Contemporary political theory is a game. Individuals compete to publish
in ‘top’ journals, to amass greater numbers of publications than their
peers; then journal-ranking is combined with number of publications
generating scores. The aim is to get the most points. Whoever gets the
most points wins: they get the best jobs and the most prestige. This
Hunger Games–like contest has serious consequences for people’s lives,
determining who can make a living from academia, who will be relegated
to the academic precariat or forced out of the profession. In this
article, I argue that, aside from the chilling effect that job
insecurity and the gamification of academia has on the precariat, these
conditions are stifling intellectual creativity, diversity, and dissent
in political theory/philosophy. I discuss how privatization and
deregulation of universities has created unbearable working conditions,
why academics are forced to publish in so-called top journals and why
this is detrimental to our field, marginalizing people, topics, and
methodologies these journals do not support (which usually align with
already structurally marginalized peoples and modes of knowledge). I
explain why we are engaging in this game and how it perpetuates itself.
I conclude with some suggestions for breaking this vicious cycle, as
well as a discussion of who is really benefitting from it, namely, the
corporate elites who run many universities and most academic publishers.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12115-022-00705-z
Giacomo
PS: mi scuso per il link diretto a Springer ma non sono riuscito ad
archiviarlo sulla WayBack Machine. Ho comunque verificato la sua
accessibilità via TorBrowser.
