The good and the glittery: a commentary on the contemporary culture of research and publications

Abstract

ABSTRACT The dominant metaphors of “publication game,” “fast-food publishing,” or “pipeline/assembly-line” bear heavily on the ways we produce and appraise knowledge. With the hope of breaking the hegemony of these metaphors, this essay offers an alternate metaphor and re-visualizes the artefacts we produce in our academic journeys. The modest intention is that the metaphor and its associated typology can become a useful tool to reflect, reimagine, and (hopefully) realign our research goals. I hope that this perspective will enable us to see through the dazzle of knowledge artefacts and peer sharply into their substance, allowing us to break the totalizing-blinding nature of face-value judgments that afflict the academy. I discuss the ways in which the proposed way of seeing and doing can become useful for graduate students and early career academics, mid – to late-career academics, and institutional gatekeepers, along with providing a specific (perhaps utopian) toolkit for breaking the existing hegemonies.