sjsca

Special Issue

Vol. 31 No. 1 (2025): Reciprocal Vulnerability: Privilege, Violence, and Solidarity from Fieldwork to Academia

Weaponised Positionality? Coercive Disclosure in the "Publish or Perish" Academy

Submitted
October 9, 2023
Published
2025-11-13

Abstract

This paper brings anthropological scholarship on reflexivity and positionality in conversation with debates around issues of self-exploitation in the neoliberal university, to argue that the publication pressures early career anthropologists face, can cause them to feel that they must violate their own emotional and ethical boundaries to get their manuscript through peer review. Drawing on my own experience of being forced to disclose my past of traumatic violence to a journal, I show that reviewers’ and editors’ demands that anthro­pologists critically reflect on their positionality and on the power relations in their field site, can sometimes become weaponised against them. This can make academic publishing a site for new forms of violence, as well as for renewed trauma for young anthropological writers.

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