Thinking, writing, and publishing from Latin America pose significant challenges, especially for younger researchers. Academic work is affected by various kinds of asymmetries, but when we add to this the centrality of the English language and the predominance of theoretical perspectives from the Global North, the landscape becomes even more challenging. In response to this situation, several projects have emerged that view publishing as an intervention in the politics of knowledge. One such project that aims to undo these asymmetries and contribute to more horizontal practices is Tapuya: Latin American Science Technology and Society, an international journal that fosters conversations between the global North and South and helps its authors navigate the complexities of diverse languages and traditions of critical thinking.
On this occasion, we had the opportunity to speak with Vivette García-Deister, the editor-in-chief of this journal. In this interview, she talks about why she considers academic publishing a service, how some editorial processes —such as reading, reviewing, and providing feedback— can theoretically and methodologically support young authors’ texts, and why publishing can be a form of hope.
Karina Aranda: Hello, Vivette. Thank you very much for accepting this invitation. In the STS field, you are known for your ethnographic work, mainly for your genetics and forensic science research, but you are also an editor. You have valuable insights into the academic writing and publishing processes. This interview aims to discuss your approach to editing and learn more about your editorial work in Tapuya. Let’s start with the first question: how did you become editor-in-chief of one of Latin America’s most important STS journals?
Vivette García Deister: Hi, Karina. I knew about the existence of this project, first as a reader and later as a reviewer. Tapuya is an interesting project because it is an effort to make the work of Latin America visible on a global scale. I received emails from Sandra Harding inviting me to send publications, to review books. When the call was launched to recruit the next editor-in-chief, I discussed it with several people involved in the founding of the journal. Also, through 4S, one of the associations Tapuya is affiliated with (the other one is ESOCITE), I listened to many discussions about creating knowledge infrastructures through publishing projects, where Kim Fortun, Leandro Rodriguez-Medina, and Sandra Harding herself participated. Through these exchanges, I learned from a more reflexive and epistemological point of view the importance of this type of project. That motivated me to participate in the call. And well, I was selected.
KA: What does your job at Tapuya involve? What are your main tasks there, and which challenges do they present?
VG: I believe that my job as an editor is to encourage conversations and foster a dialogue between different epistemic traditions. To achieve this, I pay attention to the topics that are being discussed, for example, in online forums, congresses, conferences, and other STS publications. At Tapuya, we select the conversations that we find relevant, original, and interesting.
There is a challenge in making explicit the relevance of the knowledge produced in Latin America at a global level. We aim to make authors’ work visible at very different stages of their careers, from graduate students to established researchers. We guide authors to make their inter-translations as generative as possible (by this I mean, English versions of their texts that do not lose their local specificities). We also organize a peer review system that includes reviewers from the Global North and South.
KA: How would you describe your positionality within the global landscape of academic publishing? What does it mean to you to be a Latin American editor? Does this give you a particular perspective on these matters? How does this influence your view of editorial work in STS?
VG: I studied at a public university in Mexico, at UNAM. But at the same time, I had a lot of exposure to the academia of the Global North. I participated from very early on in different international societies, and while working on my doctorate, I had research stays in institutions in the United States and Europe. This gave me a hybrid, platypus-like formation, combining languages and also disciplines such as biology, history, philosophy, and anthropology. But I have my feet firmly placed in Mexico. Mexico has a particular position in relation to the rest of the world; that is, geographically, Mexico is part of North America, but geopolitically, it is a country closer to Central and South America, which also gives it this interesting position. And I believe that all this has contributed to my way of being Tapuya’s editor.
This is a good time to be an editor because there is a shared collaborative ethos among many journals at the moment. There has been a renewal of the editors and editorial collectives of Science Technology and Human Values and Social Studies of Science, two of the most canonical and long-standing journals in the field. There are new or relatively recent journals such as East Asian Science Technology and Society, Engaging Science Technology and Society, and Tapuya itself; there are journals in Spanish such as REDES, CTS, and Manguinhos (in Brazil). There is a critical mass of people who consider that editorial work is indispensable to doing good academic work and that it is not reduced to the number of editorial objects that go out into the world. There are many women in these collectives; there is also Catalyst, of course. They are turning to other places and other people to participate in this curatorial work and conversations much more than before. Also, some anthropology journals, like Cultural Anthropology are now doing bilingual publications.
