As academics and as scholars, the published article and the scholarly monograph are our preferred currencies through which we negotiate our careers and our professional trajectories. Yet these valuable and value-laden symbolic goods, our published articles, become hyper-visible through routes that remain for the most part invisible. Some of this invisibility in fact contributes to the symbolic value of these publications, for example through the prestige we attach to blind peer reviewing and anonymity as part of the process through which we assure impartiality and quality. But, in addition to the work of the disembodied peer reviewers, there are other invisible processes that underpin and enable the hyper-visible products that calibrate our value. In this reflection on ethics, transparency and expertise in academic journal work, I argue that we need to pay ethical and intellectual attention to these invisible processes through which value is produced and reproduced, as well as to the networks that are convened and replicated through this labour.
Carli Coetzee is the author of "Written Under the Skin: Blood and Intergenerational Memory in South Africa" and "Accented Futures: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid" and a number of articles on the ethics of north-south intellectual engagements. She is the current President of the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) and the editor of the Journal of African Cultural Studies. As part of her editorial practice, she founded the Journal Work Academy, a joint initiative of the ASAA and the ASAUK, which trains and accompanies the next generation of Africa-based editors, peer reviewers and editorial boards.
Chair: Martina Kopf / Arno Sonderegger
Tuesday, 9th May 2023, 5:15 pm
Online via the following Zoom link:
https://univienna.zoom.us/j/66072478453?pwd=N0JsMktBYWVpZCtDTXI5cFF4UmcyQT09
afrika@univie.ac.at, afrika.univie.ac.at
