Authorship as social relations

Abstract

Authorship, like many cultural quotients, reflects the positionality within which it has currency. In academic worlds, it is the key metric of scholarly worth, one that defines careers and is the pathway to success. As such, it carries particular potency as a proxy of accomplishment, one that commonly emerges from a foundation of understanding: authorship is the badge of knowledge within our institutional spaces and in those of others, such as legal arenas. However, there are two deviations to this pattern that are raised in this important work. First, because of its value, authorship both generates and reflects power in ways that do not always align with understanding. Second, because of its role as an academic currency, authorship in this context invokes a particularly, perhaps peculiarly, Western view of knowledge. In Western academic worlds, the benefits of authorship typically fall to the individual. Research teams that work collaboratively tend to provide equal opportunity for members to occupy positions of significance rather than confronting the hierarchical nature of system. Some teams simply replicate their own hierarchies in authorship; some authors avoid collaborative practice altogether to avoid them. The ability to do otherwise is enjoyed only by people outside the academic system or those senior enough to be beyond it. Those looking for employment or its continuation rarely have the capacity to forgo individual recognition. In this paper, Ouzman proposes profound alternatives for authors such as collective and non-human variants. Ouzman also suggests revisions to the hierarchy of published projects, which can disentangle the hierarchy of value from the rigidity of the hierarchy of status in publications. As Sonya Atalay has demonstrated (Atalay et al. 2017), this can not only address complex issues in new and insightful ways, but make the project of understanding the scholarship behind it more accessible – a key priority for communities marginalised from academic hierarchies. As exciting as these ideas are, they do not fundamentally alter the hierarchy of value attached to being an academic author, so I fear they will remain outliers. If authorship correlates with individual academic value in monetised and career placement ways, the system will remain intact. That should not dissuade people, as this forum achieves, from pointing out the hypocrisy inherent in the academic exchange of collective understanding for individual benefit. Universities continue to navigate the paradox of being places where knowledge is both produced for the collective good and where it is monetised for individual benefit. Changing this seems to imply tearing down the very foundations of our academic institutions, which though arguably laudable, will not happen either quickly or without major revolution in other cultural contexts. There is a more proximal issue here, however, one that might have a better chance of unravelling in the near term: that of the differences in different cultural worlds. Academic authors cite the genealogy of their scholarship via citations – extracting, digesting, augmenting, and redepositing knowledge in a cumulative chain that is not reliant on any connection between authors, adds to itself and self-corrects through organised disagreement and disproof, although the latter is also vulnerable to various rhetorical errors including ad hominem hagiography, epistemic lacunae, and uncritical ideological enthusiasm. My understanding of Indigenous scholarship suggests a different model, one focussed on the collective authorship for collective ownership and on the ensuing responsibilities of authors to the knowledge that they temporarily hold. I am hesitant to generalise, but my sense is that many Indigenous communities have analogies to those I have familiarity with, specifically the Ts’msyen/Tsimshian peoples. Ts’msyen scholarship is analogous to that of Western academics in many ways – it is intergenerationally cumulative, it operates through reference to demonstrable evidence, and it defines both understanding and the benefits of knowledge. Indeed, as inheritors and participants in a scholarly tradition that has been operating for over 10,000 years, and which is integrated into all