Entangled Publications
- Objectives
In the social sciences, discourses and policies on publishing are shifting towards journal articles and bibliometric measurements, while publication practices stay diverse. Anthologies and monographs, also in local languages, remain important despite the discoursive shift (Engels et al., 2018). While some correlate the decline of the monograph with a decrease in quality of research and an exclusion of specific local knowledge (Akbas, 2016), others highlight a more detailed discussion of results in smaller units (Happell, 2016). Nevertheless, all researchers must anticipate and strategically plan specific paths of publication. Our project aims to understand the role of publication processes within research designs and processes of analysis, as well as to theoretically build models of research that include publishing as an integral part of research.
- Transformation of results during publication processes
Our preliminary interviews show that researchers think of their results as an entity that sustains various forms of presentation. Whether they talk or write about their specific outcome, the meaning of it is expected to endure the publication process. The assumption is that a result, once reached and presented according to specific rules, has a specific stability, permanence and purity that is independent from its presentation. However, at the same time researchers are aware of specific publishing conditions they have to meet. Researchers mention a series of publishing conditions that influence their analysis (e.g. using theories or methods that seem easier to publish) or they rewrite, amend or patch up their results when receiving revision requests from reviewers on small scales in order to stay in the publication game. In our empirical work we ask: How do publishing perspectives influence the production of results? How do results change in the course of their presentation? Which parts of these results are sustained, which are not, by which forms of dissemination?
- Entanglement of publication processes, analysis and research designs
The theoretical aim of our research is to include the publication process into a model of scientific research, which currently includes the researcher, the research instruments and the researched objects (Barad 2007). We want to extend this model by including the publication process. We employ a new materialist perspective for this purpose (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2002; Haraway, 2010), where a specific practice of dissemination, theoretically, can be described as a part of a result and. Therefore, the practice of dissemination is a part of the properties of a result (Schadler, 2019). Our question is how to build theoretical models of research that integrate publishing processes?
- Theoretical definition of the result
If publishing is an integral part of research, results differ when disseminated through different pathways. As a consequence, the definition of results is reconfigured. Our subsequent question is: How do we define results, if publishing is entangled with knowledge production?
2. Theoretical perspective:
We mainly work form a new materialist/posthumanist process ontological perspective (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2002; Haraway, 2010). We nevertheless integrate insights from various other theoretical perspectives on the process of publishing and knowledge production.
3. Method:
We plan to answer our research question with a New Materialist Ethnography (Schadler 2019). We will collect data on authors, reviewers and editors (interviews, documents and artifacts). We will track and compare results of specific research projects through different forms of publication.