Many students have the opportunity to work with the Ginsberg Center during their time at U-M, and they each bring unique skills and passions to their roles that contribute to Ginsberg’s many projects and initiatives.
Patricia Jewell is a joint PhD candidate in English and Women's and Gender Studies and also serves as the editorial assistant for the Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Ginsberg’s open-access, peer-reviewed journal focused on service-learning and civic and community engagement. As an editorial assistant, she connects and communicates with journal partners, organizes and maintains the journal review process, and reviews and drafts feedback for authors. Patricia is passionate about supporting and promoting the work of emerging scholars, especially junior scholars, and thinking critically about how to make editorial and review processes equitable.
In her own words, here are Patricia’s reflections on her time working at Ginsberg:
What have you learned from working on the journal that you wouldn’t have learned in a traditional classroom setting?
It has been eye-opening to work behind-the-scenes for a journal that regularly publishes. You have to juggle many different parts of the process at once, so there is always something to do. I like that aspect of the position! There's this relentless momentum, but it definitely took some adjusting. Ultimately, I have come out the other side with confidence in my capacity to facilitate a long process like scholarly publishing in an efficient, professional, and humane manner. There is a lot of coordination and communication involved in finding peer reviewers for a manuscript, workshopping submissions with authors, and corresponding with MPublishing during the pre-publication stage. I also meet with the editorial team and board regularly to discuss new submissions to the journal and brainstorm about the journal's future. You learn how to talk to many different folks. Before working with MJCSL, I had wanted to develop an editorial profile because I have always enjoyed reading others' writing and workshopping it with them. It's fun to see cutting edge work and get a peek into different writer's brains in this very particular way. This position has allowed me the space to do all of that in a professional capacity and routinely practice communicating with people who have various different stakes in the process.
How has your time working with Ginsberg impacted your career aspirations?
My scholarly and pedagogical training are not actually in community service learning, so in some ways, Ginsberg took a chance on hiring me as the editorial assistant at MJCSL. I'm so glad that they did, though. Working with Neeraja and Nicole has been one of the great delights of my time in graduate school. They help me to imagine what I want to be for others in a supervisory or mentorship role. Seeing how a scholarly journal facilitates the review process has impacted how I teach writing workshops as a graduate instructor at U-M and the feedback that I offer my students. Imagining every student's piece as potentially publishable work raises the stakes and makes you pay attention to certain facets of an assignment like purpose, audience, and contribution with keener eyes. While I don't necessarily see myself as an expert in community service learning even after my time working with inspiring people in the field, I do remain interested in (and more confident in my capacity to perform) editorial work more generally after my time with MJCSL.
From the MCJSL editorial team:
Patricia is an essential member of our editorial team, she is not only a thoughtful and collaborative partner, she synthesizes disparate reviewer comments into cohesive and clear feedback while tending to the human at the other end. She even helped us publish our first annual report which allows us to show some of the reach and impact we have nationally. Plus, she laughs at our jokes!
We thank Patricia for her years of thoughtful and engaged editorial work!