Emergent scholarship

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Essays as scholarship

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A different form, not a lesser form

Essays deserve recognition as scholarship—not as a lesser form, but as a different form. One that enables exploration before formal investigation, synthesis across disciplinary boundaries, and engagement with audiences that traditional academic publishing fails to reach.

What counts as scholarship? The question seems straightforward until you realise how much of academic practice depends on a remarkably narrow answer. We have converged on the peer-reviewed journal article as the default unit of scholarly output, a format so standardised that Mark Carrigan described it as the “sterile uniformity of journal formats.” This uniformity serves important purposes—it enables comparison, facilitates peer review, and creates predictable expectations. But it also excludes entire modes of thinking and expression that might contribute meaningfully to knowledge—including essays as scholarship.

Boyer’s (1990) framework remains useful here. He proposed four overlapping forms of scholarship:

  1. The scholarship of discovery: original research or the search for new knowledge.
  2. The scholarship of integration: putting isolated facts into context, making connections across fields.
  3. The scholarship of application: applying disciplinary expertise with rigour to real-world problems.
  4. The scholarship of teaching: the systematic study of teaching and learning.

Traditional academic journals focus almost exclusively on the first of these—the scholarship of discovery. We publish and privilege peer-reviewed original research, typically presented in formats optimised for methodological transparency rather than general understanding. This is essential to the scientific method. But it is not the only way to advance knowledge.

The essay offers something different. Where the research article asks “What did we find?”, the essay asks “What might this mean?” Where empirical research seeks to close questions through evidence, the essay opens questions through exploration. The essay is a space for speculation, synthesis, and the kind of creative thinking that precedes formal investigation.

As Sarah Kember has argued (2016):

We need to make contact with a sense of writing as something that evades and exceeds the possibility of measurement.

This matters because not all valuable intellectual work can be captured by citation metrics or measured through impact factors. Some ideas need room to breathe before they can be tested. Some connections only become visible when we step outside the constraints of hypothesis-driven inquiry.

Essays and emergent scholarship

The case for essays as scholarship becomes stronger when viewed through the lens of emergent scholarship—an approach that reimagines how scholarly work might function in a complex, interconnected world.

One of the core principles of emergent scholarship is that meaning emerges through medium. The form of expression fundamentally shapes how knowledge is understood. Different formats reveal different aspects of complex phenomena. The medium itself contains meaning beyond the explicit content.

The essay embodies this principle. Its form—discursive, exploratory, personal—enables a kind of thinking that the structured research article does not support. Essays allow scholars to write their way toward understanding rather than reporting conclusions already reached. They make space for uncertainty, for provisional claims, for the tentative connections that might later become research questions.

What essays can do

This is not an argument for placing reflective essays in the same category as randomised controlled trials. Different forms of scholarship serve different purposes. But well-crafted essays deserve recognition as scholarly work because they:

  • Explore ideas that don’t yet exist as testable hypotheses. Essays can articulate emerging intuitions, identify gaps in current thinking, and propose framings that later research might examine.
  • Synthesise across boundaries. The essay can bring together insights from disparate fields, integrating knowledge in ways that disciplinary silos resist.
  • Engage broader audiences. Scholarship that remains locked within academic journals fails to fulfil its potential for societal impact. Essays offer a bridge.
  • Model intellectual humility. The essay’s provisional quality—its acknowledgement that these are thoughts-in-progress—demonstrates a mode of scholarly engagement that complements the confident claims of empirical research.
  • Preserve the humanity of scholarship. In an era of increasing automation and AI-generated content, essays written with genuine voice and perspective maintain the fundamentally human character of intellectual inquiry.

Essays in a scholarly ecosystem

The question is not whether essays should replace other forms of scholarship but whether they deserve a place in the ecosystem. The current hierarchy—where peer-reviewed empirical research sits at the top and everything else “doesn’t count”—impoverishes academic culture.

A more generous conception of scholarship would recognise multiple valid forms, each suited to different purposes. Empirical research establishes what is. Theoretical work explores what might be. Essays ask what it all means and why it matters. Each contributes to the collective project of understanding.

The sterile uniformity of traditional publication formats has served us reasonably well for standardising knowledge production. But standardisation comes at a cost. When we optimise for one kind of output, we systematically undervalue others. We create incentives that push scholars toward conformity rather than creativity, toward measurement rather than meaning.

Essays—thoughtful, well-designed, intellectually rigorous essays—deserve to be incorporated into the corpus of scholarly work. Not as a lesser form of scholarship, but as a different form. One that enables us to explore ideas and practices that don’t yet exist, to make connections that formal research cannot yet test, and to engage audiences that traditional academic publishing fails to reach.

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Provenance

This post is based on an earlier article, “Publishing essays as scholarly work”, originally published on 16 December 2021. It has been updated and expanded.

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