Constitutive Concealment

Abstract

NOTREALLYTHERE documents the processes through which some people come to be unnoticed, and analyzes the axis of perceptibility/imperceptibility, and how and why it is established and contested, by whom, and under what conditions and circumstances.

The project interrogates being NOTREALLYTHERE as a representational effect, an interactional achievement, a particular subject position, and an affordance: a feature of life that facilitates some actions, ideas and identities, and that encumbers or blocks others. It will complement but also complicate existing theories about how discursive arrangements distribute and influence perception and attention by comparing people who frequently are rendered NOTREALLYTHERE against their will or desire and others who gain greater autonomy or attain certain kinds of professionalism by consciously doing their best to be NOTREALLYTHERE.

Rider & Hyvönen’s study, Constitutive Concealment, concerns the phenomenon of academic review in which concealment can be regarded as constitutive of an entire set of relations and structures (funding agencies and journals, and by extension, higher education and research as such) that depends on it.

The study will be conducted in the tradition of philosophical anthropology, or cultural epistemology, that is, as an attempt to articulate general structures or forms of science and scholarship understood as concrete expressions of a specific kind of reasoning on the basis of a close examination of its institutions, artefacts, discourses and practices. Rider and Hyvönen will scrutinize policy documents, guidelines and directives, scholarly controversies, and media debates concerning double-blind peer-reviewers for publications and academic grant applications and between 2000-2020. Interviews will be conducted with the editors of leading European journals/publishers in sociology, philosophy, media studies and higher education in Europe as well as with higher-level research administrators in national research funding councils in Europe and the UK. The aim is to map the steps involved in achieving the effacement of the peer reviewer, and to find out how referees, policymakers, and research administrators achieve the anonymity of the peer review system and fulfill their own roles in it. In particular, the focus will be on the complicated relationship between two senses of discretion:autonomy and anonymity