Dr. Krista Benson online interview, conducted by Elizabeth Silvas (transcript)

Benson discusses organizing the First Feminist Summer Institute and Ohio State University's support for Frontiers. Transcript (21 pages) of interview by Elizabeth Silvas with Dr. Krista Benson, recorded March 15, 2021.

Dr. Krista Benson, Recorded zoom interview, March 15, 2021 10:00 am MST, Interviewer: Elizabeth Silva TRANSCRIPT Key Words Feminist Summer Institute Student labor Peer review Feminist praxis Feral Feminisms Activism Women of color feminism Women studies Queer studies Boundaries Summary Dr. Benson was a Ph.D. student when they started working for the Journal. They helped organize the First Feminist Summer Institute and remembers the intense amount of student labor that it required. The Institute was set up to foster publication opportunities. Scholars and graduate students were invited to come to the conference and were expected to be part of a workshop experiences, including reading each other’s writing for feedback. As part of their feminist praxis, the editorial team at Ohio State was very supportive of scholars who were under-resourced. During Ohio State’s tenure hosting the Journal, Frontiers expanded its awareness of issues of race, Indigeneity and sexuality, as well as the issue of editorial transparency. 1 Dr. Benson Interviewer: We didn’t have to get consent. Technically, it was just more like, participants are aware because it's an oral history and so the IRB didn't require written consent for it. Benson: As methodologists, like, as somebody who does a lot of mixed methods and teaches a lot of methods, that's always such an arbitrary decision institutionally, like there's no difference between oral histories and interviews, there just isn't any. Good for you, you didn't have to go for IRB. Interviewer: I think it's really interesting because for us, I did my own dissertation on oral histories. And depending on if I did or didn't analyze it, I had to have just a statement of what I was doing, but it was still kind of arbitrary. Benson: I think it's because there's not always a social scientist, scientific humanities, this person on IRBs. And so I think a lot of people who are like, you know, I don't know, doing clinical trials on pigs, or whatever they're like, I don't know what to do with all this talking to people. And so distinguishing the difference is very confusing. Interviewer: You're not working with DNA or actually human body. Benson: Right? You're not doing experiments on it. Okay. 2 Interviewer: Well, thank you again. And if you don't mind, we'll just kind of jump into it. We typically ask for about 45 minutes, but if you want to go over, I definitely have time if there's stuff that you want to share. And if there is something that you want to add that's not in one of these questions, please feel free to you know, expand as you as you feel comfortable. And so the first one is just, how and when did you become involved with the Journal and what was your role? Benson: So I was involved with the Journal before I actually worked for the Journal. Um, so when the Journal came to Ohio State, which was in let's see, oh, it would have been the same year I came to Ohio State, I think, so I think it was either in 2011 or 2012. Um, I don't remember for sure. I didn't work for the Journal that year. One of the - so there were always - until my predecessor, an editorial assistant. At first, there were two, two editorial assistants who were grad students, PhD students, and they tried to get one from the history department and one from Women’s and Gender Studies. And so one of my mentors in Women’s and Gender Studies, was working for the Journal and then after that, the next two sets of graduate administrative assistants were also friends of mine. When they were working for the Journal, that's when Judy Wu had the idea of, of putting together the first Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute, which happened in 2014. That was co-sponsored by Frontiers and actually those two editorial interns, Peggy Solis and Denise Delgado, did a lot of heavy lifting on the planning of the conference. So then Judy also brought on some other faculty and PhD students at OSU from both the history program and WGS to serve as the local arrangements committee, and I was on that committee. So I started working with the Journal in that capacity as somebody helping coordinate the Transnational Feminisms Summer Institute in 2014. I applied to be the editorial intern after 2014. And they 3 ended up going with Leticia Wiggins, and then asked if I would do it in 2016 to 2017. And so I was the editorial assistant for the 2016/2017 school year, and I stopped in that position in August 2017, as the Journal transitioned to Utah. Interviewer: Awesome. Okay. So I'm really interested in this conference. I have yet to meet with Dr. Wu. We're scheduled for later this week. But anything that you would like to share, we're kind of having different lenses between like division of labor, feminist politics, and, or ways in which this was kind of something that siphoned work into the Journal. So kind of wherever you want to go with that question. Benson: Yeah. I mean, I'm, like I said, I wasn't the editorial assistant at the time, though. I'm very, I'm like one of my closest friends from grad school is Denise Delgado, who has left the academy. I don't know if she responded to requests for an interview, but she's no longer working in academia and is using those skills in the private sector, for public service. I can definitely speak from my perspective of working on the committee. So the local arrangements committee, we didn't do any