers facing LGBTQ+ scholars in Southeast Asia, among others. In the editorial, the editors propose a “tender reviewer perspective,” extending Agata Stasińska’s earlier concept of the tender researcher perspective: treating review as a conversation rather than a verdict, recognising unequal access to expensive publications, not demanding proofreading as a condition of publication, and actively pointing to scholarship beyond the West and the Global North.
The issue grew out of a panel organised at a conference on feminist and queer geographies, together with Michal Pitoňák and Łukasz Szulc.
Editorial: https://www.emerald.com/qrj/article/26/4/441/1387898
Full issue: https://www.emerald.com/qrj/issue/26/4