Relational Accountability, or, The Limits of Objectivity

The first issue of Jeunesse, which appeared in the summer of 2009, carried three reviews of Home Words, a collection of eleven essays on Canadian children’s literature. Publishing a group of reviews of a single scholarly book was an inversion of the pattern of review essays about groups of texts that had become the standard form in the journal that preceded this one—Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse—and the idea of editor Benjamin Lefebvre. The reviews had been commissioned many months previously and originally were intended to appear in the final issue of CCL/LCJ. For reasons I can no longer recall and perhaps never knew, they were held over for the inaugural issue of Jeunesse. All of this would have been an ordinary, even banal, occurrence in the production process, except for the fact that I was both the editor of the volume of scholarly essays and the incoming lead editor of the new journal. While I took some pains in my editorial to the issue to register my distance from any oversight of the reviews (7) and Lefebvre introduced the essays by assuring readers that he had been given “total freedom to arrange for a review” (94), I remained uneasy about the perception of too close a connection between reviewers and reviewed. Shortly after the issue appeared, a discussion thread on a listserv for editors of scholarly journals took up exactly the question that had been discomfiting me: under what circumstances might it be acceptable for editors to publish reviews of their own books in their journals? The general opinion, as I feared, was that good journals, reputable journals, do not. Retaining the status of trusted purveyor of knowledge meant restraining the appearance of material to which editors might be attached.

That objectivity is the proper stance for a scholar is an assumption deeply engrained in Western systems of thought and knowledge creation. Associated with the development of modern scientific method, objectivity is the attribute of knowledge that, among other things, is impersonal, has predictive saliency, is built on observations of events outside the mind, and can be tested and replicated experimentally (see, for example, Gillispie 10). The extent to which these attributes describe scientific method in practice accurately is questionable. “[O]fficial ideologies about objectivity and scientific method are particularly bad guides to how scientific knowledge is actually made,” according to feminist scientist Donna Haraway (576). Historiographer Hayden White blames historians for perpetuating “bad science,” which he characterizes as “contained above all in the outmoded conceptions of objectivity” historians often invoke (“Burden” 127). Nevertheless, it continues to be true that the attributes associated with objectivity are highly valued far beyond the domain of experimental science: the principal contemporary meaning of the word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is “the ability to consider or represent facts, information, etc., without being influenced by personal feelings or opinions” (“objectivity”). In common usage, in short, objectivity has become more or less synonymous with intellectual and professional integrity.

The prompt for my recollection of my unpropitious beginnings as editor of Jeunesse was a more recent publication resulting from another collaborative research project in which I have been involved for the past seven years, a publication that is unlikely ever to be reviewed in this journal. The Six Seasons of the Asiniskow Ithiniwak Picture Book Series project sets out to document some of the stories of the Rocky Cree people of northern Manitoba (the Asiniskow Ithiniwak) from the proto-contact period of the mid-seventeenth century: this was a time before any Europeans appeared in the region, although the Rocky Cree had already heard tales about the presence of non-Aboriginal people on the land and a few European goods such as metal knives had arrived in their communities through their extensive trade networks (Brownlee and Syms 5–6). The first publication of the series is a picture book authored by storyteller William Dumas and entitled Pīsim Finds Her Miskanow. To refuse to promote the appearance of this book in this journal in order to maintain editorial objectivity—a stance Thomas Nagel...