Research Guides: HIST 150-03 Kashmir: Past, Present, Future (Fall 2023): What is Peer Review?

Peer Review?

"Peer review? Isn't that why we have the House of Lords?" - Bruce Lancaster

"So what?" - Reviewer 2, History of Education Quarterly, my first submitted article in 2009.

Peer review grows out of the 18th century Republic of Letters and the Royal Society, in which papers were submitted & reviewed by scholars before presentation and publication.

Now peer review is a process by which academic work is evaluated and improved before publication.

An article or book is submitted for review to an editor, who then sends it to 2 or 3 external reviewers, who in turn provide feedback and comments. They return the piece to the editor with notes, who then sends it back to the author. This process may repeat. This process improves the quality of a work, but also means publication takes Years after the work is written.

Examples of Peer Reviewed material

Book: The Hindu Householder: (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)
This Omnibus brings together two of distinguished sociologist T.N. Madan's books on the concept of the householder in Hinduism. A common thread running through the Omnibus is the focus on life and society amongst the Hindu Kashmiri Pandit community. It includes his seminal writings on marriage, kinship, family, and the household in Hindu society. Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir is a pioneering and ethnographically rich account of the Indian family, and is considered to be a classic in the field of world anthropology. It is probably the only study of its kind of traditional Pandit life in the Kashmir Valley. Non-renunciation: Themes and Interpretations of Hindu Culture draws attention away from the ideas of caste and renunciation and focuses instead on the ‘householder’ in Hindu society. It explores aspects of auspiciousness, purity, asceticism, eroticism, altruism, and death while focussing on the householder's life in Hindu society. The Omnibus also includes additional essays on the Brahmanic gotra, and the Hindu family and development, along with a short piece on aspects of traditional household culture. It features an autobiographical essay—the author's recollection of growing up in a Pandit home in Srinagar, Kashmir. In the Prologue, T.N. Madan engages with the ‘householder tradition’ across the cultural regions of India, analysing themes of householdership and renunciation in religious philosophy and ethnography.
Article: Discerning women's discursive frames in CyberKashmir
This article challenges the notion that Kashmiri women are just silent observers/victims of an ongoing conflict and militarisation of Jammu and Kashmir. Women have utilised and impacted terrestrial public spaces, but there has been an impasse to creating a viable women's movement in the state. This analysis of digital discourses about and by Kashmiri women between 2010 and 2012 shows a discernible presence of women's discursive highways which serve to manoeuvre through the clamour of competing Indian, Pakistani and Kashmiri nationalisms. Kashmiri women can be heard, they are speaking out, and this article examines their discursive landscapes and what role, if any, Islamic discourses have in CyberKashmir.

NOTE: Book Review articles aren't peer reviewed

Book reviews often show up in the catalog as articles, but they are not peer reviewed articles.

They are very useful for finding and assessing books, but they aren't the same as a scholarly article.

Yaqin, Amina. “Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism: By Patrick Colm Hogan, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2016, 294 Pp., $60.00 (hardback and e-Book), ISBN: 978-0803288591.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 2023: 1–2. Web.
Review of Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and colonialism: by Patrick Colm Hogan, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 2016, 294 pp., $60.00 (hardback and e-book), ISBN: 978-0803288591