Navigating Hierarchies in Communication Journal Publishing: African Scholars, Symbolic Capital, and Epistemic Trade-Offs

African-based scholars are underrepresented in highly influential journals across disciplines, including communication studies. There remains a dearth of research investigating how they interpret and navigate this inequality and how their interpretations and navigation strategies might shape knowledge production. Anchored in Bourdieu’s field theory and drawing on in-depth interviews with communication scholars based in seven sub-Saharan African countries, this study interrogates their perception of their positions in high-impact global publishing and the strategies they adopt to secure legitimacy. Respondents described perceiving journal publishing as a hierarchical arena where symbolic capital is unevenly distributed. They also described calculated, position-dependent practices aimed at increasing their perceived chances of getting published in these journals, thereby accumulating capital. I find that underrepresentation may extend beyond statistical absence from high-impact journals and operate as a relational process, informed by participants’ interactions with editors and reviewers of such journals.