What can academic publishing do for community development?
By Ellie Munro
We were pleased to be able to use the World Community Development Conference (WCDC) 2026 as an opportunity to bring together the Community Development Journal with colleagues from the Community Organizing Journal for a workshop on sharing our knowledge and learning from practitioners, academics and those in between.
CDJ and COJ are two academic journals at different points in their lives: CDJ celebrated its 60th birthday this year, while COJ has just reached its 6th. CDJ has the advantages and constraints of working with a publisher, while COJ has corresponding freedoms and challenges of running a more independent operation (with some institutional support from universities). We came up with the idea of a joint workshop because we want to exist in the spirit of collaboration, not competition, and because more avenues for sharing knowledge and learning from one another can only be a good thing.
We asked our audience of community development practitioners and researchers three questions:
- How do we move toward social and environmental justice in publishing?
- How can we help practitioners to publish?
- How should our journals address AI in submissions?
Colleagues pointed out that the traditional model of academic publishing, arguably, did not enable social or environmental justice. They raised questions about access, timescales and pressures, expectations around formal writing and presentation, the high price of open access, and the confusion and injustice the system could engender. Journals did have a role in cutting through the noise of online publishing though: providing trustworthy pathways for diverse voices to be heard, recognising the liminal role of practitioner-academics (“pracademics” as I once heard them called), and representing transdisciplinary scholarship. Things that might enable this included alternative forms of publishing to what was once viewed as the traditional academic format, such as podcasts and video conversations, inviting practitioners to act as provocateurs for research subjects, and increasing access through public libraries (although this requires resources which many libraries in the UK at least are sorely lacking).
Some attendees questioned what benefit academic journals held for them, and what the incentives to publish really were. This is totally fair – an academic journal is just one way to share learning, and it won’t suit every project or individual. However, people also noted the potential for journals to share theory, practice and experiences; showcase creative and other research methods; support praxis and experimentation with ideas; and to offer structural analysis and disrupt colonial practice. Suggested enablers included writing workshops, creative spaces and support with translation; mentorship and co-creation of articles; and providing written frameworks and guidance about elements of the publishing process such as timescales, what articles should look like, and how to promote material once published. On the sticky question of AI in academic publishing, people also suggested clear and transparent guidelines around its use, recognising it as a tool – albeit one fraught with complexities and moral compromise.
What emerged through conversation was that a lot of people did not understand a lot of the intricacies, contradictions and frustrations involved in commercial publishing – and quite understandably, as it’s an opaque business. So while open access journals might be something we all want, it’s hard to achieve with capitalist publishing houses. The answer might be to abandon those constraining structures – and COJ, indeed, is independently published and open access – but then there are additional challenges of being able to pay editors for their labour, or redirect the proceeds of publishing to support the work of organisations like the International Association for Community Development (IACD), as CDJ was able to do for this year’s World Community Development Conference. There’s no simple answer. But what we can try to do is to be as transparent as possible about the choices we as journal boards have made, what the consequences of those choices are and the ways in which we can (and hopefully do) challenge the constraints we are under.
The workshop – along with chats over breaks and at our CDJ stall – generated so many ideas that we’d love to keep developing, especially around increasing the accessibility of journals to practitioners. Ultimately, academic journals exist for a purpose – they couldn’t and shouldn’t meet every need, and should exist as just one small part of an ecosystem of learning and knowledge exchange. WCDC and IACD are also important parts of that. We fully intend for this workshop to be the first collaboration with COJ, and to continue building collaborations with IACD and others in this field too.
With thanks to everyone who attended the workshop for their time, energy and ideas, and to the journal representatives: Lara Rusch, Sean Crossland and Tobias Meier from COJ, and Kirsty Lohman and Ruth Pearce from CDJ.