Book presentation at Centro Cultural Universitario, UNAM, Mexico City. April 23, 2023. Image provided by author.
KA: Speaking about other languages, I would like to know what it means for you to think, write, and publish about Latin American themes, methodologies, and problems in the space that opens up between different languages, mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and English. What possibilities do you discover in these transits, exchanges, and translations?
VG: After finishing my Ph.D., I began publishing and realized there was tension for those of us in Latin America. On the one hand, there is an interest in, and a need, to publish in English, but that means not being able to dialogue with our peers in Spanish. There is a loss in a way there. But if we do not publish in English, we also miss out on participating in conversations. Many of the journals in which one wants to publish or that have a certain prestige and greater distribution are in English. Tapuya’s project is aware of this problem and offers an option: “Keep thinking in Spanish or Portuguese, but let’s publish in English so that your work is better known.” It is a work of language calibration that we do all the time while producing knowledge.
KA: Yes, editing is a curatorial work. I remember you have a text published in Tapuya, an editorial text that opens Volume 8, called In the Service of Hope. In that text, you describe publishing as a practice of service and care. Could you tell us a little more about that?
VG: For example, Tapuya offers editorial feedback to authors before submission and during the publication process. They can consult with us in Spanish or Portuguese, before submitting their paper, and ask for recommendations to ensure that it fits the editorial line and scope of the journal. This is a reading and developmental editing job that implies an enormous commitment so that the ideas generated by our authors are transmitted as clearly as possible, without flattening them, without homogenizing them, and, at the same time, making them legible to global audiences.
Throughout the editorial process, once the papers are reviewed, we also help authors interpret the reviews to clarify what is being suggested to them and what would be the most convenient revision route for their work. Or how to deal with empirical data so that they reflect the power of the authors’ work. Care must be taken to ensure the provenance of the empirical data, to show that there is an ethical structure, an assurance that we are publishing something that was done correctly.
This careful reading and feedback is voluntary work. At the same time, it is teamwork because I work in the editorial office with several people, mostly women, associate editors, an editorial board, an international advisory board, and a senior advisor in the United States with whom I consult a lot. Although I am in charge, I am supported by this extended editorial group that we have.
KA: Very interesting work. Is there anything else you would like to share with the Platypus audience about your work and your vision of STS?
VG: Well, in the text you mentioned, I talk about service and editorial care, but there is another important word there, which is hope. When this year started, it looked like it was going to be terrible at all levels. As I say in that editorial text, we started with ecocide, genocide, fires, budget cuts, and absurd policies that are economically impacting all countries, not only the Global South, in concomitant and amplified ways.
So, I had a hard time writing that text. In fact, it was published quite late in the year, about three months into it. But I took hold of a life experience I had at the beginning of the year that gave me a lot of hope: I visited a nursery where they do work (in some sense very simple and small scale) of care and reforestation. It made me think: you have to hold on to some hope, because if not, what is the point of producing STS that only denounces or criticizes if you cannot offer other ways of being and inhabiting the world, right?
And so, applying this to Tapuya’s work, which we already said is of service —it is in the service of authors, readers— and it is also in the service of hope, of doing hopeful STS. Well, there is still a lot of work to be done on this idea. What does it mean to do STS with hope or hopeful STS? You and I, Karina, have been talking about this. I think that is something to hold on to.
KA: Thank you very much for accepting this interview, let’s keep the conversation going.
VG: Thanks to you.
This post was curated by Multimodal Contributing Editor Karina Aranda Escalante.
References
García-Deister, V. (2025). In the service of hope. Tapuya: Latin American Science, Technology and Society, 8(1), 2472501. doi.org/10.1080/25729861.2025.2472501.
