Compare Podcast Episode 4

Uma Pradhan: Hello and Welcome to the fourth episode of the Compare and BAICE podcast series! I am Uma Pradhan – one of the editors of the journal Compare, 

Qiang Zha: And I am Qiang Zha, Editorial Board Member of Compare. We are pleased to be co-hosting this episode of Compare podcast. Today, we are diving into a very important topic, which is Decolonising writing for academic journals. And we’re speaking to two brilliant guests with us: Professor Emerita Sheila Trahar from the University of Bristol, who also served as the editor of Compare, and Dr Adisorn Juntrasook, Assistant Professor at Thammasat University in Thailand.

Uma Pradhan: Sheila and Adisorn, along with their co-authors James Burford, Astrid von Kotze, and Danny Wildemeersch, wrote a powerful forum piece in 2019 titled “Hovering on the periphery? ‘Decolonising’ writing for academic journals.” Even though it’s been a few years since its publication, the issues they raised are just as relevant today — maybe even more so.

Qiang Zha: We’ll be talking about why academic publishing often feels exclusive, especially for scholars from the Global South, and how colonial legacies continue to shape whose voices get heard. Plus, we’ll explore what needs to change to make academic publishing more inclusive and truly diverse. We are really excited to hear Sheila and Adisorn’s thoughts on all of this, so let’s start.

Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us about your work on this topic. So first of all, could you please tell us about yourself, what inspired you to explore the idea of decolonising academic writing, and why do you think that’s important

Sheila Trahar: OK so I’ll start and then I’ll hand over to Adisorn. So, as Uma said, I’m now a Professor Emerita of International Higher Education at Bristol. So my academic career has been concerned with international of higher education and issues of decolonization and decoloniality.  In 2006, when I became Secretary of BAICE that was at the time when Compare was beginning to offer workshops for writers from the so-called Global South – I’m sure we’ll we’ll talk about these terms a little bit later – to support them too publish in high impact journals, of which Compare was and is One. I suggested in 2006 that it might be a good idea for Compare to start to think about publishing, I suppose what I called, alternative articles in which the writers wrote in different ways, different genres, different structures, etc. What I did get out of it was a Special Issue on the value of using narrative research in Comparative and International Higher Education. So in 2016, when I applied to be an Editor of Compare, I actually put in my letter of application that I did feel that it was time for Compare to grasp some of these issues around academic, the kind of orthodox academic writing genres. And if I were appointed as an Editor, something that I wanted to do was really to start to challenge academic conventions as a Journal Editor. So that application was accepted and eventually, as I write in the forum, I decided well I had this idea for a forum to bring together different perspectives on what I was interested in and one of the things that came out of that – or maybe it was even before that – we then stated on our Compare website that we welcomed articles that were written and structured – I guess the word we used is – differently. And what we wanted to do in that forum was to initiate a discussion of these issues in a high-impact journal. So that’s my story, so I’ll hand over to Addison.

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Hi, thank you very much! I’m Adisorn Juntrasook and currently Dean of the School of Learning Science and Education at Thammasat University in Thailand. My interest in decolonising academic writing really emerged from my own lived experience navigating academic spaces across Thailand, South Africa, Switzerland and New Zealand, where I did my PhD. As a Thai scholar writing in English, I have often felt the need to perform a certain version of legitimising, adopting certain tones and references that don’t always align with my context as a Thai person. So what inspired me or we was the realisation that publishing isn’t just about sharing knowledge, it’s about navigating power, you know, and too often scholars from the Global South, like me, are asked to write in ways that make that word legible to the Global North. This is not just a linguistic issue, I think, it’s an epidemic one. I think it shapes whose voices get heard and whose methods are seen as rigorous and whose stories are considered relevant. So the forum article gave me and my co-author James Burford, who was once my colleague at Thammasat, now at Warwick, a chance to reflect on those tensions not just through critique but through practice. And when Sheila asked me to do this together, I thought Oh, this is a good idea! This is a good opportunity to practise what I’m trying to say, promote in my own community as well, so we experimented with letters, using multiple voices and even including Thai script, to, I would say, disrupt conventional formats and make space for other ways of knowing and writing. So for me, decolonising academic writing is about reclaiming my voice, our voice. It’s about creating space where our languages, our forms, and our knowledge are not just translated but truly valued, so I really appreciate when I’ve got a chance to co-write this piece with Sheila and other colleagues.