of the like, selection of papers, putting together of panels, none of that. That was all done by the conference committee who were all faculty members. And so a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of like local arrangements, putting together like lists of places that people could walk to, putting together information about like accessibility of buildings, bathroom availability, ensuring that there were gender neutral bathrooms, which was actually kind of a pain in the ass, because OSU is imperfect about their, the availability of single stall gender neutral bathrooms that are also available to people, for disabled folks. And so like trying to map out where people would be and what buildings they would be in, but also making sure that were 4 accessible bathrooms that really fell to us. And that mostly fell to grad students. A lot of the functional stuff about like making sure that people had places to stay when somebody got too cold, the rather famous feminist who got too cold staying in the dorms, you know, the person they went to, to demand more blankets, if we had no process to provide them with, was to the graduate students. So I think that the conference, it was a really awesome experience as a participant, as somebody who I chaired one of the panels--I attended all things actually--one of the people who I did some collaborative writing with is somebody that I met by chance at TFSI. And we're still working together through that like chance meeting when we were both in a bad mood at breakfast. So because of the setup of the conference, it was really intimate, even though you know, there were like 400 people or whatever. But because there were shared symposia, that happened every day of the four days of the conference that everybody was present for. And also we have like lunch breaks, which conferences don't usually have. And breakfast was provided, like it definitely gave a chance to really get to know people in a way that I think was awesome. There were some really uneven experiences of people who attended the conference, there was, I don't know if you've heard specifically, there was a big conflict that happened toward the end, because there had been one of our featured, you know, keynotes had been the tensions and possibilities between transnational and Indigenous feminisms. And I think in a lot of ways, I saw it as a real like kind of call to action to transnational feminists that, like, if you're not thinking about Indigeneity, and thinking with Indigenous perspectives, you're engaging in the project of colonialism. And a lot of you are, and I was like, as somebody who was, at the time a student of both transnational and Indigenous studies, but focusing a lot more on Indigenous studies, I was like, oh, how are all of these transnational feminists gonna take this? And a lot of them, I actually think, at least in my experience, a lot of them did listen to that, and have kind of taken that 5 insight into their own intellectual journeys. And I know some of the people I worked with at Ohio State, were like, if I'm an Americanist, and I really haven't thought about Indigenous feminist studies, I'm fucking up. But because we were, and I mean, I think we're still very much in that conversation between transnational and Indigenous feminists. But there was a person who presented a perspective about Japanese experience in Hawaii, who had very obviously was based, you know, the scholar herself was based in Japan and she had thought not at all about Hawaii as a site of colonialism, including a site of settler colonialism by the Japanese-Americans who live there. And, you know, of course, that's a very complicated thing, and there was a scholar in the room who was a scholar of Kānaka Maoli, Indigenous Hawaiian, and you know, Polynesian, more broadly, experience and when she had started by asking a pretty generous question, the scholar was very resistant, and then it became really hard room to be in. So there was also some of that stuff is that some of, you know, the invitation in like, this is a conference where we want to think about what transnational feminists who aren't thinking about Indigeneity at all, like, you know, we want to open up this relationship in this door, but not necessarily all the participants were on the same page about that. That led to some that some folks I have talked to, who do work in Indigenous feminist studies, because of that experience, they were like, you know, I'm not sure that this is really a place where I feel like putting in the work. I always try to say like, I personally had a very good experience, but also I personally am a white person and that I recognize that was not an experience shared, especially with some of my Indigenous colleagues. But, and also that the conference was very successful. And some of that did come down to graduate student labor. That was, you know, framed as and thought of as a service but wasn't compensated, you know, both of the graduate students who worked for Frontiers, you know, it's not like the Frontiers duties went away. So they were just doing this on top of their 6 other duties. And definitely, we were acknowledged by the kind of the head committee. But I do think that there are ways that we could have and I would have liked to if you know, if TFSI had been something that happened multiple times, I really would have liked to think about the politics of like, the way that some people will get a lot of professional recognition for that conference, and then a lot of the kind of day-to-day labor that was done for it was done by people who would not get that kind of recognition. Interviewer: Thank you for sharing all