Publishing essays as scholarly work

A few days ago the OpenPhysio journal published a collection of speculative fiction essays, called Physiopunk, written by first-year physiotherapy students at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. The project was an initiative of Filip Maric and colleagues in the department, and is an attempt to help students think creatively about the kinds of futures we may arrive at in the profession.

Speculative fiction is a literary genre that often has a focus on possible futures.

The concept, in its broadest sense, captures both a conscious and unconscious aspect of human psychology in making sense of the world, and responds to it by creating imaginative, inventive, and artistic expressions. Such expressions can contribute to practical societal progress through interpersonal influences, social and cultural movements, scientific research and advances, and the philosophy of science.

Urbanski, H. (2007, p. 127). Plagues, apocalypses and bug-eyed monsters: how speculative fiction shows us our nightmares.

Through the choice of speculative fiction rather than a more conventional approach to undergraduate essays, Filip and his colleagues opened up a space where students were set free from the more rigid boundaries of traditional assessment tasks. They were able to explore creative, inspiring, and hope-ful narratives of a physiotherapy practice that’s far removed from our current conception of what and where the future of the profession lies. For that alone, it is remarkable.

However, the project has gone further for me and helped to think more carefully about what ‘counts’ as scholarship. In the past I’ve wondered if and how podcasts might be incorporated into the corpus of scholarly works but I’d never thought about the role that essays could play.

Scholarship (as proposed by Boyer, 1990) has four separate but overlapping meanings:

1. The scholarship of discovery (research): original research or the search for new knowledge.
2. The scholarship of integration: putting isolated facts into context.
3. The scholarship of application or engagement (service): goes beyond the service duties of a faculty member to those within or outside the University and involves the rigour and application of disciplinary expertise with results that can be shared with and/or evaluated by peers.
4. The scholarship of teaching: involves the systematic study of teaching and learning processes.

Traditionally academic journals have focused almost entirely on only the first of Boyer’s frames for scholarship i.e the scholarship of discovery; we publish – and privilege – peer-reviewed original research. While this form (and format) of scholarship is an essential part of the scientific method, I’ve also come to think of it as the “sterile uniformity of journal formats” (Carrigan, 2021). In order to standardise knowledge production we’ve converged on a specific type of publication which, ironically, is poorly optimised for general understanding.

As Sarah Kember has noted:

We need to make contact with a sense of writing as something that evades and exceeds the possibility of measurement.

Kember, S. (2016). Why publish? Learned Publishing, 29(S1), 348–353. https://doi.org/10/gnqs98.

I’m not suggesting that we place reflective essays in the same category as RCTs, but I do think that they provide spaces for us to explore ideas and practices that don’t yet exist. And for that reason alone, I think that well-designed essays should be incorporated into the corpus of scholarly works.

I see this project by Filip and colleagues as a first tentative step by the OpenPhysio journal as a reflection on the “sterile uniformity” of traditional publication, and to integrate a form of scholarship that actively seeks to “evade the possibility of measurement”.

Exciting times.

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• Carrigan, M. (2021, December 6). So you don’t want to be a normal journal any more? Mark Carrigan. https://markcarrigan.net/2021/12/06/so-you-dont-want-to-be-a-normal-journal-any-more/
• Kember, S. (2016). Why publish? Learned Publishing, 29(S1), 348–353. https://doi.org/10/gnqs98
• Urbanski, H. (2007, p. 127). Plagues, apocalypses and bug-eyed monsters: how speculative fiction shows us our nightmares.