Tim, I’m grateful that you indicated some ways a scholar can locate herself in the work as a piece of responsibility in addressing the subject at hand. I’m terrifically or terribly invested in such right now as I work on completing a cluster of essays on pre-19th century Busoga. Which I’ve been working on as a promised book since December 1969. The stops and starts in this project are rather autobiographical. Inevitably as I try to explain changes in my thinking, or some new discoveries. The authors of the paper you discuss, and maybe even the debates that should arise around their work, could poison the well some for those endeavoring to look again at positions previously taken. It feels like some people took my production of history ethic and multiplied it by twenty. There is another question about signing group letters after recent debacles (one of which you recently discussed!!)
You run these together, but I think peer review and retraction are very different here. As an extreme example, when peer reviewing a paper, you might say "this is so confusingly written that I can't figure out what it is trying to say", and thus recommend rejection, and this is considered totally normal. But no one calls for a published paper which is confusing and hard to understand (of which there are many) to be retracted.
In general, papers are expected to be retracted if they are wrong in a fundamental way (eg, the results were all switched in the lab and something else was tested) or produced by misconduct (eg, the interviews were fabricated or obtained under false pretenses), which is a much narrower set of circumstances than for rejection during peer review.
From reading your post and the letter, it seems like the paper does not really fit into those categories, but it might depend on what obligations autoethnography requires, and whether those are already broadly understood and agreed-to, or whether they are still contested.
Tim, I’m grateful that you indicated some ways a scholar can locate herself in the work as a piece of responsibility in addressing the subject at hand. I’m terrifically or terribly invested in such right now as I work on completing a cluster of essays on pre-19th century Busoga. Which I’ve been working on as a promised book since December 1969. The stops and starts in this project are rather autobiographical. Inevitably as I try to explain changes in my thinking, or some new discoveries. The authors of the paper you discuss, and maybe even the debates that should arise around their work, could poison the well some for those endeavoring to look again at positions previously taken. It feels like some people took my production of history ethic and multiplied it by twenty. There is another question about signing group letters after recent debacles (one of which you recently discussed!!)
You run these together, but I think peer review and retraction are very different here. As an extreme example, when peer reviewing a paper, you might say "this is so confusingly written that I can't figure out what it is trying to say", and thus recommend rejection, and this is considered totally normal. But no one calls for a published paper which is confusing and hard to understand (of which there are many) to be retracted.
In general, papers are expected to be retracted if they are wrong in a fundamental way (eg, the results were all switched in the lab and something else was tested) or produced by misconduct (eg, the interviews were fabricated or obtained under false pretenses), which is a much narrower set of circumstances than for rejection during peer review.
From reading your post and the letter, it seems like the paper does not really fit into those categories, but it might depend on what obligations autoethnography requires, and whether those are already broadly understood and agreed-to, or whether they are still contested.