that. I'm curious. So about how many folks attended this conference, and maybe you could talk a little bit more about like publishing opportunities for students and or established academics at the time. Benson: Yeah, um, so I think that if my memory is correct, and Judy will have the numbers, honestly, because of who she is. I want to say there were maybe 250-300 people so it wasn't a tiny conference, but it wasn't a big conference either. Because it wasn't a conference that you could attend, just by paying, you had to have a role. So you had to be presenting a paper chairing a committee, sitting on one of these, like daily, all conference colloquium things. So people were invited to be a part of the conference. And it was made very clear that the expectation was, if at all possible, you should be attending every day. Um, so there was an I'm fuzzy on this, if I remember correctly, there was breakfast and then there was a panel in the morning, where there were maybe, you know, four or five different options, we would go and listen to people's papers which were shared ahead of time. The expectation would be they were read by the respondent and the chair and each other, but also that they were made available to participants. So people did not read their papers, it was really a workshopping of ideas and a coming together of thoughts, 7 which is an unusual format. Then there was lunch, then there was a whatever that day's feature colloquium was, and then there would be another set, maybe two breakout sessions, and then it was over. In terms of publication opportunities, there was an explicit invitation to the Indigenous feminisms panel, that that panels discussion, could be an opportunity to have that discussion become a roundtable, which it did later become a roundtable in Frontiers. I didn't work for Frontiers at the time that they were starting putting it together. But I believe it was a combination of, you know, kind of a transcript or their notes from that presentation. Also their thoughts after they'd given it was kind of what turned into that roundtable and then also there were definitely, I know that there were pieces that were then submitted to Frontiers after being revised after the conference. I don't remember for sure, I believe at least one of the papers in the session where I was a respondent did end up getting published, I think both of them might have in Frontiers, I could do a quick search. And also, more broadly the politics of that editorial team was really, really, really supportive of scholars who were under-resourced, so that included graduate students, but also people who were, you know, tenuously employed either as adjuncts or as you know, part time lecturers or whatever, as well as to scholars from countries with fewer academic resources or less access to some of the American databases, that kind of dominate intellectual conversations. I saw this in my time for sure, even not necessarily specifically related to TFSI. But I saw the editorial decisions really taking into account those kinds of things. So, you know, a piece that from an established scholar maybe would have been rejected to a graduate student, they would put more effort in to do things like do an internal revise and resubmit before considering whether they would send it out for peer review. I saw that as they explained that as a part of their feminist praxis, that the position of a scholar does matter in terms of like how badly they need the publication, how much support we might be able to offer them. We actually, during 8 my time there, I started offering to authors that if they, you know, especially if they got an internal revise and resubmit, and part of it was like there's some scholarship you need to be familiar with to be publishing in this venue. Otherwise, it's just not legible to the readers that I would offer, you know, if we referred you to any resources that you don't have institutional access to, for whatever reason, I will do whatever I can to chase down those resources. And so I would send like, some academic articles and stuff to scholars who could get them as a way of kind of trying to even the very, very, very uneven not at all meritocracy that is academia. Interviewer: Well, that's a whole lot of work and effort and intentionality that was put into that process. That's really kind of fabulous to hear. Benson: It's been a big inspiration for me as I now am an editor at a journal called Feral Feminisms. And that's something that because we're an independent journal, you know, we're still a scholarly peer reviewed journal, but we're not being sponsored by any presses or anything. So we actually can make out - we call it our edits - we call it our publication access policy, because we're also an open source journal, is that we will do anything like we will provide our authors or prospective authors, which is much, you know, as they need that they can't get institutional access to if we can, you know, say like, am I gonna be able to send you a whole ebook of like, Foucault's Discipline and Punish? Probably not, I can probably get you a couple chapters. So yeah, it was it was a big inspiration to me in terms of like, the ways that feminist practices in publishing can actually be about addressing the in the best ways we can address structural inequalities. 