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!!)
I mean, this is ultimately what annoys me about the essay: it is so keen to proclaim a space of novelty that it only minimally engages work that sort of resembles what it's talking about (leaving out a TON of work even so--where's Ashforth's Madumo? Where's Hartman's Lose Your Mother? etc.) but it also just breezes by generations of careful, ordinary reflexivity that is absolutely critical to understanding knowledge in the field--yours and Atieno's work among many many others. It's right over the edge of being factually wrong in that way, let alone irresponsible in terms of its potential impact.
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.
Right. The letter writers are arguing for retraction on the grounds that the interviews used to generate the autoethnographies were not framed to their participants as being about generating autoethnographies, which they take to be both 'false pretenses' and an unethical act that reproduces racial inequality within the community of scholars who study African societies, cultures and histories. I think what I'd add is that the article is borderline incorrect factually in that it misrepresents the historiography of reflexivity in African Studies on several levels, but I guess that's not quite at the level of "the data from the experiment was accidentally taken from a quite different experiment and nobody noticed during peer review".
Right, I think the letter writers are arguing from the perspective that (a) any good peer reviewers would not have accepted the article, along the lines of a "reasonable person" standard in US law, and (b) retraction is a remedy for mistakes in peer review. I cannot pretend to have any insight into whether (a) is true for this article; it's much too far away from my scholarly remit. But I think (b) is a bad trend.
I think so too; it is the cause of my hesitancy. If the letter was "I think this is a bad article that reinforces some bad inequalities in this field of study and that also misrepresents the field's historiography", I'd sign that in a minute. I just don't want retraction to become a common or default way to register a critique of weak or bad published work.
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!!)
I mean, this is ultimately what annoys me about the essay: it is so keen to proclaim a space of novelty that it only minimally engages work that sort of resembles what it's talking about (leaving out a TON of work even so--where's Ashforth's Madumo? Where's Hartman's Lose Your Mother? etc.) but it also just breezes by generations of careful, ordinary reflexivity that is absolutely critical to understanding knowledge in the field--yours and Atieno's work among many many others. It's right over the edge of being factually wrong in that way, let alone irresponsible in terms of its potential impact.
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.
Right. The letter writers are arguing for retraction on the grounds that the interviews used to generate the autoethnographies were not framed to their participants as being about generating autoethnographies, which they take to be both 'false pretenses' and an unethical act that reproduces racial inequality within the community of scholars who study African societies, cultures and histories. I think what I'd add is that the article is borderline incorrect factually in that it misrepresents the historiography of reflexivity in African Studies on several levels, but I guess that's not quite at the level of "the data from the experiment was accidentally taken from a quite different experiment and nobody noticed during peer review".
Right, I think the letter writers are arguing from the perspective that (a) any good peer reviewers would not have accepted the article, along the lines of a "reasonable person" standard in US law, and (b) retraction is a remedy for mistakes in peer review. I cannot pretend to have any insight into whether (a) is true for this article; it's much too far away from my scholarly remit. But I think (b) is a bad trend.
I think so too; it is the cause of my hesitancy. If the letter was "I think this is a bad article that reinforces some bad inequalities in this field of study and that also misrepresents the field's historiography", I'd sign that in a minute. I just don't want retraction to become a common or default way to register a critique of weak or bad published work.