Kidnapping Scholarship: Reckoning, Regulating, and Reimagining Plagiarism

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Online Thumbnail Credits: The Met Open Access Collection; Credit Line: he Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2015

Kidnapping Scholarship: Reckoning, Regulating, and Reimagining Plagiarism

- Written by The Critic

One of the very first things I recall learning in my undergraduate degree was the concept of academic misconduct, specifically through the act of plagiarism. The definition, at least as I remember it, was neat and tidy: plagiarism is passing off work that is not your own as your own. It was presented as a moral and intellectual crime, something to be avoided at all costs. And since that day, I have carried this definition with me, repeating it with a kind of confidence whenever the topic arose.

And yet, over the years, I have encountered countless moments where this neat definition has failed to make sense within the actual practices of researching, reading, and writing. There have been many times, especially after immersing myself in a collection of works of a single author, when I begin to unknowingly borrow, mimic, or reproduce not only their ideas but also their particular rhythms of expression. The boundaries between my “own” voice (and ideas) and the voice (and ideas) of another blur. It is not a deliberate act of theft or trying to pass off someone else’s ideas as my own but a natural byproduct of close, prolonged study: I absorb the patterns of thought and language until they unknowingly become almost like my own. I often do not even notice this happening until someone else points it out. My partner has, on several occasions, interrupted me mid-conversation to say, “You sound like you’ve been reading [this author] again.” And in that moment I realise that my words have taken on an accent that is not mine, that I am speaking with a body borrowed from elsewhere.

In those moments, the definition of plagiarism that was handed down to me in that undergraduate lecture begins to nag at my conscience. Am I guilty of something here? Is it wrong that my manner of speaking, even my way of thinking – not only how, but also, what I think – is changing under the influence of another, to the point that I am almost posing as someone else without even acknowledging who I’m posing as? 

In the face of such provocations regarding my own integrity as a scholar, I turned (or perhaps returned) to understanding plagiarism. What I encountered was that my self-assured confidence about what counts as plagiarism was misplaced, because there isn’t a generally agreed-upon definition of it to begin with. To scholars, this lack of consensus might not be surprising. Conceptual ambiguity and a lack of definitional consensus is, after all, the modus operandi of academic work. A fixed definition of anything often means that work has either been concluded, rendered solid and stable, or that it has gone dormant, that the door has not been opened in a while.

But plagiarism is not just another academic concept to debate in journals or conferences. Its concerns are ‘practical’ precisely because it is practically and seriously applied in the everyday practices of teaching, learning, and research. It is written into codes of conduct, adjudicated in disciplinary hearings, and policed by software. In this sense, plagiarism is not just a concept; it is a lived reality with real consequences.

And yet, even among academics themselves, there is little agreement on what it actually is. Rebecca Howard illustrates this tension by describing how readers of College English gave widely varying definitions of plagiarism when asked ‘How Do You Define Plagiarism?’, with no consensus at all. She writes:

Perhaps the definition I learned as an undergraduate – and have repeated confidently ever since, including in the beginning of this essay – might have raised your eyebrows, because it does not correspond to your own. You might judge my understanding as poor. But the more appropriate explanation for the divergences between our understandings is that there is in general no unified reality of plagiarism in the first place. And it is precisely such divergences in definitions that create significant problems when we attempt to apply the concept in practice. As Howard asks: 

“How is it that the academy still manages to use it as the basis for serious legislation and adjudication?” 

How can something so unstable, so contested, nonetheless serve as the bedrock of disciplinary regimes that carry real consequences for students and scholars alike? And more importantly: is there a point in such an indefinable concept serving as the definite foundation of scholarly integrity?  

To answer the question of whether there is a point in holding onto plagiarism given its elusiveness, we might first ask whether there ever has been a point in adopting it. Notions of plagiarism today are often treated as universal, even as if they were objective facts. But this assumption of neutrality conceals a history. It black-boxes a genealogy of cultural and epistemological traditions through which a point for plagiarism has not only been made, but stabilised, however temporarily, despite its inherent slipperiness.

In opening the historical and cultural black-box of plagiarism, it is crucial to recognise that our modern applications of the term are rooted in a specifically Western perspective. As Sarah Eaton explains, plagiarism could first and foremost be linked to the way writing became dominant in the cultural and educational systems of ancient Greece. Accordingly, one of the earliest uses of the word plagiarism in relation to textual appropriation appears in Latin, when the Roman poet Martial extended the meaning of plagiarius – literally “kidnapper” – to describe not only the stealing of slaves but also the theft of verses. At this stage, however, while plagiarism was recognised by Western thought, it was treated only as a matter of insult and derision, not as a systematic cultural or juridical category.

