Phillips: English 540 Week Four Response

Academic Voiceover: Canagarajah’s Contribution Re-Writes a Commonplace Assumption

In my last two posts, I chose to bring my outside interests to bear on the texts we were reading for class.  I depart from that in this post because I wish to focus on one article in particular, for it challenged some of my assumptions in productive ways.

Canagarajah’s A Somewhat Legitimate and Very Peripheral Participation zeros in on a compelling problem in the academy and elsewhere. Whose voice gets heard, by whom, and for what purpose and/or audience? By extension, as a neophyte “n00bity” in the academic publishing arena myself, I always wonder, how professional scholars get articles and monographs published. {You know, the back-story, like Canagarajah gives us.} Canagarajah narrates what can happen when people migrate to the United States for an advanced degree and then return to their country of origin (or choice as the case may be different depending upon the context).

In many ways and for various reasons, we all need to know the inside-scoop as we think about professionalization and by implication the “publish or perish” paradigm we will likely face should we be fortunate enough to find gainful employment as scholars and teachers. If that employment is not stateside, there are additional constraints. In a clever twist, Canagarajah turns those constraints into assets. That is, on the one hand, he notes that limited access to academic journals means that one has to focus on the top journals—at least in Canagarajah’s instance. Necessarily, then, one’s attention is directed to specific criteria. On the other hand, lack of access to up-to-date, hi-tech equipment facilitates longer-term qualitative studies and subsequent monographs.

I found Canagarajah’s article absolutely fascinating for a number of reasons. First, to my knowledge, Canagarajah is right: academics don’t usually discuss their processes of reading, writing, research, and publication efforts. Second, that the idea of technological determinism so prevalent in the U.S. academic context would lead to more monographs in Canagarajah’s opinion shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. The sustained effort necessary for an individual monograph suggests to me long-term institutional support. Clearly, Canagarajah disrupted a commonplace assumption that I did not realize I had. {That’s just cool and I love when that happens!} Third, I have a new interpretation of secondary or tertiary source citations. I often wondered why academics chose not to go to primary source materials in certain situations. Confirmation bias on my part assumed it was a kind of academic hastiness or laziness that made people stray from the primary path to the secondary sources. Sometimes, I know this is still the case, but Canagarajah posits another reason: access to the sources due to limited resources. Of course, I have had a good understanding of this as a non-traditional female student, but Canagarajah builds greater depth perception into my field of view by explaining his experiences as a researcher in Sri Lanka.  What one does, or does not do, with the access one has is telling.

The book that Canagarajah’s chapter is a part of looks promising for other reasons as well. I’ve posted the cover here for anyone interested in giving it a more thorough read.

Click below for the table of contents and more information.

http://books.google.com/books?id=RuF6HSqAelkC&printsec=frontcover - v=onepage&q&f=false