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Hi Scholar,

The following poem was written by Jessy Randall – who turns the lives and work of women scientists into art – about Flemmie Pansy Kittrell, one of the first African American women to earn a PhD in Home Economics: 

Howard University lured me,
promising a new Home Ec building,
but academia has slow metabolism.
I’ve always said prejudice is
having your thoughts too soon.
I spent my whole career fighting
that kind of snap judgment. So maybe
it’s all right I never worked in the
building they promised. They did,
eventually, build it, after I
retired and moved away.
If not for me there’d be no place
for the galoshes and the zippers.
The crayons, the dress-up bin,
the nap mats, the small chairs, and yes,
even books, lots and lots of picture books, and
the children themselves, and the mothers and fathers
and grandparents and teachers and families and all that love.

There is much in this poem that invites reflection, but two almost contradictory ideas in particular stood out to us. 

First is her remark that “academia has slow metabolism.” It is a wonderfully vivid way of describing the often extensive length of time it takes academic institutions to process the undercurrents of change. And yet, paradoxically, while academia moves slowly in some respects, it is also a place where snap judgments can happen quickly. Some ideas, people, or kinds of work are prematurely judged – sometimes even dismissed – before they have truly been understood.

We found ourselves particularly drawn to this contradiction. Perhaps because in many ways, the work we try to do through spaces like The Scholarly Letter emerges precisely from this tension – creating room for ideas and conversations that might otherwise be judged too quickly or recognised too slowly within academic institutions.

At times it can feel crippling, but it is also what pushes us forward each day, renewing our sense of purpose.

Recently, during a conversation with a fellow scholar in our community, I came across the idea of critical being for the first time, which I wanted to share with you. 

Personally, I found myself rather excited upon encountering the notion of critical being. My excitement was due in part because after years and years of understanding criticality principally in relation to thinking, I had been presented with the opportunity to engage with it through a different set of relations. 

Being intellectual, educated, and learned has come to be largely seen as some abstract matter entirely located in the intangible realm of thought. Or, as Barnett argues, it has become primarily understood and practiced through an epistemological lens that is useful only for assessing knowledge claims within specific contexts and for specific aims and purposes. The problem with this, however, is that such criticality remains defined by individualistic, hyper-rationalised, instrumental aims. Critical being challenges this, and in doing so, brings two relations back to the table of criticality. 

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First is the body. There is a fundamental misunderstanding in how we tend to understand the process of thinking in general. Typically framed as purely a cognitive effort, this view completely misses the fact that thinking is still an embodied practice – performed by a thinking body. In this sense, shifting the discussion from critical thinking to critical being – or, more appropriately, collapsing the dualities between thinking and being – enables the extension of what involves criticality. It draws attention to the ways in which our bodies, our ways of being, are entailed in our capacities to be critical. 

Second, and relatedly, it brings back into the purview of criticality the world and our embeddedness within it. Critical thinking is often imagined as a one-directional process flowing from mind to world: the thinker evaluates external reality. But our thinking is always shaped by the world that surrounds us – socially, politically, materially, and environmentally. Critical being, through its renewed emphasis on our situatedness in the world, therefore enables the becoming of “critical persons embodying critique in the three domains of knowing, of self, and of the world at the same time.”

Taken together, this shifts the cultivation of criticality in an important way. Instead of remaining solely an epistemological practice – evaluating claims and arguments – it takes on an ontological dimension. It becomes a matter of not only how we think, but also how we live, act, and position ourselves within the world we critique. Seen in light of these relations – the body and the world, criticality becomes less abstract and more lived. It pulls critique down from the lofty realm of intellectual performance and returns it to the texture of everyday lived, experienced, and encountered life, reminding us that critique is ultimately a way of inhabiting the world. 

Now if you’re thinking, scholar, about how in this world this shift from critical thinking to being might inform the work you do for your scholarship, then perhaps it might be worth turning to Ian Normile’s work on non-criticality. 

He suggests that for developing one’s critical being, we may consider non-critical thinking and non-critical action as valuable resources because they are equally important parts of our larger being itself. As he argues, 

That is, when we try to develop ourselves as critical beings, it is not always possible to do so through purely rational means of engagement. Much of being human does not involve conscious thinking, much less critical thinking. For the most part, our everyday experiences and actions are non-critical. However, this does not mean that criticality cannot emerge from such experiences.

Normile offers two such non-critical experiences that are particularly important for inquiry: wonder and wu-wei. 

I will only briefly talk about one – wonder – because I have myself experienced it, and perhaps because you have too.

We often experience wonder unexpectedly. It arises in moments when what we thought we knew suddenly becomes uncertain. It is a confrontation with the unknown, or a recognition that what once seemed obvious may not be so obvious after all.

In this sense, wonder interrupts the familiar and unsettles what we take for granted, inviting us to see things differently. Through its openness and receptivity to the world – unencumbered by expectations or preconceptions – wonder opens the possibility of encountering things anew. It connects thought with experience, draws attention beyond the self, and opens us to the world and new possibilities. Such ways of encountering the world is at the core of what entails criticality. In this way, wonder reminds us that criticality does not emerge merely from intellectual activity but also through ways of engaging with the world in unexpected, unfamiliar, and importantly, non-critical ways.

