Sheep and The Politics of Publications
This morning an old friend visited me. Her life has taken a completely different direction from mine; she trained as a nursery school teacher, but have in recent years chosen to work at home on the farm she owns with her husband, raising two kids, several sheep and chickens while also growing a huge garden filled with berries, herbs and vegetables which she plants, waters, havest and sells from a stall at the wayside. This season, she confessed, she has been working from 7am till 12pm most days of the week, so if you have any romantic dreams about life as farming wife working at home, forget it.

She has known me for years and years and we have managed to stay in touch and stay friends, though our everyday lives have very little in common. She is sharp and perceptive, and has a very rationalistic and no nonsense approach to life which I value highly - I always feel better when having turned things over with her. However, today she really put me to the test when she asked me to explain what I was writing about:
"Ok, but what is the meaning with your ph.d.thesis?..I mean, it seems so narrow in its focus, will it really do anyone any good?", she asked across the coffeetable, making me shift uneasily on the chair. "Is it of use to anyone?"

I found myself struggling hard to justify my answer, as always. She is not the first, and most likely not the last, to ask this question. Trained as a literary scholar, in a trade which rarely produces anything else but theory and analyses which very few other people actually read, it is something hard to argue that what you do as a scholar will actually do any common good; that it will have any social impact or make a huge difference to a lot of people. Add to this the difficulty of explaining the usefullness of studying a very specific internet phenomena to a person who has never surfed on the internet and does not know what a link is (which is understandable, honestly, when should my friend ever find the time to do that - and playing or chatting just for fun? Forget it.).

However, this time, I did actually manage to persuade her that her old friend is not just a hopeless academic, waisting huge governmental resources on studying something so profoundly weird that no-one really wants to hear about it.

"Remember when we were taught how to analyse popular literature and commercials in secondary school?", I said. "Didn't you find that meaningful?". She nodded. "Don't you think your children should learn how to analyse and critisize also new media, like the internet and the computer? They need to be given tools in order to be able to evaluate what is good and bad in new media, what works, what doesn't and why it doesn't? I know they are never going to sit down and read my ph.d. thesis, but I will try to write articles which explains some of my findings to highschool teachers or even school teachers. In that way, maybe one day, what I discover and think about now, will actually be something your children can be taught." She acquiesced in this argument.

I was honest and perhaps I'm a little naive. But, most of the time, I really do hope that what I "produce" in terms of potential analytical tools etc, will find a use also outside of a very narrow circle of academic researchers. But it acquires that I actually sit down and write about it in a way which laymen can understand and teach in order for the tools to be put into work. I'll be happy to do that. But it really, really bugs me that this kind of writing is not giving me any academic credit. I can put it on my publication list, but when applying for an academic job, it will be disregarded, counted as too "light-weight" since it is (most likely) not going to be peer-reviewed prose. In many ways, I see "popular writing" as the most important part of being an academic; a way of stepping down from the ivory tower and engaging with people, who might actually ask you very clever questions about your work when confronted with it. But the politics of publications is making this difficult. Why spend your time writing "for the people" when it is not going to earn you any butter on the bread?

Perhaps one of my responsibilities as an academic should be to try and change this politics. To make popular publications count, also in the academic world. What do you think?
# posted by Lisbeth at: 16:10