Uma Pradhan: Thank you! We read your forum article titled – Hovering on the periphery? ‘Decolonising’ writing for academic journals. And as you just mentioned, you have used a very different format, you’ve used three letters, and you have proposed five shifts. We are very curious about this format and your experience of writing this paper. How did you come up with this format of three letters, which highlights how scholars from different parts of the world navigate the academic publishing process? You’ve used, as you mentioned, different fonts and different scripts in this. If you could just take us through the process of how you came up with this format and what led you to approach this piece in this way.

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Thanks for your question. I think the decision to use a letter format was both, I would say ,intentional and deeply personal. It came from a place of discomfort, you know discomfort with the academic writing norms that I have been trained in to actually and that I might cell was now in some ways you know propitiating actually. at the time of writing I was Tameside university and Co writing this space with James who is now as I said at the Warwick we had worked closely together and we often have long reflective conversations about our publishing often felt like entering a performance space one where certain voices anan registers you know were welcomed while others had to be translated tamed or left at the margins the letter format gave us a way to resist that pressure to perform Academy legitimacy as I said earlier you know we decide to write 3 letters each directed towards a different audience. The first one to Thai scholar in our local academic community, second to scholars in the Global North, and 3rd to fellow scholars in the Global South. Each letter had a – different tone, different language, different emotional textures – because we were speaking across different … not trying to smooth it over. But the first letter written in Thai was especially meaningful for me. I wrote it with the awareness that it might or  will be read by many of the Journal’s usual readers. But that wasn’t the point. For me, writing in Thai inside international English language journal was a deliberate act. It wasn’t an assertion that Thai script, Thai ways of expression deserve to be visible – not just translated into English – but left to sit on the page in their own form. So in using letters, we were trying to create relationality. We wanted to shift the mode from, I would say, decoration to conversation; from argument. That felt more aligned with the spirit of what we were trying to say. And even though we knew the risk that some readers might see it as non academic or too emotional, we felt it was important to model a different way of writing –  one that made space for voice you know vulnerability and voice. Not about rejecting academic convention and for me it’s more about expanding the repertoire of what academic writing can be. I didn’t actually proposed the five shift, one of our colleagues who wrote this article did. Sheila, may be able to talk about that.

Sheila Trahar: Yes, I think what’s worth saying before I do –  to say a little bit about the five shifts is that when Adisorn and I invited… So the forum was my idea, and I knew that I wanted Addisorn and James to contribute to it.  At the time, I was involved in a big research project in South Africa, so I had  invited one of my South African colleagues to contribute. But unfortunately he then had to withdraw but we managed to get another South African Astrid. I also wanted somebody from mainland Europe because it seems that often these issues that we’re talking about are overlooked in mainland Europe. And of course,  there the issues are somewhat similar to publishing in English when their first language is not English. So we managed to find Danny. Danny Wildemeersch wrote a really inspirational piece I think. I was very happy with Adisorn and James writing those letters. In fact I thought it was a wonderful idea. I’ve used that format in my own writing. One thing that I did have to do though was to check with our publishers Taylor and Francis whether they could manage Thai script. This may now sound a little bit ridiculous. But you know 5 or 6 years ago, this was something that I had to check. And thankfully they came straight back to me and said that it wouldn’t be any problem. So each of the authors composed their own pieces, i was  kind of checking with them every now and again. But but mainly, I  was a very you know loose Director of this forum.

