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\nThis week I was at a sociology of education summer school. As you might expect, I was there to talk about academic writing and publishing. In this context, I wanted to situate my usual topic in a wider context, and not simply offer strategies and advice.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s the abstract I wrote for the \u2018lecture\u2019:<\/p>\n
Educational researchers generally want their research to make a difference to policy, practice and\/or teaching.\u00a0 \u2018The difference\u2019 is understood multiple ways \u2013\u00a0 the provision of new empirical evidence, innovative argument, penetrating problematisation, insightful analysis and so on. Regardless of what is understood as \u2018making the difference\u2019, the research has to be communicated to communities that want, need or would simply like to know about it. Enter academic publication.<\/em><\/p>\n Academic publication is not a neutral activity, not simply a matter of putting words on a page, meeting disciplinary conventions and then seeing the resulting papers and books in print. Academic publication is now irrevocably about geopolitics and political economies \u2013 who publishes what, where, in what language, in what medium and on what platform at what cost, and who has access to it. Furthermore, academic publishing is now the stuff of institutional audit and national league tables, performance management and promotion systems. Academic identities and their institutions are made in and through publication. Academic publication is a high stakes social practice.<\/em><\/p>\n The lecture will examine how early career researchers, now often members of an academic precariat, can engage with this publication topography.<\/em><\/p>\n As the summer school participants were in European countries where publishing in English is increasingly common, \u00a0I \u00a0wanted to say two things early on. I\u2019m going to signpost these two points here to show the essence\/pith\/nutshell of what I said (I don\u2019t have space or time here to do all the nuances and caveats). But these points might be of wider interest \u2026<\/p>\n (1) The dominant English language genres of academic writing \u2013 argument, essay and report \u2013 are a cultural artefact.<\/strong> They are not the only, or the right way, to write.<\/p>\n Other academic traditions don\u2019t place nearly so much emphasis on the kind of argumentative meta-commentary that is the norm in English scholarly papers \u2013 in this paper I\u2019m going to, now I\u2019ve done this, this shows that, so far I\u2019ve argued that<\/em>\u2026 they don\u2019t expect to see the IMRAD<\/a> structure as default. Some European cultural traditions of scholarship for example prefer a paper carried by the elegance of logic, taking an emergent form, offering cross textual philosophical discussion and\/or the poetics of rhetoric. And many Indigenous scholars reject the genre of argument, the primary genre of English language scholarship \u2013 Russell Bishop<\/a>, a Maori researcher, for example, proposes narrative traditions of knowing and writing.<\/p>\n In my academic writing workshops, mother-tongue English speakers are often surprised to learn that English language rhetoric and genre \u2013 with its predominant\u00a0I will argue<\/em> x repeated throughout the text in various forms \u2013 can be seen as infantilising the reader, a point Suresh Canagarajah makes very tellingly<\/a> about his early experiences of taking a US doctorate home to Sri Lanka.<\/p>\n And speaking English isn\u2019t enough. You have to speak the \u2018right\u2019 English. Not only no vernacular please. Syntax policing by reviewers causes difficulties for many writers. Papers have to \u2018sound\u2019 right. Despite common usage, journals are very patchy in their acceptance of \u2018World Englishes\u2019<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, academic publishing in English, and this is what\u2019s generally used for constructing global league tables and citation indices, is not culturally neutral. (Nor is teaching\/advising people how to \u2018do\u2019 academic writing in English.)<\/p>\n (2) There are many concepts that are simply untranslatable into English.<\/strong>\u00a0They just don\u2019t carry across the cultural divide.<\/p>\n For example, in my own field of education, the term pedagogy is usually translated into English as something which is about process, methods of teaching. Yet its actual use in most other European contexts is a much more holistic one \u2013 it is about the \u2018science\u2019 of the overall work of a teacher. Pedagogy attends to everything related to the development, nurture and care of students, not simply to the processes of knowledge and skill building. Pedagogy (European version) is a far more inclusive and less instrumental concept in other languages than it is in English. Its translation into English has reduced its meaning, and<\/em> its potential for informing educational practice.<\/p>\n During the summer school I had a fascinating conversation with Paolo Landri, an Italian academic, who described the difficulties he\u2019d experienced in translating a chapter he\u2019d written in English \u2018back\u2019 into Italian, his mother tongue. Converting concepts, adapting genre, changing context to meet local understandings and defining untranslatable terms \u2026 all of these things together made for a rewriting task rather than straightforward word substitution, Paolo told me. Translation actually required significant reinterpretation. (Professional translators and interpreters know this very well, the rest of us are learning.)<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not all bad news \u2013 there are increasing examples of scholars who refuse to translate their key concepts into English; they use their own language, offering an explanation to readers while maintaining the terms. And there are emerging examples of PhDers submitting sections of their thesis in their own language in order to avoid the inevitable difficulties in translating across cultural, writing and epistemological traditions.<\/p>\n However, understanding the dimensions of cultural\/language issues doesn\u2019t come so easily to we native English speakers. We often just don\u2019t see the problem. APA says no vernacular so that\u2019s what we do\u2026 I suspect we may well need the equivalent of classroom \u2018countering pedagogy\u2019<\/a>\u00a0(that\u2019s when the \u2018other\u2019 speaks back) in academic publishing, to help we English speakers understand what writing in English actually means for everyone but us.<\/p>\n Now, these are only two of the many questions about the increasing dominance of academic publication in English. It\u2019s important that someone like me, who runs writing workshops, blogs and writes books about writing, recognises them.<\/p>\n And of course this is not all that there is!!\u00a0But a post is tiny and you\/I can only say so much \u2013 so you might add more issues and constructive strategies in the comments.<\/p>\n Notes<\/i><\/p>\n This post connects with another by Helen Kara on challenging the dominance of English<\/a>.<\/p>\n And to show you what I actually said at the workshop \u2013 or at least give you an idea of the shape of the lecture \u2013 here are my slides.<\/p>\n