EDITORSHIP OF SEAA NEWSLETTER & COLUMNS
SEAA Contributing Editors are responsible for overseeing and publishing pieces in our section’s dedicated column in Anthropology News, the flagship magazine of the American Anthropological Association. These pieces are also published on our own SEAA website as part of our community newsletter.
Two editors co-manage the newsletter, and they are in many cases graduate students or early-career scholars. They serve for a minimum period of two years, and they also attend SEAA board meetings. New editors are presented at the SEAA Business Meeting during the annual AAA meeting, and their term starts in December with an annual honorarium of $500 for their labor. If an editor wishes to serve for another term, it needs to be approved by the board. Typically, co-editors do not step down together; preferably, one stays onboard for a longer tenure period to ensure smooth transition by working alongside a new candidate. However, these decisions are ultimately at the editors’ discretion, especially given their changing academic commitments and statuses over the course of their tenure.
Editors are appointed through a multi-step selection process:
- Solicitation*: Current editors solicit previous SEAA section contributors, and if this proves insufficient, they also circulate a call within the community.
- Interview: Editors host an interview or briefing session with candidates about what the position entails.
- Approval: Candidates submit a cover letter and a short CV to the SEAA Board, and board members express their final approval.
- Onboarding: Candidates work with current editors for one or two pieces to learn about the solicitation/editing/submission processes. Current editors pass down the Google Drive (with comprehensive editor guidelines and sample publications), email templates, SEAA website/social media account information (through Guven), and also introduce them to the SEAA Board and Anthropology News editors.
- Transition: By December, the new editorial team assumes their two-year tenure.
*We strongly prioritize recruiting previous column contributors as future editors, as their first-hand experiences both familiarize them with the editorial process and ensure that they take the impact of the section newsletter seriously.
Some factors that current editors consider when soliciting candidates:
- clear and respectful communication styles
- early-career scholars or graduate students (either pre- or post-field)
- at least one candidate on the team has a full command of English
- diversity in terms of research areas and home institutions.