As for its main shifts –  which come kind of in the middle of the paper –  are referring to the acts of writing. If anybody listening to our podcast is inspired to go and read the forum, you’ll see that she she talks about these these major shifts. I’ll just run through them very quickly. Phase one is to read writing from those people that we might consider to be so-called different from ourselves. Phase 2 is to engage with research and writing that make the familiar unfamiliar, and as she says, can challenges to experience the ordinary extraordinarily. Phase three, this is where she emphasises what what Adisorn has been talking about already – that there are partial representations. We have to be really aware of partial representations that are based solely on western paradigms and these should be signalled as such. And as somebody who continues to review articles for various journals,  I really constantly notice how people do this sadly – they don’t actually indicated that the paradigms that they’re drawing on are drawn from particular context and may not have relevance for their own context. tge writing should be accessible, she talks about the writing being accessible. And so in other words, using different styles, different literary practises –  as indeed Addison and James did –  then the hardest one of all is to think about establishing alternative journals independent journals. Astrid describes some experiences here and as Danny Wildemeersch wrote in his piece, they did establish a journal an an adult learning journal –  it’s still in publication and it invites articles to be written in the author’s first language. If the article is accepted, it’s translated into English but it is the author can submit it in their own language. So those five shifts referred to by Astrid as she said focus very much on the act of writing and and the challenges – I’m using my terms carefully – the  so-called western paradigms.

Qiang Zha:  That’s great and Sheila and Adisorn. Let me continue with another question. In your paper, you talked about the idea of hovering  on the periphery. Could you please share with us about what you mean by that and also how it shapes the scholars’ experiences what they try to get published in academic journals. How might the marginalisation of Global South  knowledges result in the profound loss for knowledge advancement in the Global North.

Sheila Trahar:  We’ve probably touched on this already. But I mean I mentioned the term Global South and said that I would come back to it. We chose the title or I chose the title from a paper by the Australian scholar Raewyn Connell that she published in Higher Education Research and Development in 2017. And I was very interested in her notion of the metropole, the ters that she used the metropole and periphery. And I guess,  I saw these terms as alternatives to using Global North and Global South. They’re all very slippery terms, and in fact the danger is always , as I hope you agree, that by using them we perpetuate division. So I, at the time, I chose that title decolonizing was – hovering on the periphery.  I kind of liked this idea of hovering, of hovering on the periphery. And that relating to decolonizing academic writing, which is what of course the forum is addressing, or what we address in our different ways. And in fact Adisron and James. in their piece of the forum,  they draw attention to being cautious –  that we need to be cautious about the ways in which we use these terms such as Global North Global South, now I would say metropolitan and periphery. For example, Australia is in the Global South but I’m imagining that most people wouldn’t consider Australia to be similar to other countries that are geographically located in in the Global South. Do you want to pick up on this long.

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Yes,  sure thing, Sheila! I think when we speak of marginalisation in the academic context, especially for scholars from the Global South. We’re talking about something that is, I would say, layered, persistent and at times almost internalised. It’s not only about exclusion from publishing, it’s about the often invisible terms of inclusion. It’s the experience of being welcomed to the conversation but only if we agreed to speak a certain way, certain theories, and frame our work through lenses that are seen as credible in the Global North. In our second letter, James and I wrote directly to scholars based in the North and we posed a question – while really saying when we call something international and it actually just means American or or or British. I can recall multiple instances where we will be asked to demonstrate the relevance of my Thai based research to a so-called international audience. I think everyone might experience that kind of someone like me but what is being implied there is that Thailan,  and I think by extension the Global South,  is local, parochial or of interest only in comparison to a universal benchmark that tends to be the eurocentric. So what gets lost in this framing is not just our voices it’s the richness of our context in Thai. For instance we have words metaphors an ways of knowing that carry generations of embodied cultural and spiritual knowledge. But these don’t always map neatly onto English grammar or western Academy logics and so to be published we are often required to translate. Its  not just language but our world. Translation is not neutral is a form of epistemic labour an it can feel like a constant reshaping of ourselves to fit a mould. But this is crucial for me-  this isn’t just a loss for us, it’s also a loss for the field! when we treat Southern  knowledge as supplementary or illustrative rather than generative. I think we deprive ourselves of new paradigms, new theories, and new understanding of education and society. This is why I believe decolonizing knowledge production is not only about justice – it’s also about intellectual reality, without it we end up reproducing the same ideas, the same voices and the same blind spots. And that’s my opinion about that.

