Taming the Journal Monster: Building Bibliographical Bridges

Christian Beyer

doi:10.7557/13.5024

Authors

Christian Beyer Torghatten Buss and UiT The Arctic University of Norway

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5024

Keywords:

Manufacturing Monsters

Abstract

The idea of rounding up our special issue in this way came to us while harmonizing all the bibliographical entries into one pattern. We have tried as best as we could to double-check each single source. Sometimes, names that we have never heard before appeared over and over again, in multiple contributions. Somewhere on this planet, different scholars had come across the same readings. We simply wanted to underline this complex, interwoven net of border-crossing–border-creating literature. As editors from different fields, we have learned of many intriguing discourses that were unknown to us before. Quite often, shared literature lists make visible certain symptoms of academic echo chambers, copy-paste works, or self-referencing networks. Shared foundational texts serve as sense-making tool kits to the members of so-called ‘fields’, and give a hint at somehow negotiated vocabulary within them. Yet, what we have in front of us is an example of an interdisciplinary collaboration of writers. Since our special issue had an ‘open call’, many of our collaborators do not even know each other personally. Yet, in the end, it was possible to build bibliographical bridges between all of them—every single contribution has at least one theoretical link to another article. This way, it is possible to theoretically unite our work, and consider it as (part of) a whole.

A Meta Bibliography of Some Sort—Bridging MaMo’s Bibliographies
In short, we consider as a bibliographical bridge the shared bibliographical reference to a particular work or to a particular person by at least two of our issue’s authors. If some of our authors refer to ‘writer A’, an imaginary bridge is being created between their contributions—oftentimes unconsciously. These bridges become even more intriguing when noticing that numerous authors independently investigated the identical ‘work B’, without even knowing that another contributor did so as well. Our overview is based on a close examination of all roughly 1000 bibliographical entries in this special issue. It may not be free from errors. For the detailed references, see each contributor’s bibliography individually.

Author Biography

Christian Beyer, Torghatten Buss and UiT The Arctic University of Norway

is a bus driver at Torghatten Buss where he drives beautiful people and big packages between Nordland, Finnmark and Lapland. As a searcher and re-searcher, he came across questions of political philosophy and power politics in places such as Tehran and Hamadan, Murmansk and Belgrade, Qazvin and Qom. After having been a doctoral research fellow at UiT, he continues to work as a part-time lecturer at the Department of Language and Culture where he teaches the course ‘Manufacturing Monsters’ together with Holger, Juliane and Emil. Chrill considers as quite fascinating: epistemology, the manufacture of knowledge, and the grotesque carnival of academia. Regional focus: Syria, Iran, and the wider axis of resistance.

Takk and děkuji to the border poets at Torghatten Buss. Crucial copy-editorial MaMo work took place in the bus garage right next to the university campus, and, quite literally, on the road—during driving breaks en route to Narvik and Alta.

Giitu and спаси́бо to the regional branch of the Russian Philosophical Society. Parallel to our journal, our academic neighbors from the Murmansk Arctic State University publish a collection that includes one further MaMo contribution as well—as an addendum to our issue, so to say.