9 Interviewer: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. I think that's one thing that we've been trying to get out, because it seems like originally, the founders of the Journal were, and it's almost a quote that I read in a couple of places, trying to bridge something, between academia and Ms. Magazine, that was accessible. And I'm curious how you felt that aspect of politics was addressed or are focused or not? Benson: Yeah, I mean, I definitely I think that the Journal as a whole slipped away from that for a while. And I think that, you know, we still struggle, we within academia still struggle to try to figure out what role in what's place, and relationship, feminist artists and activists and poets, like what place do they have in conversations, because I'm definitely going to say that Frontiers is a lot more an academic venue than, than it is an accessible version of Ms. Magazine. But, you know, there was a strong commitment among the editor staff, when I was a part of it to creative process. A lot of the time, we had one editor who is herself an artist and a crafter but also is a, she's a scholar of feminist art history, and feminist analysis of like political art. So she could kind of help a little bit with some of the visual pieces submitted. Poetry, we were all are, like, you know, long from creative prose, the entire editorial team was like, “I don’t know,” so we would often send those out for publication. You know, as long as they were feminist, we would send them to peer reviewers because we're like, we just don't know. We don't know how to assess a poem. Like, we are all trained scholars. And, you know, I think that if they wanted to, and perhaps the staff now has, I feel like they do have some people that do creative work, that can assess that in ways that we just didn't have the staff for. And I think they're, you know, they're through some of the like, okay, this person is like an independent scholar, that not being seen as a bad thing. There were more opportunities I think, with the folks that I worked with, for activists, 10 or people kind of position themselves at the intersection of activism and academia to publish. I would still say the vast majority of the pieces that were published and/or submitted, because I read everything submitted when it got submitted because I had to read it first. Um, the vast majority of it is still pretty traditional, you know, academic writing. But I did, I was pleased that I didn't see some of the feedback that I hear people get from other journals, you know, where it's been like, where people get chastised for writing too informally or even using the first person, which is absolutely something that has happened to people I know personally. So those kinds of things weren't happening. So definitely people who are writing excessively to instill kind of an academic genre that was something that was not ever seen as a bad thing by the editorial team. I think that that's, that's a nod toward that kind of history, as well as, you know, a real commitment to when the Ohio State team took on Frontiers, you know, they were very explicit about like, “we as a team, are invested in women of color feminism, the intersection between women's studies and queer studies, and transnational feminisms,” you know, so like, you could publish, like, you know, an exclusively kind of like, I've only cited white feminists in my analysis of this thing from British literature in the 1700s, I probably could get published with that team, but they weren't going to put together a special issue where that would be the target, I guess, if that makes the difference. So I think one of the ways you can see some of the commitments from editorial teams, in my experience, is the kinds of special issues they decide to take on because special issues are a much, they are much more complicated, and in my experience take longer than general issues. Especially if you have special editors from outside of the institutions. Interviewer: Yeah, it seems like the time that you were you all housed Frontiers there was a whole lot of special issues that came out and I was blown away. I know that does take a lot of 11 time. I'm curious, if you would, if you would want to talk about how Frontiers affected your own career/scholarly academic trajectory. Benson: Yeah. I came on in my last year, and so I was writing a dissertation, I was working at Frontiers I was applying to, it ended up being I think, 85 jobs all over the world. And I'm running this journal. And I was also serving as a teaching fellow. So there was definitely the opportunity for the work at Frontiers to delay my progress in other things, just because the dayto-day workings of the Journal are really complicated and they can take actually as long as you want them to, because with the setup that they had at Ohio State, and that they have at Utah, just because I'll get to why I know that, is really the only person who sees every piece of the Journal moving is the grad assistant. That's it, it's you. Like that the editors know what's in their pile. The people at press know like what those deadlines are, but the only person who sees every moving part is the grad assistant, so I'm really glad that I knew some of the previous assistants and I set some really clear boundaries with the editors about, you know, my time and you know, why I wanted to contribute, but also what I had to say no to, because I would not let work on the Journal delay my graduation. And it didn't. They were great about you know when I did have to set a boundary and say, no, I cannot get that done by that deadline, that is not a reasonable deadline. They were great about hearing that and being like, okay, what would a reasonable deadline be? I have no idea how long this takes. So like, I had a really great relationship with being able to like do really awesome work, but also be able to set some boundaries that helped me juggle everything. I definitely met people through working on both TFSI and working as the editorial