Valuing popular writing in academia

A colleague and I were talking the other day about the relative valuation of different kinds of writing and publishing within academia. My colleague has, as he puts it, “surprisingly” found himself reading and participating on blogs related to a particular interest of his, an interest that he shares with a fairly broad base of people. This interest is related to his teaching and research, as well as being of special personal and political importance. In seeing how big the active readership is on some of the blogs he checks, he started wondering about the relative value of some of the comments he's left on those sites, and thinks that it's quite possible that something he writes in one of these more open and public fora may reach more people and, in some sense at least, do more good than a refereed journal article on the same subject.

I expressed similar thoughts regarding the writing I do for PopMatters. PM claims a daily readership of “1-million plus” and connections to other media outlets as reasons for authors to consider the site when looking for places to publish. If only a tiny fraction of that one million reads one of my features or reviews, I will undoubtedly have reached more people than I have via any of my conference papers or traditional articles.

Of course, those works are not of the same quality as my scholarly articles and papers (and here I am using this term not to indicate relative goodness, but to refer to the differing natures of the different kinds of writing). I can and do bang out my reviews and features for PM within two days to a week's worth of actual writing. They generally do not require research other than basic fact checking, and, of course, a viewing of the DVD in the case of the reviews. However, writing reviews of films is not the same as subjecting them to a close reading, particularly with the intent of exploring the treatment of a geographic theme. I would not pretend that the work I publish in PM is making a contribution to geographic or film scholarship.

At the same time, the two kinds of writing are not entirely distinct either. The first feature I published in PM was an essay on Brokeback Mountain and its implications for the Western genre. This is a subject I could have easily turned into an article for an academic journal. I chose the “popular” route for two related reasons.

The first was time. I wanted to publish on the film while it was still at the forefront of conversations within American popular culture. Going the academic journal route would have made that impossible. The other reason was that I wanted to reach a wider audience. I was inspired to write the essay because I thought that many popular outlets for film criticism were missing the genre dimensions of the movie. I wanted to persuade at least some people in the larger moviegoing population to read Brokeback Mountain as something more complicated than the “gay cowboy film.” Again, publishing this argument in an academic journal would have put it outside the reach of that larger public.

It is also the case that I was able to write the PM essay fairly quickly because of my prior teaching and scholarly writing on film, and on the West in particular. Virtually every feature or review I write for PopMatters benefits in some way from my teaching and research. Indeed, I often choose certain DVDs to review because I believe that my experience as a geographer and social scientist will give me a valuable perspective on the films and TV shows under consideration. My first review of 2008, Libby, Montana, is a good case in point.

If you do a Google search on “should blogging count for tenure” you'll get a variety of commentaries and answers to the question: “No,” “It depends,” “Yes, but as service not scholarship.”

I have no desire to include this blog in my annual reports of service or in my forthcoming post-tenure review. Nor did I reference my earlier weblogs in any of my pre-tenure files or application for tenure and promotion. I have, however, cited my writing for PopMatters in my most recent annual reports of service. I think that a reasonable argument can be made that my writing for PM, and any other similar work I might do, should count towards my public service responsibilities. Those outlets enable me to bring my knowledge and expertise to those outside of the academy. If I can encourage someone to rethink some aspect of popular culture, direct them to worthy films or at least films that might of interest to them, then I have performed a service that should be seen as valuable to the university at least in the same sense as, say, a public lecture would be.

I can also see how some blogs authored by academics might also qualify, particularly since such blogs not only reach a wide audience, but often contribute to dialogues between scholars. While I would hesitate to count participation on someone else's blog as a kind of service, if it is extensive enough, or is the result of belonging to a distinctive online community, I can see a case being made for that kind of writing as a form of service as well.

On the other hand, I don't think that all blogs or popular writings authored by academics are necessarily defensible as public service. I think that the kinds of connections I'm making between my scholarly work and what I write for PM are important in making the case that that work falls within the scope of my professional responsibilities. If I were writing about, say, dogs, I wouldn't think that that could be reasonably presented as a professional service. On the other hand, if I were more clearly in the Humanities and creative non-fiction were my specialty, then a blog about dogs or contributions to a dog-focused publication might very well be legitimately part of my professional work.

The real question here is how to weigh different kinds of writing, publishing, and creative endeavors. I work at an undergraduate teaching institution, which I think has two implications for how popular writing and publishing should be weighed, and both suggest to me that it should be looked at favorably in the service vein.

The first is that such writing is consistent with the underlying mission of teaching and education. When academics engage in wider conversations about their areas of interest, we are extending what we do in our classrooms to a larger arena. The second is that writing for a wider audience enables me to be more productive. At institutions like mine, time and resources for traditional scholarship are limited, especially as compared to places where research is the priority.

When classes are in session, what passes for research and writing time comes in the form of an hour here and an hour there, maybe a full morning or afternoon if you've scheduled well or been allowed to schedule well. At the very beginning and very end of research, I can get a fair amount accomplished working that way, but virtually all projects reach a stage where I need more sustained time than I can realistically “buy” during the main part of the school year.

