Through the Looking Glass: Publishing in Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals

This article considers some of the issues of power embedded in publishing in academic journals. It asks questions about the way in which individual scholars and researchers might be empowered within a hierarchical system in which getting funding and getting published are closely allied. Four concepts borrowed from diverse sources (creative power, the power of disbelief, power as freedom and decisive preference) act as running stitches through an auto/biographical account of the author's return to the academy after an absence of several years. Showing how the author exercised power as a PhD student, the author concludes on a polemical but somewhat speculative note as a scholar who has yet to find a home.