On Friday, September 23rd, Associate Dean and Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric Rebecca Walton will present for USU Library’s Peer Review Week, “a community-led yearly global virtual event celebrating the essential role that peer review plays in maintaining research quality.”
The presentation is titled “Don’t Be Reviewer 2: How to Review for Scholarly Journals and Conferences” and will be from 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. in LIB 101. Peer review is high stakes work; reviewer feedback influences whether manuscripts are published, and for many academics, keeping their job depends on publishing their scholarship. In other words, peer reviews have material, professional consequences. It’s surprising, then, that scholars are rarely trained in how to be a good reviewer. In this workshop led by Rebecca, you’ll learn a practical heuristic for providing peer review feedback that is inclusive, helpful, and appropriate. To register, visit the USU Peer Review Week event webpage.
Rebecca is a professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric, an associate dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at USU, and the editor of the journal Technical Communication Quarterly. Rebecca researches how people intervene for justice in their workplaces. Her co-authored scholarship has won multiple national awards, including awards for best book, best theory article, and best empirical research article. Her research has informed implicit bias training, policy revision, and curriculum development at multiple universities. One of her favorite parts of her job is mentoring graduate students, and she is passionate about making graduate education more inclusive, learning from the experiences and expertise of her students, and helping students reach their professional goals.
In addition to her position as editor of TCQ, Rebecca serves as an editorial board member for another journal and an academic press, board of trustees member for an academic press consortium, and peer reviewer for national and international conferences, as well as several journals. She’s also published multiple papers on academic peer review, led workshops on scholarly peer reviewing at national conferences, and collaboratively developed a couple of peer review heuristics, including one focused specifically on anti-racism that has been publicly endorsed by 315 individual scholars as well as organizations and journals including the ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication (SIGDOC), the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, College English, and others.