assistant that had been relationships were like, we'll run into each other at a conference and they'll say, “why do we know your name?” I was the editorial assistant who like kind of 12 shepherded your piece through Frontiers. And then inevitably, somebody would ask me, “why did it take so damn long?” And I would say the answer is peer reviewers, peer reviewers are what slowed down every stage of this. I can do nothing about it. A lot of your colleagues don't meet the deadlines, friends. So you know working on TFSI I got to know some like very prominent transactional feminist folks who I still, you know, end up in, you know, taskforce meetings and stuff like that. I have mentioned before a person that I met there, April Petillo, currently at Kansas State [KB note in 2021: Now at Northern Arizona University]. She finished one year earlier than I did so when we met we were both still PhD students. She had a postdoc at Kansas State and is now an assistant professor there. We've kept in conversation since TFSI. And we actually recently co-published in a colloquium, a featured colloquium that we put together with Maia Butler and Shylah Pacheco Hamilton. It’s a featured colloquium and I think it was the like, the November issue [of Frontiers] from last year. We originally submitted it as a special issue. And then Wanda, and the rest of the team at Utah said, “actually, we'd be more interested in hearing what you all have to say about the relationship between decolonial and transnational feminisms. As you think about the African diaspora, and other forms of Indigeneity, we'd really rather hear from the four of you that have a special issue on it.” And so they invited us to do this colloquium. All of us are junior scholars. We are all still assistant professors and we started this process with them two and a half years ago and so Shylah and April and I all wrote articles, which the editors then read and send out for peer review. And they invited us and flew us to Utah, in fall of 2019, when we had no idea what was coming. We had received the peer reviews before, but then we actually had workshops with them because they had made an attempt successfully to have the three articles all have one of the peer reviewers be somebody who was also at Utah. So it was still, you know, double anonymous, but they knew that people were there 13 at Utah, and then they invited those reviewers to come in and workshop our papers with us in real time. So we actually had to have like, not just to get that, you know, a one or two page response, but actually to work through it with an external scholar, but who for the event was local, so that they were able to coordinate that which I thought was brilliant. I've never experienced that. And then our fourth collaborator, Maia really took the lead in writing the introduction to that after we had kind of started to finalize our pieces. After the peer reviews, all of them got accepted with revisions. And so the revisions were kind of what we were talking through at Utah. We also had a couple other related events where, like, we had a roundtable discussion about the relationship between the African diaspora, Indigeneity and decolonial futures that was also organized by Frontiers. And this was called co-sponsored by the School for Social Transformation [at University of Utah]. And then Maia and the rest of us worked on the introduction, we got feedback from the editors and so I was able to publish not just my peer reviewed article, but also my editor reviewed collaborative co-written introduction that I wrote with my colleagues. And so like, from the inception of … I wouldn't know April if I hadn't been involved with Frontiers, and then at TFSI. I mean, I might but probably not, to kind of culminating in this relationship with Frontiers that I had intellectually, because I knew the Journal really well, right. Like, I don't think it was nepotism as much as it could sound like it. I think that it's like, I know where the Journal has been. I know where it was when it was at Ohio State. I trained the Utah team, along with their first graduate assistant. They flew to Ohio in 2017 and we trained them kind of on the editorial process. Each of the faculty of editors worked with a faculty editor, and then I trained the graduate assistant on how to run the Journal. So you know, I was like, I know where they say they wanted to go because I read their proposal. And so because I had such a (inaudible) at the Journal, I think, open some doors in terms of really unique 14 experience in terms of publishing that feature colloquium, which is not an opportunity that's given to many pretenure faculty. Interviewer: It sounds like you definitely put in a lot of work during your time. I'm curious why the Summer Institute never happened again. Was it just kind of like a one-time thing? Benson: No, it was designed to be something that happened again. Um, so the primary institutional sponsors for that were Arizona State University and then Ohio State, and the vision was that this would be offered every two or three years and it would switch between institutions. Because you know the work of like getting the local organizing committee, heading up the broader steering committee, that's a lot of labor and so saying that it would always be housed at Ohio State was kind of asking a lot. I don't know for sure what happened in terms of a transition to Arizona State, but what I do know is that a lot of the senior faculty who've been really involved with the steering committee, within three years of TFSI happening were not at either Ohio State or Arizona State. I think some of it might have been that it was really easy to say like “my institution will support this” when you're at an institution you've been at for a while, but if you change jobs, you don't necessarily know if that's within the vision of your college, your university, your institution’s strategic plan. So I think it might, it might just have to do with that. There was always a hope that would happen again. Interviewer: We’ve kind of got to like a lot of the main points in some of the questions. I guess there's kind of two ways to go, anything that you wanted to add, but also maybe what the transition looked like from Ohio to Utah. Either one of those. 