What I find most appealing about this way of cultivating critical beings is that it places less emphasis on the rules, procedures, and recipes of how to be critical. Instead, it invites us to allow ourselves to encounter the world in ways that are not already structured by the expectations of critique. And in doing so, it puts the brakes on the further mechanisation of critical thinking whereby it seamlessly operates within fixed boundaries which are rarely ever questioned. 

There is something about this way of cultivating criticality – by taking critical being as the starting point and drawing on non-critical experiences for its development – that makes me optimistic about the possibility of more genuine modes of critique. It pushes back against the abstraction of criticality and moves it into the realm of the real and lived. In turn, it opens the possibility for more genuine forms of criticality that emerge from experience, encounter, and engagement, while pushing back against the superficial, rehearsed forms of pseudo-criticality that do not even question their own structure.

Just some food for thought, or shall we say, food for your being.

P.S. Last week, I spoke to you about laziness as a virtue in inquiry. And now I find myself wondering whether laziness might also be one of those non-critical actions that contribute to our critical being. 

Research fraud and misconduct are no longer primarily the result of poor choices by isolated individuals; instead, they are increasingly orchestrated by sophisticated global networks that systematically exploit weaknesses in the academic publishing system.

The intense metrification and quantification of research activity has created a black market, where academics buy the services of organizations known as paper mills, which sell:

“basically anything that can be used to launder a reputation”.

The pressure to publish highly cited research papers at impossible speed and scale means that authorship positions, citations on published papers and guaranteed acceptance for manuscripts within compromised journals can now be bought. Such organizations use fabricated data and AI to mass produce articles which are then sold to academics desperate to present the image of a successful researcher. 

The authors of the study conclude that stronger safeguards are required to protect the integrity of the scientific literature, lest it become “completely poisoned”. We would argue that addressing the symptoms of the problem will only do so much.  

It was these pressures and incentives that partly inspired The Scholar Manifesto, which appeared in this publication a year ago. Oh, how we wish we could say that, one year later, things were turning around.

This week we’re sharing a gem of a playlist: a collection of clips in which Nobel Laureates explain how they approach writing scientific papers. The playlist contains 11 short videos – none longer than just over three minutes – and each offers some very interesting insights into different aspects of the scientific writing process.

The Critic’s personal favourite is Peter Doherty’s advice for PhD students to ‘learn to fall in love with writing’. 

The Tatler’s personal favourite is Tim Hunt’s response to the question ‘is it important to publish?’ 

In the public culture of scholarship, much of the recent discourse surrounding International Women’s Day (celebrated last Sunday) focuses on the challenges women continue to face in academic careers or seeks to increase the visibility of women’s contributions to science. And rightly so. Nevertheless, while the scholarly community looks forward, this column will take a chance to look back: to a time and a place where the question was not yet what women were doing for scholarship, but what scholarship could do for women.

During the Porfiriato – a period of Mexican history spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – women, as in much of the world at the time, had limited access to education and little chance of entering professional or academic life with the education they received. In spite of these barriers, “a tradition of intellectual women in Mexican history” was created, primarily through weekly periodicals. While concerned with science, these periodicals were far from formal scholarly journals, being written for an audience of women whose role in society, due to the conventions of the time, was limited to being wives and mothers. Their mission to establish a tradition is perhaps not dissimilar to how we are trying to establish an alternative scholarly tradition through this weekly publication. 

The women who wrote for, and edited, these periodicals were well aware of the societal constraints placed upon them, and navigated a delicate balance between prevailing expectations of motherhood and beauty and their desire to participate in intellectual life. It was not easy to advocate for the education and participation of women in scholarly activities without drawing attention to the ways in which such arguments disrupted established expectations about women’s place in society. 

Knowledge of scientific matters was purposely framed as beneficial for raising healthy children; intelligent women, it was written, were “twice as beautiful”. 

To our eyes, such framing feels watered down, unlikely to have significant effects – but it did. 

The writers of these periodicals would go on to become some of the first female physicians – trained in the modern medical tradition – in Mexican history. While they embraced the responsibility of a medical professional to communicate scientific knowledge to the wider public, they adopted a careful rhetorical strategy when required: presenting their expertise with deliberate modesty in order to ensure their writing would be read and taken seriously.

There were instances however, of the periodicals themselves acting as vehicles for the publication of their purely scientific work, since conventional medical journals remained largely out of reach. Translations of technical manuscripts published in European journals (written by men, of course), chapters of their doctoral dissertations, and original contributions to medical knowledge by the first generation of scholarly Mexican women appeared in their pages. Such material would have been unusual for these publications, given that only five women in the entire country would have the training and expertise to understand it at the time it was published. Nevertheless, these scholars used the space they controlled to publish work that would otherwise have had no outlet. Slay, Queens.  

When you stop to consider it, the grit, discipline and self-sacrifice displayed by these women is really quite extraordinary. They paved the way to the present day, where women’s presence in science is taken as a given, and the task before us now is to realise genuine equality.

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