It was only with the invention of the printing press that plagiarism began to emerge as a significant cultural episteme. The mechanisation of writing enabled knowledge to be produced at scale and widely distributed, facilitating what Enlightenment thinkers celebrated as the “democratization of knowledge.” Yet this same technological disruption also commodified knowledge. Written works became commercially viable products, subject to ownership, sale, and exchange. In this context, copyright and intellectual property laws developed, binding knowledge more firmly to logics of individual ownership and authorship. Enlightenment humanism reinforced this view by valorising the figure of the individual author as the origin of ideas. What could be known also became what could be owned – the kn/own/able – and plagiarism shifted from a rhetorical insult to a serious, institutional matter of property and propriety.

At the same time, the massification of literacy and the institutionalisation of education meant that writing gained supremacy in knowledge-sharing, and assessment increasingly took the form of written tasks. Within earlier traditions of authorship, imitation – understood as mimesis – had long held a respected place in classical and medieval cultures as a means of learning, honouring tradition, and establishing authority. While originality was regarded as more valuable, imitation was nevertheless paired with it, not opposed to it. In the early modern period, however, with its growing emphasis on individuality and ownership in authorship, imitation was displaced and degraded through its association with plagiarism, and thus recast as the negative opposite of originality. As Howard explains, in this new binary, plagiarism is not merely an error in textual practice but a degraded form of authorship, a marker of failed individuality. This shift was reinforced by the Romantic view of writing as a “product of genius” and a “manifestation of one’s spiritual nature.” In this sense, plagiarising came to signify not just textual failure but personal and moral deficiency. 

Coupled with the massification of education and the assessment of students through writing, plagiarism became a mechanism for regulating students. Those who plagiarised were not simply poor writers; they were bad subjects. Today, plagiarism continues to be closely associated with unethical writing, often provoking what can only be described as a ‘moral panic.’ This panic, however, is mapped not only onto textual practices themselves but also onto the figure of the plagiarist, imagined as a malaise of the individual – the kidnapper. It is therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, that plagiarism in the context of academic integrity tends to be treated in ‘punitive and deficit-based’ terms. 

As Howard argues, plagiarism has never been only about textual appropriation. Its very indeterminacy signals the wider cultural work it performs: regulating students, maintaining hierarchies, and enforcing Western assumptions surrounding ownership, originality, and authorship. In this sense, the point of plagiarism – perhaps not in spite of its definitional slipperiness but precisely because of it  – has long been to function as a vehicle of cultural regulation as much as a descriptor of textual practice. 

The question we must now ask is whether the “point” of plagiarism, as both textual practice and cultural regulator, still holds in our present moment.

This present moment that I speak of is one which has been shaped by what many have called one of humanity’s greatest inventions: artificial intelligence. The introduction of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which produces text through large-scale pattern recognition, has unsettled our textual practices and reopened the question of what does and does not count as plagiarism. If there was already no consensus around the definition of plagiarism, the emergence of machine-generated writing has only multiplied the ambiguity. A tool that can produce technically competent prose forces us once again to confront questions of ownership, originality, authorship, and integrity.

Just as the printing press transformed texts into reproducible commodities and provoked anxieties over property and authorship, so too has AI destabilised our categories of originality and plagiarism. Yet because plagiarism has always been about more than textual borrowing – serving also as a mechanism of regulation, hierarchy, and cultural authority – the arrival of AI provokes fresh anxieties about the ownership of writing, the nature of authorship, and the very meaning of scholarly integrity. Unsurprisingly, this anxiety has crystallised as moral panic. Noam Chomsky has gone so far as to call ChatGPT “high-tech plagiarism” and “a way of avoiding learning,” insisting that while such systems autocomplete competently, they cannot reason, understand, or create. Whether or not one shares Chomsky’s evaluation, his comments capture the climate: AI has been absorbed into the same cultural work that plagiarism already performs. It is framed not only as a technical challenge but as a malaise of the individual, a refusal of integrity, a sign of intellectual laziness.

