METM24 presentation
A noble craft: authors’ editors and the ethics of collaborative sensemaking
Luigi Russi, Avon, France; Wendy Baldwin, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain; Kate Sotejeff-Wilson, Jyväskylä, Finland; Theresa Truax-Gischler, Leiden, Netherlands
This panel, addressing the full spectrum of METM attendees, illuminates the professional ethos (Burgess 2022) of editors and translators working closely with authors through the prism of communication ethics: an approach that views communication as a domain of ethical – and not merely technical – competence, by which the mutual humanity of participants is manifested. Central to the authors’ editor’s and translator’s spirit is an ethical sensitivity to the larger worlds that inhabit a text, engendering curiosity about the author’s work of sensemaking (Arnett 2023) and an inclination toward dialogue and joint inquiry (Kerans 2010).
Professionals working in this spirit typically need to make this aspect of their craft visible to a variety of partners and defend it from the encroachment of the machine. By situating the professional ethics of authors’ editors within the noble craft of communication between humans, the panel will offer useful metaphors for the central task of claiming our work with authors’ texts as serving the uniquely human good of collaborative sensemaking.
The session emerges from a reading group of two recent books featuring MET members: Dialogic Editing in Academic and Professional Writing, on the communication ethics of editing, and Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms, on academic writing as a social enterprise. Panelists will share with the audience how certain themes and metaphors from the books have helped them reflect on their own practice: their personal examples and reading notes will help the audience access an intuitive understanding of how communication ethics lies at the heart of the choices that editors and translators make. Subsequently, the audience will be invited to join the conversation to draw out a fuller awareness of author editing and translating as profoundly human communicative practices informed by a distinctive set of ethics and oriented to cultivating connections between linguistic and cultural worlds.
References
Arnett, R. (2023). Dialogic Editing as Understanding and Stumbling into Argument. In: Üçok-Sayrak Ö., Harden Fritz J. and Majocha K.L. (eds.), Dialogic Editing in Academic and Professional Writing: Engaging the Trace of the Other. London: Routledge.
Burgess, S. (2022). Learning to Be a Non-native Speaker: A Retrospective Autoethnographic Account of an Early-Career Researcher’s Publishing Trajectory. In: Habibie P. and Burgess S. (eds.), Scholarly Publication Trajectories of Early-career Scholars: Insider Perspectives (pp. 113–129). London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Kerans, M.E. (2010). Eliciting revision: An approach for non-authors participating at the boundaries of scientific writing, editing and advising, The Write Stuff, 19(1): 39–42.
Pais Zozimo J., Sotejeff-Wilson, K. and Baldwin W. (2023). Women Writing Socially in Academia: Dispatches from Writing Rooms. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Üçok-Sayrak Ö., Harden Fritz J. and Majocha K.L. (2024). Dialogic Editing in Academic and Professional Writing: Engaging the Trace of the Other. London: Routledge.
[Read a member’s review of the panel discussion.]
About the presenters
Luigi Russi (moderator) has been a MET member since 2020. He is an alumnus of MET’s Small Grants for Research Program (2020-2021) and a contributor to the book Dialogic Editing in Academic and Professional Writing (Routledge, 2023). In January 2024, he became an Assistant Professor of Education at the Catholic University of Angers, France.
Wendy Baldwin is an authors’ editor and Spanish-English translator in the social sciences. She also runs structured writing retreats for academics and teaches academic writing to developing scholar-writers. Before that, she was an EAP instructor in the US and studied functional linguistics, with a specialization in psycholinguistics.
Kate Sotejeff-Wilson enjoys midwifing people’s texts into being. She translates from Finnish, German and Polish, edits for multilingual authors writing in English, and runs writing retreats. Born in Wales, she did her history PhD research in London, Berlin, Poznan and Warsaw and is now also a Finn.
Theresa Truax-Gischler is a developmental and substantive authors’ editor in the narrative social sciences and humanities working with multilingual writers. An enthusiast of cross-cultural knowledge production and multimodal communication, Theresa spends part of her life learning how to be a more effective disability ally. She lives in Leiden, the Netherlands.