Uma Pradhan:  Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you so much for writing this forum article as well. As you just mentioned, this also relates to one of the shifts that you talk about in the forum article – about the importance of making familiar unfamiliar as a way to challenge entrenched power dynamics. Could you talk about how this approach helps help to expose the colonial influences embedded in academic publishing

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Sheila do you want to start?

Sheila Trahar:  Yeah I can start but I think you I think you’ve probably just talked about talked about that beautifully but I can remind listeners that this is from the piece written by Astrid von Kotze and she talks about again… to talk again about questioning what what seems to be normal and natural and and showing it up as interested. So thus presenting a particular interes -t is one way of showing up norms as deliberately produced. And I think it goes back to what I said a few minutes ago, where it seems to me that it still – unfortunately in my view – people draw on theories and concepts that we developed in particular parts of the world and apply them unproblematically to either their own context or other context within which they are working. And I’m not suggesting that these ideas are may not be helpful. But what I am more than suggesting is that they should be critiqued, we should think about the relevance of of these ideas to the context within which we exist – the context within which we’re working. Does that give you a sense of what I think Astrid is talking about there?

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Yeah I think so. And I would add that in Academy publishing you know we often assume that there is a right way to write –  a certain tone or a linear argument,  preference for abstract realising and above all detachment from the personal or emotional. These conventions, most of the time, are so deeply embedded that they begin to feel like common sense. For me and for my colleagues – when we intentionally disrupt those norms, you know when we write for example like letters – instead of article – bringing personal voice or structure our work around storytelling or dialogue –  you know we’re not just being I would say stylistically creative. But I think we’re making visible the constructed nature of academic writing. Snd then we’re saying this too is a choice of tradition and like all traditions you know it can be resolved. I would say one of my favourite moments in writing our Forum piece was when we placed Thaid script right at the start you know that a small simple act made visible the assumption that English is the natural language of scholarship. Suddenly what had been invisible in the linguistic hierarchy of the journal became undeniable. And it produced a range of reactions. My colleagues read that and got some you know e-mail from people some readers I think scrolled past it; others paused; and some asjed why it was there. And that’s the point – it created a moment of friction;  a moment where the family structure of the Academic article was interrupted – that’s so fun in a way. That as well that friction is what exposes power because it’s only when norms are disturbed that we begin to see the colonial scaffolding that props them up. And also making the family unfamiliar isn’t just an aesthetic move you know – it’s a pedagogical and political strategy. I think it asks readers and ourselves to rethink who gets to speak, how knowledge is valued, and what Academic work could look like if we were brave enough to let go of some of the inherited rules. So yeah that’s that’s kind of my response to that.

Sheila Trahar:  And it’s also who gets to speak, how do they get to speak, or how do they feel they have to speak. And really risking letting go, questioning – well why ? why should an article be structured in that way? Does it have to be structured in that way?  And the answer would be No!

Qiang Zha:  Sheila and Adisorn, and in your paper, you also talked about how alternative publications can be a way to challenge the mainstream academic publishing and sounds like keeping them moving is a real challenge or struggle. So what do you think are hurdles for independent decolonial journals and how can they navigate those challenges? Would Open Access preprint help decolonize the academic population for the Global South  scholars?

