Re-viewing Peer Reviewing: Towards an Affirmative Scholarship

Abstract

Although often unacknowledged and unrewarded, peer reviewing is a crucial part of the process of academic scholarship. Surprisingly, not much has been written on the process and experience of peer reviewing, besides a few articles in journals of teaching and learning in higher education. Nor has there been much consideration of peer reviewing as a critical component of the academic project within larger efforts to rethink the problematic euro-western, patriarchal and neoliberal logics that underpin higher education. This article makes a contribution to the emerging interest in the peer reviewing process by considering the experiences of authors in this regard and thinking about reviewing as a pedagogical practice which refuses reviewing as an individualist, competitive and gate-keeping practice. We address reviewing as a key component of the project of reconceptualising knowledge-making practices, within the context of current feminist decolonial and new materialist rethinkings of dominant neoliberal scholarship.  We propose affirmative, response-able peer reviewing as a critical part of the larger project of challenging current conditions and practices in higher education - for doing academia differently.