The Poethics of Scholarship

This pamphlet explores ways in which to engage scholars to further elaborate the poethics of their scholarship. Following Joan Retallack, who has written extensively about the responsibility that comes with formulating and performing a poetics, which she has captured in her concept of poethics (with an added h), this pamphlet examines what connects the 'doing' of scholarship with the ethical components of research. Here, in order to remain ethical we are not able to determine in advance what being ethical would look like, yet, at the same time, ethical decisions need to be made and are being made as part of our publishing practices: where we publish and with whom, in an open way or not, in what form and shape and in which formats. Should we then consider the poethics of scholarship as a poetics of/as change, or as Retallack calls it, a poetics of the swerve (clinamen), which continuously unsettles our familiar notions? This pamphlet considers how, along with discussions about the contents of our scholarship, and about the different methodologies, theories and politics that we use to give meaning and structure to our research, we should have similar deliberations about the way we do research. This involves paying more attention to the crafting of our own aesthetics and poetics as scholars, including a focus on the medial forms, the formats, and the graphic spaces in and through which we communicate and perform scholarship (and the discourses that surround these), as well as the structures and institutions that shape and determine our scholarly practices