Sheila Trahar:   Well I suppose you know this kind of feels like or may feel like a huge hurdle again.  Asteid  talks about in it in her piece –  she talks about various journals, mainly I think in South Africa, that have developed in order to challenge the major academic journals. And as I mentioned earlier Danny Wildemeersch talks about his European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning for Adults-  which as I said is still in publication and which invites articles not written in English but written in the author’s own language. I don’t really know… I mean you know the longest journey has to start with the first step. So there are very many of us who are taking and have taken those steps. And I’m hoping that things are beginning to change. Adisorn is, and because of his position as Dean as he mentioned earlier, he has this or holds these tensions between wanting to support this kind of journal but at the same time having all feeling he has to support colleagues to publish in so-called high impact journals. Adisorn, I think maybe you’re better placed to talk about this now than I am do you want to pick that up.

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Sure I can talk about my position which is as you say this it can be you know quite in tension,  in a way.  As a  faculty at my university you know I now find myself navigating the very system that I have long been critical of. On one hand, I am a scholar committed to social justice, to epistemic inclusion, and to expanding the idea of what akademic work can look like. But, on the other hand, I am now responsible for ensuring that my faculty members meet the benchmarks of performance that our university has, and indeed the global academy expects. So these benchmarks are dominated by one word –  publication –  and not just any publication –  publications indexed peer reviewed English language journals, preferably with a high impact factor. So this is the game we are all forced to play.  And yet we know that the game is rigged. So what do I do –  I find myself giving kind of parallel messages to junior colleagues – I sometimes say to them like yes and for those journals publishing in English build your CV. But at the same time, I’m also trying to say like write in Thai –  you know speak to your communities, value work that may not be seen as publishable. But that matters. This split creates what I might call – a pedagogy of contradiction –  I am constantly asking how do we survive the system while slowly transforming it? Can we –  including me –  you know as administrators create spaces within the institution to support non conventional forms of scholarship?  At my faculty, we’re beginning to explore ways to do  this –  revising evaluation criteria, supporting Thai language journals, our faculty created actually one Thai language journal as well. And also trying to recognise creative outputs in many different ways. But of course change is slow an it can be uncomfortable!  Because to challenge the status quo from the within is to constantly risk appearing unstrategic or naive or incompetent.  Yet I believe it’s the only way forward.  As Suuthern Deans, editors, and scholars –  I think we must play the game strategically. But never forget that rules are not neutral. And the goal should not be to win the game but to rewrite it!

Uma Pradhan:   Thank you so much for sharing the experience, and also for using creative ways of finding space – where it is not that easy to really figure out how to – as you said – not just to play the game but also rewrite the game itself.  But we are also in this new context of rapidly changing technology –  I just wondered how does… what your are thoughts on AI’s impact on organising knowledge production? Do you think it’s making any kind of difference at all or creating any opportunities or possibilities?  I was thinking about –  given its powerful function of translation and possibly providing pathways for  publishing in different languages. Do you see any possibility there at all or do you think this could still be another way of imposing power dynamics in different way, in a different format?

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Well, I think this is a very intriguing and timely question. I’m not an expert on AI or anything like that. But I think on the surface, AI especially – as you just say it you know in this capacity to translate –  seems like it could be a great equaliser. Imagine a world you know where scholar could write in their own languages and those text could be translated intantly and I would say accurately into English or other languages –  it’s I think it’s a compelling imagination. It suggests a world where linguistic hierarchy no longer determines you know whose word gets read. But I think we also have to ask who builds the AI – what kind of you know company,  what organisation, what corpus is it trained on,  what linguistic norms,  the ideological frames,  and cultural assumptions built in it.  If the data that fed into AI systems comes predominantly from western English language sources, then AI may end up reinforcing the very hierarchies we hope it will disrupt.  Even more importantly,  I think that translation is never just technical – it’s always epistemic. Some of the most powerful concepts in Thai don’t have direct equivalents in English. And more than that the structure of our thinking – how we make arguments how we relate to ideas – is often embedded  in language in ways that cannot be easily converted. So yes, I think yeah I may help with access but it won’t solve the deeper issue of the normative expectations of what counts as academic knowledge I think. To truly support equalisation, we need to train it on the polarity of text voices and epistemology – not just on English language academic literature. Otherwise we risk automating exclusion under the guise of inclusion. I also like to invite if you could – Uma and Qiang – to share your thoughts. I think especially as an editor in a navigating this I think rapidly shifting landscape how do you see AI inferencing the future of publishing and how do we ensure that it’s not just inclusive, informed but in content and spread if you would like to answer or or to share with us your thoughts.

