Wayfaring: A Scholarship of Possibilities or Let’s not get drunk on abstraction

Abstract

I argue that our academic work is becoming increasingly normalized through the gatekeeping activities of journal editors, funding bodies, ranking systems and so on. This is resulting in a narrowing of scholarship: of methods, of theorizing and of ways in which we write our accounts. I suggest that one way of addressing the situation is to build a more pluralistic scholarship of possibilities, one that requires us to humanify ourselves and others. I draw on anthropologist Tim Ingold’s notion of “wayfaring” as a metaphor for re-thinking how we might conduct our research as a scholarship of possibilities, and suggest this involves foresight, imagination and reflexivity.