However, to repeat once more such an operationalisation of plagiarism is to repeat all the historical, moral, and cultural baggage bound up with the Western model of education and scholarship. It is in this light that Sarah Eaton has called for a move towards post-plagiarism:

Eaton’s provocation is that we must take seriously the technologies of our time and recognise that they cannot be separated from teaching, learning, assessment, or scholarship. The prefix post asks us to imagine what comes after plagiarism, given its further elusiveness in light of the advanced technologies with which we are increasingly entangled. Crucially, Eaton does not call for discarding the term altogether. Discarding would mean erasing plagiarism, leaving nothing in its place. Instead, she suggests we transcend it. Transcendence implies transformation: a reconfiguration of what plagiarism means in a world where humans and machines are constantly intertwined in the production of knowledge. In this sense, post-plagiarism invites us to rethink scholarly integrity in a post-human condition, one in which the boundaries between where we end and where machines begin are increasingly porous. 

The only way in which Eaton associates post-plagiarism with textual practices is through the notion of hybrid writing, one of the six tenets of post-plagiarism. She identifies hybrid writing as a mode of writing in which human and AI outputs are so blended that they can no longer be disentangled. The implication is that practices such as using AI to write essays would no longer be treated with suspicion. Instead, the very practice of “catching” students becomes redundant. In principle, this would make possible what Eaton describes as a culture of trust in our learning institutions: teachers no longer police students for cheating but assume, instead, that students are here to learn and develop. In practice, what this means is that while it still preserves the ethical impulses of attribution and respect, hybrid-writing loosens plagiarism from its punitive baggage.

At its core, post-plagiarism is animated by post-binary, post-hierarchical, and post-anthropocentric modes of thought. It rejects strict oppositions such as human/machine or nature/culture, flattens hierarchies between these categories, and by extension destabilises the very hierarchies through which categories like race, gender, and class have also been regulated in educational settings. In this sense, the appeal of post-plagiarism is that it offers the possibility of reworking the deeper assumptions of education and scholarship that have long underpinned older models of plagiarism.

First, in dismantling human–machine boundaries and challenging the bounded figure of the “individual scholar,” post-plagiarism compels us to take seriously a different scholarly figure: one who cannot work without the many technological relations that constitute their everyday practices. Donna Haraway’s figure of the cyborg has long challenged the purity of “the human,” and post-plagiarism invites us to imagine a similar “cyborg-scholar,” rather than the puritan figure of the solitary, self-sufficient human thinker.

Second, this post-anthropocentric orientation advances a broader view of knowledge grounded in co-creation and relationality. Postplagiarism explicitly calls on us to rethink our entanglements with technology, but it also gestures more broadly toward opening up our knowledge-making relations to include marginalized communities, othered peoples, and even nature.This subtle shift not only unsettles the ownership and hierarchies of Western humanist scholarship – traditionally been organised around the individual author as genius and proprietor of knowledge – but also reframes scholarship itself. Knowledge and learning becomes relational rather than individual, collective rather than proprietary. It opens space for a culture in which the work of scholarship is recognised not as the possession of a single scholar but as the outcome of entangled and collaborative processes of knowledge-making and sharing. 

In light of postplagiarism, plagiarism as we have come to know will cease to have a point. 

However, the kinds of changes in the fundamental assumptions of education and scholarship required for postplagiarism to become a practical reality, I unfortunately suspect, are too much to ask. The culture of trust, the flattening of hierarchies, the questioning of individual ownership that undergird the notion of postplagiarism all demand that we forgo the prevailing assumptions of ownership, property, hierarchy, and regulation. For us to be able to transcend plagiarism, the transactional nature of education and the instrumentalisation of scholarship would have to come to an end. As long as education remains transactional rather than transformational – valued for employability rather than for learning – postplagiarism will struggle to find a foothold in students’ lives. As long as scholarship is premised on publication counts rather than on what Indigenous scholars have called knowledge caretaking, plagiarism will retain its stronghold. Postplagiarism will remain, at least for now, not a practice but a provocation.

So, for now, we have to continue working with the paradox of plagiarism: conceptually indefinable, yet practically definite. Teachers will continue to police, monitor, and regulate rather than to cultivate, nurture, and relate. Students, in turn, will learn to consume and reproduce rather than to experiment, question, and create. Integrity will remain framed less as a mode of being with knowledge and more as compliance with rules. And so the cycle continues: a culture of suspicion masquerading as a culture of learning.

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