Uma Pradhan:   Yes, I think that was also one of our final reflection questions – in terms of how it might shape journals and editorial boards and other peer reviewers working in the publishing process. As you as you said,  translation is never neutral – translation is always always a political process as well. And who is building this AI and what kind of database is actually being fed into AI – makes a big difference in terms of what is happening. I have been following some of the AI development around different languages –  indigenous languages around the world. And I’m quite encouraged also by the fact that different communities are coming together to kind of contribute to this development. Yes, at the end of the day,  it is again being corporatised and might get used in more private interest. But I’m also trying to be a little bit hopeful and see that maybe there is this new space that is being created where people can also contribute towards what becomes of this AI – because it is still in the process of being constructed.

Qiang Zha: I might offer my two cents as well.  Like Uma, I’m also having mixed feelings towards the development –  especially using AI for academic research and academic writing. On technology side,  I’m optimistic because I can see AI is developing quickly and most recently –  I followed the development of Deepseek in China.  So,  you can see different countries – and if you see China as a global South country – its is also developing from the global South. And based on the different languages indigenous languages, Deepseek is getting more and more powerful in dealing with using the languages translating the languages.  So on that side, I’m  quite optimistic. On the other hand, I might think AI could bring new inequalities  because in some countries, in some systems, it’s more accessible to some users.  I mean even think about the use for the students – they might have better opportunities to learn how to use AI versus in some other countries which would not be the case. So that could result in new inequalities.

Sheila Trahar:  I think that .. listening to the three of you.. I think that you’ve all made really important and interesting,  and,  you know in some ways, encouraging points. But I think the last point about access is really important and unless everybody has access then clearly there’s going to be disadvantage. I guess something I just want to reinforce again is that – what we’ve been talking –  what we were talking about in the forum and what we’re talking about today –  isn’t only about language. Although you could say that’s easy for me to say because I’m operating in my first language – which is English –  it’s also about questioning so-called orthodox structures. Why ? Why are journal articles that are published in the majority of high impact journals structured in particular ways? Why do reviewers or many reviewers reject them, when they’re not? Why does everything have to have a theoretical framework?  Where are those theories drawn from,  if there is a theoretical framework?  How relevant are they? Why are there not many myriad knowledges drawn on,   myriad methodological approaches and styles of writing? And importantly not assuming as again we state in the forum that unless an article has relevance to the US, and probably the UK –  it can’t be considered worthy of publication. I mean you know these may be provocative statements but I feel that we do have to continue to question them and I really hope that Compare is continuing to do that. We had a statement put on the website – that we are welcoming articles in a variety written in a variety of genres. When we received an article that appeared to be somewhat outside of the so-called Compare mainstream and send it out for review,  we would communicate with reviewers,  remind them of that statement – and ask them to –  in their reviewing,  reading,  and reviewing of the article –  to consider the words that we had put on the website. Other journals may well be doing similar or more than that – I’m not sure at the moment.

Qiang Zha: Thank you so much, Sheila and Edison. We are coming to the end of this episode. So finally I want to ask – how might journals, editorial boards and peer reviews contribute to the perpetuation of those biases in academic publishing? What can be done differently to make the publishing process more inclusive and equitable?

Adisorn Juntrasook:  Do you want to start first, Sheila? or should I start?

Sheila Trahar: I feel that I probably have been saying that .. all of the way through the conversation. I think it’s so multilayered, the whole you know,  there are so many issues  – what you were saying earlier – where does the power reside in  journals or certain journals needing,  wanting to retain,  their high impact factor and somehow believing that if they accept articles that are a little bit away from the mainstream – then that will affect their impact factor. I think journal –  well I think – we all have a responsibility. Because I think this is a communal issue. But I I think journal editors, reviewers – they also have a significant responsibility to be taking up the mantle. Certainly, as I said earlier, as a reviewer when time after time I find that people are unproblematically quoting theories and concepts that really need to be unpicked for their epistemic roots etc. –  then I’m going to continue to challenge that and I do so still in my own writing as well as in reviewing.

