The Future of Academic Publishing
- The Future of Academic Publishing
In place of a traditional set of book reviews, we offer a conversation on the future of academic publishing among four scholars who have focused their academic, professional, and creative work in this area.
What are some of the potential challenges, rewards, and new directions as we integrate new forms of academic scholarship (scholarship in popular spaces and blogs, collaborative scholarship, multimedia scholarship) into the range of publication possibilities for emerging and established scholars? What are some compelling new models or examples we can point to? What new opportunities and challenges do digital or hybrid publication possibilities offer for collaboration and international dialogue?
When I think about this question, I think a lot about my brother, who was a freelance journalist for five years before applying to graduate school. When asked for a writing sample, he didn’t feel that his undergraduate work was representative, so he submitted a lengthy cover story he had written for the New York Review of Books—one that required him to perform the same in-depth research and immersive study necessitated for a term paper. He was accepted, but a member of the committee later told him that they nearly rejected him because he hadn’t submitted a traditional writing sample. Hewing to the word of the guidelines, rather than the spirit, seems to be a way in which we circumscribe the type of thought, writing, and scholarship from scholars almost from the beginning. When I was teaching, I had students produce work that argued theses about media and its history in a variety of forms—on blogs, in video essays, via tweets, in journalistic short essays, and in traditional papers that went through the rigorous review of their peers. This sort of multimodal pedagogy is increasingly becoming the norm rather than [End Page 155] the weird. Yet most graduate programs still cling to traditional means of evaluation, starting at the admittance process and extending to everything from the term paper to comprehensive exams and the dissertation. Such a traditional approach is, in part, out of necessity—a traditional dissertation is still necessary to get hired at nearly all departments, no matter how radical the chair or members of the hiring committee, due to university-wide standards for application. It’ll be difficult to change the standards and modes of scholarship that media studies, as a broad and diverse and invigorating discipline, chooses to embrace, but that change can’t just be in conference papers and undergraduate exercises. It has to spread up and down the academic ladder.
This story is very familiar to me, Anne, and heartbreakingly so. I’ve said in several venues that universities, particularly at the undergraduate level, but also in graduate programs, take in bright, energetic thinkers used to working on collaborative projects in innovative formats, and then proceed to educate them right out of collaboration and innovation by teaching them that the only valued form is the seminar paper, and that the only way to produce it is all by yourself. I can’t help but wonder what might be possible if our curricula didn’t focus on progressively isolating students within their own individual writing projects but instead heightened the kinds of group-oriented, performative work students do earlier in their careers.
I share this frustration. It’s truly bizarre that the academy continues to ignore multimodal scholarship while at the same time professing to encourage interdisciplinarity. There’s a disjunct here between the form and content of research. We are all obliged to squeeze our research into a tight set of recognized scholarly “objects”—journal articles, book chapters, monographs—forms that emerged within an expanding print culture of specialized academic disciplines. This restriction on legitimate research “outputs” becomes even more perverse at a time when academics are being increasingly required to quantify their research in a managerially driven audit culture in terms of “impact” narratives or case studies that demonstrate public engagement. This is where multimodal scholarship can really help us to liberate our scholarship beyond the...
