DEI PERSPECTIVES
Lived Places Publishing’s Empathy Mission
by Marci Wilding
 In the world of academic publishing, which often chases prestige, scale, and profit, Lived Places Publishing (LPP; livedplacespublishing.com) stands apart. Co-founded in 2021 by industry veteran David Parker (right), the company isn’t merely offering another catalog of academic texts—it’s creating a new way of seeing. Rooted in Parker’s deeply personal reflections and decades of professional experience, LPP is an ambitious and intimate endeavor with the goal to bridge identity and place, scholarship and storytelling, rigor and empathy.
During our conversation, Parker shared, “I grew up in a ’70s blue-collar, working-class environment. My grandparents raised me because my mother had a disability related to a car accident, and my father was semi-absent. Those experiences stuck with me.” That lived experience—of navigating life from a margin—shaped not just Parker’s worldview, but his publishing philosophy. “I was always shocked at how similar everyone was at publishing events,” he told me. “Even though they were diverse in race, skin color, addresses, or sexual orientation, most of them came from the same socioeconomic class—upper-middle or wealthy, elite universities. They all drove the same cars. I always felt out of place.”
BASED IN REFLECTION
Before launching LPP, Parker had already built a formidable career. From serving as editor in chief at Pearson to founding Business Expert Press and then joining the library-facing publisher Alexander Street (eventually acquired by ProQuest), he witnessed firsthand the shifting tides of content access and academic demand. During the pandemic, while managing ProQuest’s Ebook Central, Parker noticed a recurring conversation among librarians and faculty: a lack of academic materials that focused on the intersection of place and identity.
“What I was hearing,” he explained, “is that there was space in academic materials aimed at college-level readers to explore the intersection of place and identity in the context of interdisciplinary topics—using ethnography, autoethnography, and narrative structure, but in a way that is academically sound. So, we launched the company in the summer of 2021.”
WHAT ARE ‘LIVED PLACES’?
When asked how he defines the term “lived places,” Parker lit up. “I don’t think identity is teachable except when juxtaposed against something,” he said. He cited the book Becoming by Michelle Obama as a powerful example. “She grew up in a working-class home in Chicago. When she arrived at Princeton, she said it was the first time she really felt her Blackness. That moment—her identity in contrast to her new environment—makes her story teachable.” To Parker, “lived places” are where identity becomes legible—not just to the self, but to others. The content at LPP reveals those places through tightly crafted, academically rigorous short texts. “We live in places,” Parker said. “And the places that we live in allow us to reveal our identity to others. That’s the idea behind lived places.”
THE EDITORIAL PROCESS: RIGOROUS AND GROUNDED
LPP doesn’t publish memoirs or biographies. The work is not simply about storytelling; it’s about academically grounded, research-informed reflection that connects directly to classroom learning. The books are typically 30,000–60,000 words, designed to be read in fewer than 4 hours—perfect for students in semester-long courses.
Each title undergoes a detailed editorial review process through collection editors that includes reference sections, learning objectives, recommended assignments, suggested readings, abstracts, and key terms. Every author is expected to have at least a master’s degree or comparable academic engagement. “We’re very clear about who we target to write our books,” Parker noted. “They must have an academic background or be working in a scholarly or practitioner capacity outside of traditional institutions.”
Rather than casting a wide net, LPP focuses on recruiting collection editors—experts in specific topic areas who serve as curators, editors, and talent scouts. These individuals are scholars, educators, and activists whose work bridges academia and lived experience.
“Our commissioning editors rely on these collection editors,” Parker said. “They know the right conferences, societies, key journals, and even blogs where authors are doing important work. It’s about finding people who bring both academic rigor and lived insight.” These authors write about topics such as incarceration and disability, queer migration, religious identity, and systemic racism. The result is a collection of books that serves not as a replacement for course texts, but as a deep, relevant supplement that connects theory to the human context.
TEACHING WITH LPP BOOKS
Parker described how instructors use these books: “Much the way you might use a documentary film. Professors have core readings, lectures, and discussions. Our books become a real-world application to that academic content. Then the professor uses one of the recommended assignments from the book.” This approach isn’t so much additive as it is transformative. In a classroom, students may read about economic inequality, but LPP gives them a chance to feel it through someone’s story and gain a bit of empathy while maintaining academic rigor.
MEASURING SUCCESS
Success for LPP is measured through impact, not just revenue. Parker described the three central metrics:
- University reach and institutional partnerships—Currently, 53 institutions have partnered with LPP.
- Global authorship, ensuring diverse geographic and cultural representation—The goal is to have 100% global coverage of the author’s place of origin.
- Growth in collections and topics covered—There will be 75 titles published by the end of the fourth operating year and 125 projected by next year.
Sales, Parker admitted, do matter, but more as a path to sustainability than as a driver of content. “If we’re successful in those three areas, the byproduct is enough revenue to support the mission,” he explained. Additionally, 5% of all sales go toward funding OA initiatives, with a growing number of titles available for free.
AN EMPATHY MISSION
“We didn’t start with a DEI mission,” Parker clarified. “We started with an empathy mission.”
In a moment of reflection, he said, “Fifty or 60 years ago, everyone was attacking Black people. Then, 30 years ago, they were attacking gay people. Now they’re attacking trans people. But if people would just try to peer into how those people experience their lives, maybe they still won’t agree with them. Maybe they still won’t like them. But they’ll have a sliver of empathy. And then it gets harder to be such a jerk.” And that, in the simplest and most profound terms, is the purpose of LPP.
When asked what advice he would give to publishers or librarians trying to engage in inclusive work, Parker said, “Make inclusion so much a part of what you do that it doesn’t have to be in big letters everywhere. The pendulum is always swinging, but the arc of the moral universe bends toward better. Just do the right things. Keep doing the right things.” With LLP, Parker isn’t just doing the right thing—he’s inviting a generation of scholars, students, and readers to do the same, one lived experience at a time.
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