15 Benson: Yeah, I mean I didn't know anything about how it would transition. We honestly didn't know a lot about how we should do it. I don't remember where it was before Ohio State, but the transition to Ohio State was not the kind of transition we tried to make happen for Utah, at least from what I've heard. There was nothing really about the process. It was just kind of like, here's your contact with the press. Here's the pieces that have been submitted, but not published. What I do know is that all of it was physical, when they, when they transitioned it to Ohio State. So it was just like piles and piles and piles of boxes. Because until I think, maybe two years before it left Ohio State, we still had the requirement that you had to submit your final version, both electronically and physically and I don't remember at what point it came up, but I remember talking because like, I knew all of the editors for the Journal beyond their capacity as the editors because this is not a huge program. I don't remember who I was talking to, I do remember saying like, why the physical copies? Do you ever even read them? And she was like, no. I was like, why don't you not have them submitted? Like you're just killing trees, and I don't think it was my conversation, but eventually that requirement went away. So the transition to Ohio, and I'm certain that Judy can talk more about it than I know, but that it was not super smooth. So the desire was to really make sure that like the transition from like, this is what the editorial guiding vision has been for the last five years to this is the Google Drive where you can access the articles that haven't been published yet because you always pass on a backlog, you have some pieces that are still in peer review, and I did everything I could to like get the pieces in peer review out of peer review. You need to make an editorial decision, but at least it's your editorial decision. Because that's also awkward, right, like taking on authors that other people have been working with and it's absolutely unavoidable unless you just shut down submissions for the 16 journal for like eight months, which is not a good thing, either. So the transition of the Journal from my perspective seemed to be as smooth as we could make it. There was at least one more submission to be the editorial team than the one from Utah. I don't remember who it was. I was not a part of deciding who went where, but they, they were really excited about the Utah team's mission. It really felt to them like something that was in line with the vision that they had, but also had some technological aspects that hadn't even occurred to them. The editors I worked with, they're all pretty low-tech people. So they don't necessarily think of like multimedia modalities or that kind of thing. And so those parts of the Utah group’s perspective, they thought were really exciting. And then we were able to get everybody from Utah to come to Ohio State for the transition, except for one person who then just zoomed in. We were doing zoom before the pandemic, or, I don't know, Skype, or whatever it was we used. I think the combination of like group training, from the broad vision to the individual training on the like, nuts and bolts of this is what my role is, and this is what I have to do. Even just simply walking over, walking them over to the bank and putting them on the bank account for Frontiers. Because you know, the whoever, our advisory council, like they don't do anything with that stuff like that. That's all the editors. Um, so I think that it was both a smooth transition in terms of vision, but also in terms of really trying to watch and to ensure that the Utah editors were able to like take on pieces and start the process like, this is the part that we own so that we can kind of transition as little as possible at awkward stages. What do you do with an article that got accepted by a previous editorial team? You're like, oh, why? I don’t want to publish that. And the answer is you publish it, because it's been accepted. So I think that we were trying to make sure that they can have as much as possible of the decisions that they had made as soon as possible while still giving them time to get their feet under them in terms of this is what the process is. So like the whole summer 17 I was like sending things to both the Utah team and the Ohio team, or only one or the other depending on what was appropriate for that information. So that I think was complicated. I remember my head spinning from it, but also really trying to make sure that like, it's smooth, but also that there were as many decisions for the Utah team to make as possible that were their collective decisions and not ours. Interviewer: Was there any transfer of peer reviewers that were part of the Ohio group when Utah took it get over or was it just like okay, this is what we decided already. Everyone who was a peer reviewer was done with their time? Benson: Oh, no. So our peer review process at the time, because we did not use a centralized service - you submitted