We are proud to host a highly collaborative blog that highlights sociological research on race and racism, and the ways these intersect with class, gender and sexuality. Since we began in 2007, we’ve published approximately 150 authors here. We invite pitches from scholars at every stage of their career. Many times, academics are at a loss for how to shape their work for a blog, so here are some suggestions and guidelines for pitching to us.

Connect current events to your scholarship. Our bread-and-butter posts are from scholars who are making a connection between current events and their own, already-published scholarship. For example, Jim Fenelon an accomplished scholar on indigenous issues has written here about the ongoing controversy over the name of sports teams. For those scholars concerned about issues of copyright of their work, it is perfectly acceptable practice to summarize work that’s published or to re-phrase sections of it here. (And, many journal publishers allow pre-print versions of your entire articles to be posted on your own institutional repository or at a commercial one, such as Academia – dot – edu).

Rough drafts of emerging scholarship. If your scholarship is not-yet-published but still in rough draft form, it may fit here as well. Shantel Buggs is completing a dissertation about race online dating and published a piece here about the wildly popular book Modern Romance, and the lack of attention to race in it.

Expand on 140 characters. Did you Tweet something that went viral? Go on an epic Twitter rant? If you have something you shared in short form that you’d like to expand, and tie to the relevant research, you might want to do that here. Jessie did that here, then expanded it into a series of related posts, and eventually into a peer-reviewed article.

Research Brief. Occasionally, we publish Research Briefs, which are a compilation of research around a specific topic, or simply the latest research published. Working on your comprehensive exams? Do you edit a journal that published a special issue about race and racism? You might consider doing a research brief.

Make your pitch short, clear and easy to read. We envision this blog as a resource a wide audience. If the pitch itself is overly long (more than 200 words), jargon-filled or just unclear, then we’ll be reluctant to take it on. The more complicated the subject of your piece, the more important it is for you to step away from the jargon and use clear, simple language.

Students. We frequently publish posts from graduate students. For undergraduate students, we recommend partnering with a professor or other, more senior scholar, to help guide your submission.

Press Releases from Agents. Sorry, but if you’re a PR agent and you’re sending one of those mass press releases, those generally get deleted. We’d rather hear from scholars directly.

Reblogs. Occasionally, we will reblog (or re-post) something that has been published already on another blog, but it has to be rather extraordinary. In general, we prefer to post things here first. Then, you’re free to reblog to your own site, institutional repository, or clipping file.

Pay. Unfortunately, we are not able to pay authors. We are an entirely nonprofit, volunteer run blog. We don’t get paid for our work on this blog either.

Why Bother? We are committed to racial justice and hold to the idea that our little corner of the Internet is a form of intellectual activism. For academics interested in things like citation counts, there’s growing evidence that sharing your scholarly work openly (like on this blog) boosts the number of times the work is cited in traditional, peer-reviewed journals. Also, how we create knowledge is changing in the academy. Some authors include their posts here under a separate section on their CV’s. While we’re not a peer-reviewed journal, we are a scholarly blog and every piece that goes up gets reviewed by us.

Use the Contact Form. The easiest way to pitch us is to use the Contact Form, with 200-250 words about what you have in mind. We can’t respond to every pitch, but we’ll try our best. Generally, no reply means “no thanks.”

Guidelines for Authors. If we do accept your pitch, then you’ll want to review these Guidelines for Authors.