Response-able (Peer) Reviewing Matters in Higher Education

• In Event: 79.029 - Reading, Reviewing, Mentoring, and Writing Differently in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper considers how academic reviewing might be reconfigured as a more affirmative process that is directed at the larger social good rather than individual competitive imperatives. It considers how reviewing might become more responsive to writers through a response-able and diffractive methodology. Such a methodology could form a dual function - that of doing justice to the text of the writer, whilst at the same time making it possible for the work of reviewing to be acknowledged, published, and cited.

We propose a response-able reviewing or affirmative process where texts are read, responded to and written in a dialogical way, opening spaces for new imaginings and creative engagements with ideas. We suggest that response-able reviewing can be done through a diffractive methodology of reading, namely, an approach based on the work of Donna Haraway (1992, 1997) and Karen Barad (2007). Diffraction is a concept in quantum physics which refers to the behavior of waves - light, sound or water waves, which can overlap and form patterns of difference. A diffractive methodology focuses on reading one text through another rather than juxtaposing one text/oeuvre/theory/set of ideas against another. It is an affirmative reading of texts which can produce new insights and new patterns of thought that matter, acknowledging the entanglements of reviewer/author/text and the ideas which are produced from the processes of reading and writing.

We propose a diffractive methodology for having the potential to change the way that reviews are currently enacted, through an attentive and generous intra-action (Barad 2008) with the manuscript under review. Such diffractive way of reviewing involves respectful perusing of the text under review. In this way, the reviewing process focuses on how to enable maximum potential for reconfiguring the text in a productive manner. This would mean that instead of distancing oneself from the text, the reviewer would have to pay close and care-full attention, connecting to fine details of what the writer of the text is trying to convey. Of course it is also important for the reviewee to be open and receptive when encountering the reviewer’s comments. Currently, there are various examples of how response-able reviewing can be enacted in higher education, one of which is open reviewing.

Rendering the other capable would change conventional normative reviewing practices from an attack of the scholarship of the other, judging texts to be right or wrong, to practices involving an ethic of care and justice, premised on a relational ontology rather than bounded individualism and competitiveness. If authors, texts, reviewers, editors, research sites, and participants were thought of as being entangled in intra-action and relational ontology through which they are constituted, then viewing re-viewing as a separate process of critique that goes against the other actors hardly makes any sense. Posthumanist and feminist new materialist scholars whose work is predicated on a relational ontology, such as Despret, Haraway and Barad all offer affordances or opportunities of doing peer review differently through response-able practices of becoming-with and rendering the other capable.

Authors

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape

• Michalinos Zembylas, The Open University of Cyprus

• Tamara Shefer