On the other hand, in the snatches of time I can “buy,” I can get a DVD review knocked out or a working draft of a longer feature done. While such works normally don't contribute in any notable way to the production of original knowledge in my field(s), they do help me to refine my thinking and improve my writing skills. Perhaps most importantly, they draw on, and allow me to share, my expertise.

As chance would have it, a recent experience I had with another geographer's work suggests that more popular forms of writing can sometimes grow beyond simply bringing academic knowledge to a wider public. Such works can become important within a field.

One of the challenges I have in teaching my geography and film course is balancing the teaching of film with the teaching of geography. In my selection of texts, I favor the film side with the thought that, at some basic level, geographic concepts like “place” and “landscape” are more readily accessible referents for students than, say, key concepts in film semiotics. And at least half of the students who typically enroll in the course have taken introductory cultural geography, whereas for many this is their first film class. Still, I often think that I would like students to take away a more sophisticated understanding of the geographic concepts I've chosen to focus on than they frequently do, and for that goal (or should I write, “outcome”?) to be met some kind of text is pretty well required.

The theme I'm going to focus on this year is “immigration and the experience of place,” and it occurred to me that Doreen Massey's essay on “A global sense of place” would be an ideal frame of reference for that theme. Without expecting much, I did a journal articles database search at Hamersly Library and then a Google search to see if the paper is available in an electronic form I could use without violating copyright.

The journals search turned up empty. The first result I got back on Google was a copy of the version from Space, Place, and Gender (1994) at another university that was clearly meant for course use (not really sure how it turned up as accessible off campus). Eventually, I learned that the essay was originally published, not in a peer reviewed journal, but in the British political magazine, Marxism Today. Fortunately for me, the entire run of Marxism Today is free online.

One thing this adventure demonstrates is that the lines between “popular” writing and publishing and “academic” writing and publishing can sometimes blur. It seems reasonable that certain kinds of unorthodox or tentative thinking on a core concept within a field, as “place” certainly is in geography, might require an outlet other than a recognized disciplinary journal. Massey's essay has become one of the most commented on, cited, and discussed in recent human geographic thought, to the point where it is featured in introductory texts. Her work may be the exception that proves the rule, but it ably demonstrates how the boundaries between traditional academic writing and writing of a “public intellectual” nature can be less clear than faculty and administrators are inclined to think they are.

I am not against traditional peer review, nor would I dream in today's world of applying for tenure and/or promotion without being able to demonstrate that colleagues in my field(s) had, at some point, vetted and approved my work as viable and worthwhile. But I don't think that should exhaust what is valued by colleges and universities, especially at a teaching-first institution like mine. We'll see what happens next year in my post-tenure review.

Comments

[Jason Mittell]

Nice post. I've thought about this issue a lot, and I think it requires us to think carefully about what a university is looking for via "research" and "service" as they are typically defined, especially in the humanities. In the sciences, I understand the research drive to be tied up in grants and opportunities for students to participate. But the humanities rarely produces income and funding, so the goal is more abstract - in my mind, what I want to see (and how I want to be judged) is that a scholar is active in the contemporary issues and debates in his/her field, and regarded as an expert in their scholarly niche. How that expertise is conveyed, and how we demonstrate engagement, should be reconceived for the digital era and the norms of different fields, and be open to the preferences & talents of particular scholars.

Relying on a model of publication which is being undercut by market forces and underfunded libraries/university presses seems to be short-sighted. I think it's important for younger scholars to take the lead to show how academic communication is being redefined, so highlighting blogging, online writing, popular dissemination, etc. is an important step to shift expectations and assumed markers of validity.

Or so I think today...

[Shaun Huston]

Bill Hooker has a three-part series on 3 Quarks Daily titled "The Future of Science is Open" that, while mostly specific to the natural and physical sciences, is a well thought out argument for an approach to scholarly work that entails open access to data/information, open publishing platforms, and open review.

One difficult issue here are the differences between faculty who are comfortable with online publishing and new formats for sharing and disseminating scholarly and creative work and those who are almost inherently suspicious of anything outside of traditional venues and systems. While you can't fully map these differences onto different generations, I think I'm on solid ground in asserting that many of the more senior faculty and administrators who have the highest degree of authority over decisions related to promotion and tenure are among those less comfortable with the idea that "proper" scholarship and expertise can be shared and legitimized in blogs, in online communities, and even in more or less traditional journals that are published on the web.

These kinds of differences are hardly new, but the shifting economics of publishing and higher education that you note give them a salience for those of us doing work in areas that are not magnets for substantial financial support.

[Anne-Marie]

I've been thinking about similar things - collaborative, participatory spaces take a certain critical mass before they become useful and dynamic. So if we don't value public writing, how to get that level of participation from academics? And at the same time, I really want to see scholars participating - so there it is.