Adisorn Juntrasook:  I am really supportive but then as well. so I think when we talk about decolonizing academic writing I think we’re not just talking about individual journals, individual authors, individual reviewers  –  but we also talking about systems and one of the most powerful systems is the review process. Even when journals like Compare  have progressive editorial missions – and comparatively has been a leader –  I think reviewers often bring with them a set of assumptions about what constitutes rigour.  I often have this validity etc. and those assumptions are often shaped by western norms.  So we get comments like the sample size is too small, the literature review is not critical enough; the English is not good; you know this may be legitimate concern in some cases – but they also become gatekeeping devices – especially when applied to words that are written differently from a different voice.

Sheila Trahar: Absolutely, I’m reviewing an article at the moment and the first question that the journal is asking is – is there a research question? Well there isn’t a research question. Should there be a research question? So what I have to say – no there isn’t a research question. But in my comments to the editors I am going to make the point you know that the way they’re structuring their criteria – well I won’t use the word ridiculous  I’m sure – but is exclusionary.

Adisorn Juntrasook: Yeah so I think we need to ask – can we train editors or reviewers you know to read more kindly. Invite them to see difference not as a deficiency but as an opportunity for learning .

Absolutely yeah yeah

Adisorn Juntrasook: What do you think Uma and Qiang Zha – about this because you know you’re sitting on the board member of the journals as well.

Qiang Zha:  well, my point is very simple. I mean I guess one way to do that or to change the situation which is practical is to try to recruit and include more and more reviewers from Global South,  so they can bring I think their perspectives which might be different from those, as Sheila mentioned, that we are used to. We used to try to refresh our ideas.

Uma Pradhan:   Yeah and we were trying to do that but again here as well you know lot of peer reviewing is a voluntary process. And the people are giving all their time without any remuneration as well. So we have to really think about expecting people’s time and who do we ask that as well.  Yeah. So it’s a very complicated question and one that we’re all struggling with. We’re trying to expand our peer reviewers –  expand the membership within the Compare boards,  and Compare editorial team as well,  doing things in different ways and – what Sheila and Adisorn – you have done is that – you’ve already provided us a wonderful example from your forum article in terms of different creative ways in which we can bring in different kinds of research paradigms, different ways of thinking about knowledge production. And even though you have written in a very different format – which is not traditional academic article format – it does make a very powerful point about what on questions of knowledge production and that’s a wonderful example that we can follow in terms of how do we rethink and how do we expand the idea of academic publishing itself, and the formats that we accept within academic publishing. So, I think your paper is already a great example of what we should be doing more of.

Sheila Trahar:  I think just on your point –  Uma  – when you use the word traditional I would always say whose tradition?

Uma Pradhan:  Absolutely!

Thank you so much this was a fascinating conversation! And thank you for bringing us also into this conversation and asking us to reflect on these questions. Really big thank you to Sheila and Adisorn for sharing their insights and experiences with us. Thank you to everyone listening. We hope this episode has given you plenty to think about – it definitely has to us and for Compare to think about how to make this publishing process more inclusive and equitable.

Stay tuned for more episodes in the Compare and BAICE podcast series! Thank you everyone.

Compare Article:

Trahar, S., Juntrasook, A., Burford, J., von Kotze, A., & Wildemeersch, D. (2019). Hovering on the periphery? ‘Decolonising’ writing for academic journals. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 49(1), 149–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2018.1545817 

Related Articles:

Naidoo, K., Trahar, S., Lucas, L., Muhuro, P., & Wisker, G. (2020). ‘You have to change, the curriculum stays the same’: decoloniality and curricular justice in South African higher education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 50(7), 961–977. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2020.1765740