Constitutive Concealment

The project OUT OF SIGHT 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.

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 social 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 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. 

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