Academics’ Practice Is Consequential

Abstract

As academics, we study others’ practices as important and meaningful. Outside accrediting agencies, websites that track the outcomes of our work and news media treat our own work as important and meaningful. However, academics rarely pay scholarly attention to our interactions with each other as sources of scholarly learning, even though we experience these as consequential for our careers and lives. I suggest the value of enhanced scholarly attention to our own practices, and as a stimulus to such scholarship I discuss two related phenomena, the news media’s attention to bullying and harassment in academia and a Facebook group entitled “Reviewer 2 must be stopped”. Both are salient in contemporary academic interactions, both are very pertinent to, and inform understanding of, dynamics that we regularly study, and neither is adequately understood conceptually. Attention to them can benefit both our research and practice.