Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Journal uncertainty

I’m coming to the conclusion that academic journals are like London buses: you wait ages for one to reply to your submitted article and several all reply at the same time.  So it has happened in the past couple of weeks when several journals sent decisions on papers I submitted, one from last month, another in July and two others after I made the changes requested by the reviewers – in one case two years ago.

So it seems that two of them may soon be published, while in responding to the third I am no clearer to knowing if they will publish it (since they didn’t express any urgency about when I might make the changes) and the fourth will require more work.  Anyway, what this all suggests is that the Christmas-New Year period may not be as calm as I like, since I will need to do some work on these papers.  Still, it’ll be nice to boost my publications total and actually see them in print (fingers crossed – can’t get too confident since I've been waiting for at least one to be printed for over a year now!).
Thoughts on Brazil's development model - shared in public

It was a flying visit back to London at the weekend for the Latin America 2011 conference.  This is an annual event organised by the various solidarity groups and bringing together activists and academics.  I had been invited to present on the Brazil panel, along with Joaobe Cavalcanti (an Anglican priest based in London who is also the Workers Party representative) and Francisco Dominguez of Middlesex University.

I was invited through my involvement with the LSE Ideas Centre and the conference I presented at back in July.  I guess they didn’t realise at the time what making an invitation to me would mean.  But I didn’t feel I could say no: I’ve never been invited to present at a conference before and it’s good to keep my foot in the door on Latin America-related activity, including in the UK.  There was also the matter of the launch for the Right Wing Politics in the New Latin America book, which I contributed a chapter on (it now seems so long ago – the paper I presented at the Society of Latin American Studies conference in Leeds in April 2009 which was the genesis for the chapter and finally sending it to Steve Ludlam, one of the editors, back in July last year).