The violence of literature review and the imperative to ask new questions

Abstract

Writing the literature review is not a neutral act. In fact, the key central aim of consolidating work in a particular research area is to demonstrate one’s knowledge of this area; that is, one must know the ‘conversations’ concerning the research topic. Literature review becomes violent in the Bourdieusian sense because it imposes particular configurations of privileged knowledge on researchers. Thus, in this paper, we argue that literature review is an enactment of symbolic violence and, in the process, epistemic theft, and central to this practice is the construction of research questions. Literature review, as a site of scholarly conversations, dictates the kinds of questions we ask, thus unwittingly framing our research according to the epistemic demands of past and recent studies. By asking a different set of questions, ‘new’ or different understandings about certain social phenomena may emerge.