• Fitness & Health
• Sport & Exercise Science
• Physical Education
• Strength & Conditioning
• Sports Medicine
• Sport Management
• Dance

Unpacking rejection: A critical look at bias in dance research submissions

This is an excerpt from Research in Dance by Ali Duffy.

By Crystal U. Davis

We Regret to Inform You: Rethinking Bias in Academic Rejection

Crystal U. Davis, PhD, Associate Professor of Dance Performance and Scholarship, The University of Maryland

When I discuss rejection in dance research applications with students, I often tell them what I say to myself: If you were not accepted for an opportunity, remember there is a chance it is because you were not the right fit. You could have been unhappy with that opportunity. Sometimes, you and the venue are not aligned, they are unable to see your value in the context of what they do, or you may value an entirely different set of attributes. There is a chance that your value may have been invisible, undervalued, or even seen as disruptive to the venue’s goals. Thinking more deeply about this question, this response may be too simplistic.

Rather, I invite you to consider rejection of your dance research submissions—be they dance, writing, or some other form—through the lens of bias. Surely, a reviewer’s biases can have negative impacts on the deliberation process (Davis 2022). By negative impacts of bias, I mean the preferences, aversions, or associations a reviewer has in their deliberation process that are not explicit or in alignment with the guidelines, requirements, or explicit deliberative processes shared with the applicant. Additionally, remember that the opportunities you are accepted for are also built on biases. In those instances, your biases align with the reviewers’ biases and likely challenge, stretch, or expand their perspectives in ways they value. In this way, biases are necessary and interwoven in selection processes.

COMPLY, NOT CONVERT

Although individual reviewers and the organizations they deliberate for wield a large amount of power in bestowing recognition, social capital, and value in the field of dance research, their orientation is not static, enduring, or singular. The dynamic of competition exacerbates perceptions that the negative effects of bias are a factor in the selection process. In a competitive space where reasons for a rejection are not explicit or explained, it is easy for those not involved in the deliberation process to assume that reviewers or organizations unfairly rejected their work based on a negative bias toward their content area or dance genre, methodology choices, or the social identities of subjects centered in the submission (i.e., race, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, etc.).

Research shows that the negative effects of biases are exacerbated in competitive environments (Cikara, Bruneau, and Saxeet 2011). The competitive and enigmatic structure of selection processes can evoke an orientation to who is better that may foster feelings of some people being insiders and others being outsiders vying for resources or recognition. This orientation is called a social dominance orientation (SDO) (Davis 2022). Those with an SDO perceive people in hierarchies based on social or institutional markers of value. The presence of a singular or small group of “winners” results in “us against them” narratives among applicants in the applicant pool as well as between applicants and granting organizations. Additional hierarchies are baked into the field, with biases related to topics, methodologies, styles, genres, body shapes, aesthetics, and so on adversely affecting deliberation processes. Some consider existing professional and social structures to be wholly sound, trusted, and reasonable structures to subscribe to in their career, a frame that orients them to what the field of dance research is. Of course, that is one choice. An alternative approach is researchers who understand these structures but do not subscribe to them as immutable truths. Researchers can instead seek opportunities to strengthen the field by ridding it of the negative effects of bias that exclude some styles of dance, body types, research methodologies, production styles, and so on.

Researchers expand, deepen, nuance, clarify, and refine values, biases, and areas of research via the submission process. In this process, there is a balance to be struck between compliance with current biases in dance research while not fully converting into an orthodox, immutable way of thinking about those biases contributing something to the field that did not exist before. This is how the field grows. This rejection of unquestioned acceptance of the way things are in the field is a process of examining biases. The constellations of biases of both submitters and reviewers are complex, multifaceted amalgams, not homogeneous, hierarchical structures that language like “top-tier journal” or “most prestigious” presuppose. Release the confining squeeze of these terms. Instead, consider a complex array of factors in your submissions that help clarify and orient toward opportunities that most align with your research. These factors to consider include content area, central inquiry or intent, methodologies, and markers of professional standards of the field such as adherence to the submission guidelines, citation structure, time or word count limits, and requirements detailed in the submission instructions.

After a rejection, explore where to take your research next. This may mean simply resubmitting the same submission elsewhere or adjusting your submission to better suit your goals for future submissions. Clarify your own constellation of values, methods, and standards compared to the venues to which you have submitted or plan to submit. You may uncover disparities between your standards, values, and practices and the venues’. Perhaps there is a central area of focus for a journal that was not prominent in your submission. There may be some deviation from the required guidelines that you mistakenly missed. The content you articulated may already exist in another work.

IT ISN’T ALWAYS ABOUT YOU

Even with all of this questioning, the reality is that it isn’t always about you as an applicant. This consideration often makes me chuckle at how seriously I often take myself and view myself as being the center of the world. There may just be a bounty of strong submissions, at which point it becomes less of an issue of “What went wrong with my submission?” and more “My work is suitable to be submitted to another venue or to this venue at another time.” Sometimes it isn’t really about you not submitting a worthy or selectable work and has little to do with the quality of your work or its worthiness for selection. There are times it is about a difficult choice for reviewers among your other fabulous peers.

To sort which category your work may fit into, consider these questions about rejections:

1. Did your subject matter align with the focus or subject matter of the venue? If not, is that alternative choice or deviation a clear shift to the reviewers that you were thoughtful in challenging the guides established by the venue?
2. Did your style, approach, or frame of the content align with that of the venue? If not, is that alternative choice or deviation a clear shift to the reviewers that you were thoughtful in challenging the guides established by the venue?
3. Does the venue express they are willing or seeking to push their own boundaries in reviewing submissions? Have they communicated that they are seeking to expand or revisit their approach in some way?
4. Have you searched what has already been published about your content area? Are there novel arguments, methodologies, or underrepresented perspectives, dance styles, or people you have added to that conversation?
5. Have you considered that your work might be too radical? If so, in what way? Examine whether your choices disrupt existing guidelines, research methodologies, aesthetics, standards or assumptions in the field. These distinctions can help parse whether and when to adhere to structures and when to challenge the field or venue. If it is the latter, go slowly but steadily. There are often layers of complexity that members of the field must address to understand your perspectives, choices, and calls for change and innovation.
6. Is it about money? Whenever there is grant funding, granting organizations have strict guidelines about how the money is to be used, some of which you may not be explicitly privy to but that must be adhered to for the venue to be in good standing in disbursing the funding.

In conclusion, I encourage you to consider the selection processes through the lens of biases to gain a better understanding of how your submissions do or do not align with reviewing entities and how to engage that negotiation through your submissions or any information you are able to garner after receiving a rejection of your submission. A rejection is simply a part of the process that can deepen your future research submissions and redirect you to the next step for your work. Through rejection, you can garner a clearer sense of what the next steps are in working on your research or be affirmed that you have a work that is fully prepared for submission to the next venue.

More Excerpts From Research in Dance

---