Adam Bongers

I thought I might start writing here. Just typing notes on my phone. Part of it just comes from a realisation I have made about the publication process, and how it differs from teaching or giving a conference paper. With written work, you come up with something you think is ready, then a bunch of reviewers all give their notes. By the time you respond to the notes, it doesn’t look like what you intended, and the momentum’s gone. It just takes too long.

I figure by posting here, it’s a way to think out loud. And that might wind up being the name for this, if I stick with it. Here are some other candidates off the top of my head:

• Thinking out loud
• Questions nobody asked
• Errors are my own

*Questions nobody asked” cuts two ways. On the one hand, it’s that frustration that the contribution that you want to make to an academic field is falling on deaf ears, or doesn’t click for peer reviewers. On the other hand, it’s my belief that there are two types of contributions you can make in academia: towards a solution to an established question that people have been asking; or towards a new framing of the question that others are not seeing. Not necessarily a better question, but a different one.

“Errors are my own” points to that requisite line you always see in academic books. That part where you want to acknowledge that you showed your manuscript to others, but you still want to assert that it’s all your own work. It’s necessary, after all, you need to accept responsibility for what you have said. But it also comes off a bit as what Nietzsche once called “ironic modesty:” other people looked at this, and kudos to them, but this is all me.

I expect this will permanently be “under construction.” By that, I just mean that I don’t expect any of the ideas here will be fully worked out. There might be some threads I run with, others I leave by the wayside. And I expect that I will probably go back and edit old posts, so they might not look the same as when I first published them. If one aim of this is to “show my working,” then it will be apparent that a lot of the work I do is a matter of reworking.

Watch this space.