I just want my fellow scholars to know I was the last author on *one* paper in grad school. I had no publications from my dissertation or post-doc. Two years after becoming a professor, I still had that 1 publication.

But I did a lot of public writing and that’s what lifted me. https://twitter.com/jmendicino/status/1284961602987491328

Man, my academic writing kept getting rejected left and right! It wasn’t until I stopped trying to “compete” and started getting in less well known journals and writing book chapters that I found my scholarly groove. Also, being active on social media helped people find me.

Local publications like IndyReader gave me a chance to write and publish my work. That was so huge for me.

Even though I wasn’t getting published academically, I felt like my voice was being heard. That’s what kept me going and maybe helped me become a better writer even.

A lot of scholars have published more than me. I knew I couldn’t compete on volume like that. I saw cats use one dataset to write 5 papers. I didn’t have a lot of fancy statistical skills and those papers didn’t speak to me.

I needed to find my niche and find my research voice.

Truth is, I was a community-based participatory researcher (CBPR) and a scholar-activist. And back then, I cared way more about the activism side than the scholarly side.

Looking back, I see that CBPR and being an activist means that it takes TIME for you to build relationships.

I cared a lot about what was happening to people I worked with in East Baltimore. So I helped create videos and a webpage. I participated in actions and marches.

I wasn’t publishing academically but I was learning what really mattered. I saw how displacement really played out.

It’s like I earned a whole ‘nother PhD from folks in East Baltimore (BRACE + Men’s and Families Center) and West Baltimore (Union Baptist Head Start).

It’s that lived experience PhD that gave me the insight I needed and guided me in terms of what to write and publish.

It’s the beauty, strength, and love of the people I saw in East and West Baltimore that helped me to be very clear to reflect those qualities in my work. That’s why I came up with Black Butterfly in 2015. It reflected the love, power, and resilience I experienced firsthand.

Now I do think that academic publishing is a rigged game for most scholars in the social sciences because you have to master dry boring writing with no flavor about topics journal editors care about.

But scholar-activists are rarely dry! We like our writing to be spicy & juicy.

This is why I absolutely think we need metrics beyond academic publication for tenure & promotion. The question should be IMPACT straight up. And you can make an impact with public writing, videos, websites, social media, and activism. That’s what I’d care about if I were a dean.

You can be in a city like Baltimore and hope to address real problems by talking solely to other scholars in journals that the general public never reads. To me, if there’s no public translation of social science research, it’s virtually useless.

So I’m pretty clear that if you judge me by academic publishing, I’m a late bloomer and like a 4 out of 10 in terms of pure scholarship. But if we’re talking about translating and disseminating research, then I am one of the world’s leading translators and disseminators!