to us by email. We did not have like a rotating cast of peer reviewers. We would often hit up previous authors, but also like, we would just pick peer reviewers and, you know, without even knowing if they have any desire to do so would ask them to peer review. So the pieces that we passed on were passed on with peer reviewers attached if they had been approached about peer reviewing, or they had agreed to do so or they agreed to do so but never turned it in, which is a lot more reviews than you think. Somewhere I would say around somewhere between 20 and 25% of the peer reviewers who agreed to do a review just never did it and never responded as to why. Pieces that had not been sent off to peer review it was up to the Utah team what process they wanted to go through to identify peer reviewers. Interviewer: And then with the board, it seems like the board is a paper board in a lot of situations. What was the board situation like for you all? 18 Benson: I had no contact with the board. My understanding is the person who had the most contact with them was probably Judy Wu, but I had no contact with the board at all. The editorial team, as far as I saw, did all of the little financial stuff there was. They did all the contracts. They might have thought of our board members first when they're thinking of peer reviewers, I don't know. We had kind of a general process, but each individual editor would suggest peer reviewers after deciding to send a peer a piece out for review. So yeah, I didn't have any contact with them. I would say my perspective is they might as well have been a paper board because I honestly can't tell you who was on the board except for Judy, when I was the assistant. Interviewer: Okay. I was curious about that. Because it seems like originally, there was a very strong desire to have a particular type of board, but after it left Colorado, it was just never active so I was I was curious about that. Benson: I don't think that's uncommon among journals, but I don't think it's in line with the original vision either. Interviewer: We are kind of at our time that I had asked you, I guess we could have any closing thoughts or how you would envision where the Journal might go? Benson: Yeah. I mean, I think that when I came to Ohio State, so when it was transitioning to OSU, Frontiers was not a journal that I often looked to for my own research. At the time thinking about the relationship between race, sexuality, and youth experience with the juvenile 19 justice system, and I continue to operate in that area, but with a lot more caveats. I wouldn't have thought of Frontiers - like I ought to check out the most recent issue because what I know they care about is race and sexuality. No, that was not the journal that Frontiers was at the time. I’m not accusing any of the previous editorial boards of anything, including malice. But that wasn't just wasn't the area they were operating in. Like, I would definitely go to Sexualities before I would go to Frontiers. And I think that in the time that I was at Ohio State the profile of like what you could look to Frontiers for really changed. I think that it was a lot more aware of issues of race, becoming aware of issues of Indigeneity, sexuality. Thinking about gender as not just this is a written about women, but this is a specifically feminist argument for these reasons, and this is the kind of feminism I'm talking about because we can't always agree on that. I think that became much more kind of the tone of the Journal. I know that we had at least one piece that was, it's a really fantastic critical trans studies piece. And Frontiers is still not a journal where a lot of people who work in trans studies are like, there, I must go. Some of that certainly is the problem that feminism broadly, women's studies inclusive, has had with welcoming trans hostile feminists in those spaces. And I don't, I'm not saying that, like, that person, I know that author, her piece did not go out to like transphobic people and like none of that happened. But feminism more broadly, has some issues with allowing and/or embracing trans exclusionary feminists. And so I think that the board wanted to be better than that and the editorial board wanted to figure out how to do so in a way that was like, aware that this was not any of their fields. And so, you know, they reached out to myself and also to a colleague of mine, and we gave them some names of like, these are some really important figures, these are people at, you know, these specific intersections the authors talking about it. So while I wouldn't necessarily think of Frontiers for the first place to publish my trans studies arguments, I've definitely referred friends in trans 20 studies who need to publish for more conventional women's studies audiences, that Frontiers is a journal that would be aware of the fact that like, there's a specific way to interact with trans studies, that isn't just like, oh, you write about trans people, because a lot of that scholarship is pretty hostile, or it's, it's commodifying in some really uncomfortable ways. So I think that Frontiers has become a journal that I would pay more attention to, I guess is what I can say, in the last whatever that is, I guess, almost 10 years. I've really admired the transparency of the editorial teams in terms of who they are and who they're looking for this board to be. And so yeah, I think that would be kind of my last thoughts unless you have anything you want me to clarify. Interviewer: Oh, no, that's wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. I'm going to stop recording. But I also let's see stop recording. I also… End of audio. 21