Having not attended the RGS-IBG Annual International Conference since 2018, it was a pleasure to make a belated return there last week, and to enjoy the company of old friends, to be energised by the exchange of ideas, and to talk (if only for 15 minutes) to an audience about Macintosh. I was lucky enough to participate in a fascinating pair of sessions—”Surveying the Field: Caribbean Histories and Geographies”—organised by Jo Norcup and David Lambert. My own paper, “Testimonial injustice and the authority of Black voices in eighteenth-century Grenada,” used Mariana Fricker’s concept of ‘testimonial injustice’ to consider the intersecting social and legal frameworks that functioned to subtract credibility from, or entirely to invalidate, the testimony of Black people, both enslaved and free.

Later in the week I was discussant in a session I co-organised with Diarmid Finnegan on geography and biography, which contained a series of excellent and thought-provoking papers that addressed a range of conceptual and methodological questions around the writing of biography, particularly in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Although the conference made for a busy and rather exhausting few days, it was a welcome change to the rather cloistered experience of book writing that has typified my summers in recent years.

Almost everyone I met at the conference was keen to know how the book was going, and there were many solicitous and well-meaning inquiries about quite why it was taking so long and whether my perfectionism might be partly to blame. These comments were tempered, however, by a common view that slow scholarship matters in an era of scholarly overproduction and might even be a (quiet) form of resistance to academia’s neoliberal ideologies. As readers of this blog will know, I have long wrestled with these questions and concerns so to have them vocalised by others was not a cause for further anxiety but simply a reminder that my friends and colleagues know me rather well.

I did wonder, however, whether these questions would look different in a different disciplinary context, such as history, where the writing of scholarly monographs is more commonplace and where one’s career is measured out in a series of decade-long “book projects”, rather than a more rapid and frequent stream of journal articles. There are, of course, larger trans-disciplinary processes at work—such as the REF—that have the effect of deprioritising the academic monograph as a form of scholarly output. A decade ago Robert Mayhew noted that “the audit culture of U.K. academic life increasingly positions the writing of a monograph as outré, an indulgence, or both.” Arguably this positioning has only calcified in the intervening time, particularly so when the next REF will place less emphasis on research outputs and more on the wider “research culture” in which they are composed. Indeed, as Matthew Gandy has recently argued,

The academic monograph, a cornerstone of academic achievement in many disciplines, will be under further pressure with the move away from individual scholarship in REF 2029. This marks a contrast with REF 2021 where the wider funding differential between 3* and 4* publications, along with greater flexibility in submissions per person, may have contributed to a modest increase in the number of research monographs submitted in geography, sociology, and cognate disciplines. Many academics have spent recent years preparing book manuscripts in anticipation of a similar evaluative framework for the next REF: now this has all changed, with the likelihood that books will be perceived as ‘out of step’ with the new emphasis on multi-authored publications under a science-based model. Furthermore, if we compare the years of intellectual labour that go into the production of a double-weighted monograph, which might constitute just 1% of the overall research evaluation profile for a medium-sized department, we find that an equivalent degree of effort devoted to the preparation of documentation required for ‘research culture’ would involve many years if not decades of academic labour.

Concerning as these broader processes undoubtedly are, they are there to be challenged and (as in the case of the unworkable and now abandoned open-access requirement for monographs) potentially changed. For now, though, and despite my internal battle with perfectionism, onwards, onwards!